Transcription
If you've been scrolling through social media or following the news lately, you might have seen a specific image that's making a lot of people very nervous. It's a photo of Israeli soldiers in uniform. But it's not their gear that's catching people's eyes. It's a small embroidered patch on their arms.
At first glance, it looks like a pretty standard map of the region. But if you look closer, you see that the map doesn't depict Israel with its 1967 borders inserted in the Middle East region. It stretches Israel itself out to swallow up the West Bank, Gaza, the Golden Heights, and then it keeps going into Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and even parts of Egypt and Iraq.
Now, this isn't a random design choice of some soldier. It's a visual representation of a concept called greater Israel or Eretz Israel. With Israel's recent invasion of Gaza and the declared military occupation of southern Lebanon in early 2026, following the prior occupation of the city in the Golden Heights and its historic illegal incursions into the West Bank, this isn't just a fringe theory anymore. It's becoming a central part of the geopolitical conversation within the country.
But okay, to understand why this soldier in 2026 would wear a map of half the Middle East on his arm and claim it as his own, you have to go back thousands of years. The idea of greater Israel is, according to supporters of it, rooted in the Hebrew Bible. Specifically, in the covenant of the pieces in Genesis 15:18. The text says, "To your descendants I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river the Euphrates."
Now, first of all, you would have to believe the veracity of what is written in the document. Then you would have to believe its validity as a sort of ancient legal document that would somehow define borders. And then you would have to additionally believe that, for whatever reason, those borders would still be valid today. Anyone that looks at this with logic understands the issue.
But even if you ignore everything that I just said, there's an additional problem. The Bible itself actually gives three different definitions for the land. And depending on which one you pick, the ideal map of Israel changes completely. First is the so-called wide view. Genesis 15 describes a massive territory given to all of Abraham's children, including Ishmael and Midian. This is sort of the maximalist map that stretches across the Levant, the one we saw in the patch.
Then you have the so-called narrow view. Numbers 34 and Ezekiel 47 describe a much smaller area specifically for the tribes after they left Egypt. This is more of a Dan to Beersheba situation with a much smaller territory. And then there's even the gradual view. Deuteronomy mentions land that will be given slowly over many years, almost like a frontier that keeps pushing outward. This might be the theory that many hardliners see as the method to reach the wide view idea.
But again, even that wide view has another big point of contention: the so-called river of Egypt. Some religious nationalists interpret this as being the Nile River. If you take the Nile as the western border and the Euphrates as the eastern one, you get that massive map seen on those uniform patches, covering Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and parts of Turkey.
But most historians and archaeologists argue that the river of Egypt isn't the Nile at all. It's just a choice of interpretation by these extremists. Instead, they believe it refers to Wadi El Arish, a seasonal riverbed in the middle of the Sinai Peninsula, which at the time would have been referred to as the Egyptian River. If this is true, the greater Israel map would shrink significantly, losing most of Egypt's populated land. So you can understand the many layers of debatable arguments that these people use as justification for their theory, which is in itself questionable to begin with.
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So, okay, that's where they got the idea from. But when did a movement advocating for a real annexation begin? While the Bible supposedly provided the map, modern Zionism provided the political engine. At the end of the 19th century, Theodor Herzl was trying to figure out how to make a Jewish state a reality. Herzl was a Hungarian Jewish journalist and a lawyer who was the father of modern Zionism. He is seen as the founding father of Israel by many. He formed the Political Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine, which in the late 19th century was a part of the Ottoman Empire, in an effort to form a Jewish state back then, or at least lay the foundations for it in the future.
He, in turn, was heavily influenced by a guy called William Heckler, an English Christian Zionist. There's a famous moment recorded in some stories, I'm not sure if it's true, where both of them would have met on a train. Heckler would have unfolded a map on a table in one of the compartments and instructed Herzl for hours on where the borders of this future state should be. Herzl recorded in his diary that the northern border should be the mountains in Turkey facing Cappadocia. On the southern border, there would be the Suez Canal. Their slogan was "The Palestine of David and Solomon."
The ancient kingdom of Israel, though, didn't stretch as far as those lands, even though it was bigger than modern Israel. In 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, saying they viewed with favor a Jewish national home in Palestine. But Palestine was a vague term under Ottoman rule. And when the Ottomans lost World War I and the British took over the land, it seemed like the Zionist movement's dream was going to come true. By 1919, their leaders were presenting maps that included the West Bank, Gaza, and huge chunks of Lebanon and Jordan. They weren't just thinking about religion. They were thinking about resources. They wanted the headwaters of the Jordan River and the fertile soil of the Harran, now in Syria, to ensure the state could actually survive economically.
So if the early Zionists wanted both sides of the Jordan River and only got part of Palestine to begin with, why does the modern settler movement mostly focus on the West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria, the land west of the river? Well, while Palestine doesn't have the resources to fight off Israel successfully, Jordan, a full sovereign country to the east, maybe does. Historically, the British Mandate originally included both sides of the river. However, in the early 1920s, the British severed the East Bank to create the Emirate of Transjordan, which coincides with modern-day Jordan. It was to essentially satisfy an agreement with the Hashemite family and better rule the locals.
This was a massive blow to revisionist Zionists like Ze'ev Jabotinsky. Early revisionist groups like Betar regarded the entire mandate, including Jordan, as the place for a future state of Israel. Their 1931 posters showed a map covering both Israel and Jordan with a rifle across it. Their motto was, "The Jordan has two banks. This one is ours, and the other one is too."
Even David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister and a leader of the more moderate Labor Zionists, saw the 1937 plan to split the land as just a first step. When Israel was founded in western Palestine after World War II, he supposedly told his son that building a state on part of the land was just a way to increase their strength so they could eventually liberate the entire country. He famously said they would smash these frontiers that were being forced upon them.
Now, everything changed in 1967. Before this, the Labor Zionists who ran the country were pragmatic. They accepted the 1948 borders to get a functioning state. But when Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War, a brief but sizable conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, the movement for a greater Israel was born almost overnight. Suddenly, that biblical heartland was under effective Israeli control. And this led to the growth of Gush Emunim, a religious political group that believed settling the land was a prerequisite for the arrival of the Messiah. For them, giving up any of this land wasn't just a political mistake. It was, according to them, a sin against God.
In 1977, Menachem Begin and the Likud Party won a pretty big election victory. Begin had spent his whole career preaching loyalty to Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. And once in power, he promoted Jewish settlement there aggressively. However, even Begin was careful. He didn't formally annex the West Bank and Gaza because he knew that absorbing millions of Palestinians would turn Israel into a binational state instead of a Jewish one. He wanted the land, but he didn't necessarily want the people living on it.
For a while, greater Israel seemed to be fading. In 2008, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert even said the idea was over and that anyone still chasing it was deluding themselves. He was even working on a plan to give most of the West Bank to the Palestinians and effectively reach the two-state solution desired by most of the world. But since then, the political pendulum swung hard to the right, and everything changed again. Governments of Israel became more and more hardline, more militaristic, more against Palestinians, and more aggressive in their projects to settle the West Bank and attack, invade, occupy, and annex neighboring countries' lands. First, it was the Golan Heights of Syria, then Gaza, and now southern Lebanon. They do it against the will of many countries and against very heavy criticism by the UN. A lot of people criticize the UN for not doing anything about it, forgetting that the UN is just made up of the countries that are a part of it. It's up to the countries to do something. The organization itself cannot.
In 2023, the finance minister of Israel spoke in Paris behind a podium showing a map of the country that swallowed all of Jordan. He has since suggested that Jerusalem is destined to expand to Damascus and that Israel's future includes parts of Iraq and Egypt. Daniella Weiss, a prominent leader of illegal settlers, told reporters in 2024 that the real borders are the Euphrates and the Nile. She represents a wing of the movement that sees 1948 and '67 as just the beginning of a much longer expansion. And in August of 2025, Benjamin Netanyahu himself told another news outlet that he was on a historic and spiritual mission for greater Israel. He said it was this generation's duty to ensure the survival of this expanded state, marking a massive departure from his earlier, more cautious rhetoric.
And even the US has seen a shift. In early 2026, Ambassador Mike Huckabee told Tucker Carlson it would be fine if Israel took over the entire Middle East. This kind of talk from a high-ranking diplomat would have been career-ending 10 years ago, but now it's a talking point on the news. And what's crazier, nobody seems to mind enough to do anything about it, at least not in Europe or America.
To be fair, some European countries have sort of put their foot down. Spain has been very vocal in their criticism against Israel, but they're standing a little isolated so far. However, I think Israel's government is becoming a bit too cocky, if you will. I think if it were actually to try and reach the Nile and the Euphrates, they'd be facing a combined military force of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, potentially even Turkey, who has been extremely vocal against Israel. They won back then, but I don't think they would now. On paper, Israel could never match the manpower and resources of all those nations combined in a total war. Not to mention the international response. Sure, maybe the US would come to their aid, but would it be enough?
The strategy doesn't look like a head-on collision, though. It looks like regional destabilization. The theory is that if Israel's neighbors are busy with internal collapses, civil wars, or economic ruin, they can't form a united front. And we've kind of seen this tactic start to play out. Syria is already fractured and unable to defend its own borders. They took the civil war opportunity to strengthen their position in the Golan Heights. And when Assad's regime finally fell, they expanded their reach by a few more kilometers. Lebanon is in a state of political and economic chaos all the time, making the current occupation of the south much easier for Israel to maintain, and Hezbollah's local presence as an Iranian proxy gives them an excuse to do it. Proponents of greater Israel might be betting that they don't need to win one big war. They just need to wait for the surrounding states to weaken further, taking a buffer zone here and a next ridge over there, slowly expanding the frontier while the world is looking the other way.
This talk has led to some wild tension over the years and some conspiracy theories, even like interpretations of the Israeli flag. For decades, many Palestinian leaders claimed the two blue stripes on the flag represent the Nile and the Euphrates and their ambition to reach both. Most Israelis call it nonsense, explaining that the stripes come from the Tallit, which is a sort of Jewish prayer shawl. But when you have current ministers standing behind maps that actually show those rivers as borders, the line between conspiracy theory and political platforms starts to blur a little.
In 1990, Yasser Arafat claimed an Israeli coin had a map of greater Israel on it. It was actually based on an ancient coin from the Hasmonean period, but it highlights how much the neighbors fear the expansionist vision. The reaction to this recent talk has been pretty explosive. When Netanyahu spoke of the spiritual mission in 2025, over 30 countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan, issued a joint statement, calling it a blatant violation of international law. They see this not as a religious dream, but a plan for permanent and regional war.
So, is Greater Israel actually happening? While the Nile-Euphrates map is still considered extreme by most average Israelis, the narrow version, total control over the West Bank, Gaza, and southern Lebanon, is increasingly becoming the status quo in 2026. The patches on the uniforms might just be embroidery, but they represent a deep-seated belief that the borders of the Middle East are not fixed, in their opinion. For some, it's about security. For others, it's some type of divine mandate that they think they have, or at least using religion as an excuse for power. But for the millions of people living in the countries between those two rivers, it's a vision that suggests the conflict is nowhere near over. It is just getting started and getting bigger.