Greater Israel () 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 the State of Israel.
Territorial claims of Israeli Nationalist or Zionist movements have varied, depending on the time period and different groups of proponents such as Labor Zionist, Revisionist Zionist, or Religious Zionist groups. There are two different primary uses of the term Greater Israel – one referring more narrowly to the area internationally recognized as part of the State of Israel along with the Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza Strip; and a second definition referring to the much larger region stretching from the river Nile to the Euphrates.
History
Early Zionism
Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of Zionism, was influenced by the Tanakh in his thinking on the borders for a Jewish State in Palestine. In the words of professor of history H.S. Haddad: "Herzl's idea of the geographical extent of the Jewish state was derived from the biblical romance of the Davidic Kingdom."
William Hechler, an English Christian Zionist, also influenced Herzl's thinking on the matter, and Herzl recorded in his diary that:
In the compartment he unfolded his maps of Palestine and instructed me for hours on end. The northern frontier ought to be the mountains facing Cappadocia; the southern, the Suez Canal. The slogan to be circulated: "The Palestine of David and Solomon!"
The Land of Israel in Jewish history and religion
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).
The Bible contains three geographical definitions of the Land of Israel:
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". A narrower definition ( and ) refers to the land west of the Jordan River (Canaan proper) divided among the tribes. In Ezekiel 47:18, the Jordan River itself is explicitly defined as the eastern boundary, separating Gilead on the east from "the land of Israel" on the west. A wider definition (, ) indicating the territory that will be given to the children of Israel slowly throughout the years, as explained in and ).
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.Rachel Havelock, River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line, University of Chicago Press, 2011 p.210. 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 (northern kingdom) (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 (, , ) 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.
Palestine under British rule 1917–1948
Balfour Declaration
The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing that it "viewed with favour" 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 Palestine, 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 the 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 1928 Zionist leader Menachem Ussishkin gave a speech in Jerusalem demanding "a Jewish state without compromises and without concessions, from Dan to Be'er-sheva, from the great sea to the desert, including Transjordan."
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 The same sentiment was recorded by Ben-Gurion on other occasions, such as at a meeting of the Jewish Agency executive in June 1938,Quote from a meeting of the Jewish Agency executive in June 1938: "[I am] satisfied with part of the country, but on the basis of the assumption that after we build up a strong force following the establishment of the state, we will abolish the partition of the country and we will expand to the whole Land of Israel." in; and as well as by Chaim Weizmann.From a letter from Chaim Weizmann to Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, High Commissioner for Palestine, while the Peel Commission was convening in 1937: "We shall spread in the whole country in the course of time ... this is only an arrangement for the next 25 to 30 years." Ben Gurion said:
Of the Peel Commission's partition plan Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann stated "I know that God promised Palestine to the children of Israel, but I do not know what boundaries He set. I believe they were wider than the ones now proposed and may have included Transjordan."Lewis, G. (2009). Balfour and Weizmann: The Zionist, the Zealot and the Emergence of Israel. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury PublishingChaim Weizmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (1949), Volume 2
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.Mordechai Bar-On (2004) A Never-Ending Conflict: A Guide to Israeli Military History Greenwood Publishing Group, p 219
It had been suggested that the blue stripes on 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.Genesis 15.18: "The Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying unto thy seed have I given this land from the river of Egypt [the Nile] unto the great river, the River Euphrates." This claim was at a time made by Yasser Arafat,Playboy Interview: Yasir Arafat, Playboy, September 1988. and would later be made by 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) ..."Rubinstein, Danny. Inflammatory legends, Haaretz, November 15, 2004. The 10 agorot controversy was a conspiracy theoryBarry Rubin. Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography. Page 241. put forth by Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat at a specially convened session of the UN Security Council in Geneva on 25 May 1990. At the session, Arafat claimed that the obverse design of an Israeli ten agorot coin contained a map of Greater Israel.
Movement for Greater Israel and Gush Emunim