Greater Israel

Greater Israel (ארץ ישראל השלמה, Eretz Yisrael Hashlema) is an expression with several different biblical and political meanings over time. It is often used, in an irredentist fashion, to refer to the historic or desired borders of Israel.

Currently, the most common definition of the land encompassed by the term is the territory of the State of Israel together with the Palestinian territories. Other definitions, favored by Revisionist Zionists, included the territory of the former Emirate of Transjordan and the Sinai Peninsula.

Promised Land


The Bible contains three geographical definitions of the Land of Israel:


 * 1) The first definition  seems to define the land that was given to all of the children of Abram (Abraham), including Ishmael, Zimran, Jokshan, Midian, etc. It describes a large territory, "from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates".
 * 2) A narrower definition ( and ) refers to the land that was divided between the original Twelve tribes of Israel after they were delivered from Egypt.
 * 3) A wider definition  indicating the territory that will be given to the children of Israel slowly throughout the years, as explained in  and ).

Land of Israel
The Land of Israel is the traditional Jewish name for an area of the Southern Levant. Related biblical, religious and historical English terms include the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land, the Holy Land, and Palestine. The definitions of the limits of this territory vary between passages in the Hebrew Bible, with specific mentions in Genesis 15, Exodus 23, Numbers 34 and Ezekiel 47. Nine times elsewhere in the Bible, the settled land is referred as "from Dan to Beersheba", and three times it is referred as "from the entrance of Hamath unto the brook of Egypt" (1 Kings 8:65, 1 Chronicles 13:5 and 2 Chronicles 7:8).

These biblical limits for the land differ from the borders of established historical Israelite and later Jewish kingdoms, including the United Kingdom of Israel, the two kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah, the Hasmonean Kingdom, and the Herodian kingdom. At their heights, these realms ruled lands with similar but not identical boundaries.

Judaism defines the land as where Jewish religious law prevailed and excludes territory where it was not applied. It holds that the area is a God-given inheritance of the Jewish people based on the Torah, particularly the books of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, as well as Joshua and the later Prophets. According to the Book of Genesis, the land was first promised by God to Abram's descendants; the text is explicit that this is a covenant between God and Abram for his descendants. Abram's name was later changed to Abraham, with the promise refined to pass through his son Isaac and to the Israelites, descendants of Jacob, Abraham's grandson.

Kingdom of Israel

 * The Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy) (1047–931 BCE), was the kingdom established by the Israelites and uniting them under a single king.
 * The Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) (930–c.720 BCE), was the kingdom of northern Israel after the breakup of the united monarchy of the Kingdom of Israel.
 * The Kingdom of Judah (930–587 BCE), was the southern Jewish kingdom after the breakup of the united monarchy of the Kingdom of Israel.

Second Temple period
Return to Zion (שִׁיבָת צִיּוֹן or שבי ציון,, lit. 'Zion returnees') is an event recorded in Ezra–Nehemiah of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah—subjugated by the Neo-Babylonian Empire—were freed from the Babylonian captivity following the Persian conquest of Babylon. In 539 BCE, the Persian king Cyrus the Great issued the Edict of Cyrus allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem and the Land of Judah, which was made into a self-governing Jewish province known as Yehud under the new Persian Achaemenid Empire.

The Second Temple period or post-exilic period in Jewish history denotes the approximately 600 years (516 BCE–70 CE) during which the Second Temple stood in the city of Jerusalem. It began with the return to Zion and subsequent reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and ended with the First Jewish–Roman War and the Roman siege of Jerusalem.

Balfour Declaration


The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9November 1917.

On the military front in Palsetine, the Sinai and Palestine campaign was part of the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I, taking place between January 1915 and October 1918. It brought Palestine under British control that ended with the Armistice of Mudros in 1918, leading to the cession of Ottoman Syria that included most of western Palestine.

During British Mandate for Palestine


Early Revisionist Zionist groups such as Betar and Irgun Zvai-Leumi regarded the territory of the Mandate for Palestine, including Transjordan, as Greater Israel.

In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partition of Mandatory Palestine. In a letter to his son later that year, David Ben-Gurion stated that partition would be acceptable but as a first step. Ben-Gurion wrote that "This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself, but because through it we increase our strength, and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole. The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country." The same sentiment was recorded by Ben-Gurion on other occasions, such as at a meeting of the Jewish Agency executive in June 1938, as well as by Chaim Weizmann. Ben Gurion said:"We shall smash these frontiers which are being forced upon us, and not necessarily by war. I believe an agreement between us and the Arab State could be reached in a not too distant future.'"

During early period of the State of Israel
Joel Greenberg writing in The New York Times notes: "At Israel's founding in 1948, the Labor Zionist leadership, which went on to govern Israel in its first three decades of independence, accepted a pragmatic partition of what had been British Palestine into independent Jewish and Arab states. The opposition Revisionist Zionists, who evolved into today's Likud party, sought Eretz Yisrael Ha-Shlema—Greater Israel, or literally, the Whole Land of Israel (shalem, meaning complete)." The capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt during the Six-Day War in 1967 led to the growth of the non-parliamentary Movement for Greater Israel and the construction of Israeli settlements. The 1977 elections, which brought Likud to power also had considerable impact on acceptance and rejection of the term. Greenberg notes: "THE seed was sown in 1977, when Menachem Begin of Likud brought his party to power for the first time in a stunning election victory over Labor. A decade before, in the 1967 war, Israeli troops had in effect undone the partition accepted in 1948 by overrunning the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Ever since, Mr. Begin had preached undying loyalty to what he called Judea and Samaria (the West Bank lands) and promoted Jewish settlement there. But he did not annex the West Bank and Gaza to Israel after he took office, reflecting a recognition that absorbing the Palestinians could turn Israel into a bi-national state instead of a Jewish one."

Yitzhak Shamir was a dedicated proponent of Greater Israel and as Israeli Prime Minister gave the settler movement funding and Israeli governmental legitimisation.

Movement for Greater Israel
The Movement for Greater Israel (התנועה למען ארץ ישראל השלמה, HaTenu'a Lema'an Eretz Yisrael HaSheleima), also known as the Land of Israel Movement, was a political organisation in Israel during the 1960s and 1970s which subscribed to an ideology of Greater Israel. The organization was formed in July 1967, a month after Israel captured the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War. It called on the Israeli government to keep the captured areas and to settle them with Jewish populations.

Inclusion of occupied West Bank and Gaza
Annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was part of the platform of the mainstream Israeli Likud party, and of some other, often more extreme Israeli political parties. On September 14, 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, formerly of Likud, remarked that "Greater Israel is over. There is no such thing. Anyone who talks that way is deluding themselves", making this statement just two days before privately reaching out to the Palestinian President with Israel's broadest ever peace offer.

Meir Kahane, an ultra-nationalist Knesset member, who founded the American Jewish Defense League and the banned Israeli Kach party, worked towards Greater Israel and other Religious Zionist goals. Kach, Tehiya  and the National Religious Party are parties which supported the idea of a Greater Israel.

Currently in Israel, in the debate relating to the borders of Israel, "Greater Israel" is generally used to refer to the territory of the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories, the combined territory of the former Mandatory Palestine without Trans-Jordan (already separated from Palestine by the British in the early 1920s). However, because of the controversial nature of the term, the term Land of Israel is often used instead.

In March 2023, the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the far-right National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, spoke at a Paris memorial behind a podium featuring a 'Greater Israel' map including Trans-Jordan. This speech has led to tensions with Jordan, while his spokesperson attributed the symbol's presence to the organizers of the event, which was dedicated to a man connected to the Irgun (see above for Irgun emblem). In response to the diplomatic controversy, Israel's Foreign Ministry reassured its adherence to the 1994 peace treaty and respect for Jordan's sovereignty.

In academia
Hillel Weiss, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, has promoted the "necessity" of rebuilding the Temple and of Jewish rule over Greater Israel.

10 agorot coin controversy
Zionists, and the State of Israel, have been accused of plotting to expand Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates. This so-called 10 agorot controversy is named after the Israeli coin brandished by PLO chairman Yasser Arafat in 1988 as evidence for this accusation. The Bank of Israel denies this conspiracy theory since the coin is a replica of a historical coin dating from 37 to 40 BCE and the alleged "map" is actually the irregular shape of the ancient coin.

Israeli flag controversy
Conspiracy theorists have suggested the blue strips of the Israeli flag represent the Nile and Euphrates as the boundaries of Eretz Isra'el as promised to the Jews by God according to religious scripture. This claim was at a time made by Yasser Arafat, Iran and Hamas. However, Danny Rubinstein points out that "Arafat ... added, in interviews that he gave in the past, that the two blue stripes on the Israeli flag represent the Nile and the Euphrates. ... No Israeli, even those who demonstrate understanding for Palestinian distress, will accept the ... nonsense about the blue stripes on the flag, which was designed according to the colours of the traditional tallit (prayer shawl) ..."