The Greater Israel Mirage

A vision of permanent Jewish security that may produce permanent mobilization resentment and isolation

R.M. Westerink; September 2026

Greater Israel is usually discussed as a territorial project: settlements, annexation, Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and the prevention of a Palestinian state. But territory is not its ultimate promise. Its deeper promise is security.

The vision tells Jewish Israelis that completing sovereignty over the historical homeland will end strategic uncertainty. Israel will no longer depend on temporary borders, unreliable peace processes or the willingness of others to tolerate Jewish existence. Once its permanence is beyond dispute, resistance will lose its purpose and the region will eventually accept reality.

That expectation deserves to be examined on its own terms. Suppose Greater Israel succeeds. Suppose Israel establishes permanent control between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, Palestinian statehood disappears from practical diplomacy and neighboring governments accept that the result cannot be reversed. Would the vision finally deliver the secure and accepted Jewish home it promises?

The answer may reveal the project as a mirage: territorial completion comes closer while lasting security continues to recede.

The Dream

For its supporters, Greater Israel is not primarily a program of conquest. It is the completion of the Jewish return. Jerusalem, Hebron, Shiloh, Bethel and the hills of Judea and Samaria are understood not as foreign territory but as the geographical heart of Jewish history.

In this account, the establishment of Israel in 1948 began national restoration; it did not complete it. The Jewish people returned after exile, persecution and the Holocaust, but remained territorially vulnerable and politically constrained. Greater Israel promises to end that incompleteness.

Its ideal end state is one sovereign Jewish state between the sea and the Jordan, with united Jerusalem as its capital, Judea and Samaria incorporated into Israeli national life and the Jordan Valley forming the eastern security frontier. Jewish towns and infrastructure connect the entire territory. No Palestinian state divides the land or overlooks Israel's narrow coastal center. Likud's foundational platform and later sovereignty initiatives express essential parts of this claim.[1][2]

Palestinians may retain private, religious, economic and municipal rights, but not a competing national sovereignty. Harder versions encourage those unwilling to accept the order to emigrate. Bezalel Smotrich's 2017 Decisive Plan states the logic particularly clearly: sovereignty, extensive settlement and the definitive defeat of Palestinian national aspirations.[3]

The emotional conclusion is powerful: exile has ended, the homeland has been reunited, defensible borders have been secured and Jewish vulnerability has finally been overcome.

What Victory Would Look Like

To test the vision fairly, assume that this territorial project has been achieved.
Organized Palestinian resistance has been defeated or contained. Egypt and Jordan preserve their treaties. Gulf governments expand practical cooperation. Eventually, the principal Arab states acknowledge that Greater Israel cannot be reversed.

This would be an “acceptance state”, but acceptance must be defined carefully.
It would not require Palestinians or Muslim societies to regard the outcome as just.
It would mean that they ceased organizing regional politics around its reversal.

The sovereignty question would be treated as closed. Palestinians could preserve family history, religion, Arabic culture and local identity, but Palestinian nationhood would no longer create a recognized entitlement to statehood, East Jerusalem as a capital, control of borders or an unrestricted right of return.

Arab and Muslim governments could continue expressing sympathy and supporting Palestinian welfare. What they would abandon is the proposition that Palestinian suffering still generates a recoverable territorial claim.

Greater Israel would have won when Palestinian memory remained, but no longer determined borders.

Assume the Region Accepts It

What would it take to keep this acceptance state functioning?

Neighboring governments would have to do far more than sign treaties.
They would need to prevent their territory from becoming a base for renewed struggle, interrupt financing and weapons transfers, constrain armed Palestinian organizations and cooperate with Israeli intelligence.

They would also have to manage memory.
Schools, state media, mosques and cultural institutions would need to separate remembrance from territorial recovery, solidarity from resistance and attachment to Jerusalem from a demand for Palestinian sovereignty.

The religious dimension would be especially sensitive.
Jordanian or Islamic custodianship of Al-Aqsa, reliable Muslim access and Israeli restraint around the holy compound would become indispensable. A serious Al-Aqsa crisis could reconnect Palestinian grievance with a much wider Islamic public within days.

Refugee-hosting states would face another burden.
If mass return had been definitively rejected, Palestinians would need citizenship or durable status elsewhere, economic integration and some form of compensation. Otherwise, the refugee system would continue carrying the territorial claim from one generation to the next.

Finally, the order would require a material bargain: regional investment, trade, security cooperation and visible economic improvement. Arab governments would need to show that accepting an irreversible reality prevented further suffering and produced tangible benefits.

None of this would be self-sustaining.
Each new displacement, settler attack, discriminatory law or high-casualty military operation would force neighboring governments to choose again between preserving relations with Israel and responding to their own populations.

The Most Successful Realistic Outcome

The most successful plausible result is therefore not comprehensive peace.
It is a managed cold regional order.

Israel would be too powerful to defeat.
Egypt, Jordan and Gulf governments would cooperate because confrontation offered no attainable territorial gain and because Israeli technology, intelligence and trade served their interests. Conventional interstate war would become unlikely.

Yet below that stability, Palestinian resistance would remain periodically active. Arab societies would remain more hostile than their governments. Iran or another challenger could present itself as the defender of Jerusalem and use Palestine to delegitimize cooperating regimes. Israel would require continuing military dominance, internal surveillance and external diplomatic support.

Existing experience supports this distinction.
Egyptian and Jordanian peace with Israel has survived repeated crises, but it has remained cold. The Abraham Accords have also survived, while popular support for normalization has remained shallow. Following October 7 and the Gaza war, Arab Barometer found support for normalization at no more than 13 percent in any of seven surveyed Arab countries.[4]

Such an order could last for decades.
But its durability would show that the costs of challenging it remained higher than the costs of enduring it. It would not show that the underlying grievance had disappeared.

Greater Israel may be capable of making resistance unsuccessful.
It is much less capable of making resistance meaningless.

The International Mirror

Greater Israel might eventually be accommodated by neighboring governments.
That would not make it internationally legitimate.

The United Nations would probably see a state that had permanently incorporated occupied territory, prevented Palestinian self-determination and placed two populations under one sovereign authority without equal national and political standing.

This judgment would not begin from a blank page. In 2024, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel's continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory was unlawful. The UN General Assembly subsequently called for that presence to end within twelve months. A completed Greater Israel would formalize precisely the territorial order these institutions had rejected.[5][6]

Israel would remain a UN member and an important military, technological and economic power. It would retain allies and might deepen relations with governments that valued its capabilities. But it would increasingly be treated as an exceptional state: diplomatically protected by some, legally challenged by many and exposed to sanctions, boycotts and demands for non-recognition.

It might not become a complete pariah in the manner of apartheid South Africa. American protection and Israel's strategic value could prevent comprehensive isolation. A more plausible status would be that of a “protected pariah”: connected enough to prosper, protected enough to resist international pressure, but increasingly regarded as standing outside the rules applied to ordinary states. The term 'territorial pariah' has already entered prominent pro-Israel criticism.[7]

Israel would have achieved recognition of its power without achieving recognition of its right.

The Safe Haven Becomes a Fortress

That distinction returns the analysis to Zionism's original promise.

After centuries of persecution and the Holocaust, a Jewish state was intended to provide more than military refuge. It offered sovereignty, self-reliance and national normality: a place where Jews would no longer depend on the goodwill of others for their collective survival.

Greater Israel appears to complete that project.
More territory promises strategic depth. Control of the Jordan Valley promises defensible borders. Prevention of a Palestinian state promises removal of a potential military threat.

But its successful implementation could produce the opposite kind of security environment: a large Palestinian population living without national political ownership, neighboring societies carrying unresolved resentment, holy places capable of mobilizing a transnational religious response and an international legal order that rejects Israel's borders.

Israel would be territorially larger and militarily dominant, yet also permanently mobilized. It would be less vulnerable to conventional invasion but more exposed to insurgency, communal violence, sanctions, diplomatic isolation and repeated legitimacy crises. It would depend not only on its own power but on American protection and the endurance of Arab governments willing to contain opposition.

The safe haven would increasingly resemble a fortress: too powerful to be defeated, but never sufficiently accepted to relax.

The Mirage

The mirage is not that Greater Israel cannot be created.
Israel may be capable of establishing an irreversible territorial reality. Neighboring governments may eventually accept that military reversal is impossible. A managed regional order may survive for a long time.

The mirage is the belief that territorial completion will finally produce security, acceptance and normality.

The vision promises an end point.
Its implementation more plausibly creates a permanent system of maintenance: deterrence, internal control, regional bargains, religious crisis management and external diplomatic protection. Every serious shock would reveal that acceptance had remained strategic rather than legitimate.

This can also create a dangerous political dynamic.
When a project repeatedly promises final security but security remains out of reach, its supporters may conclude not that the project is defective, but that it has not yet been pursued decisively enough. Moderation becomes weakness; restraint becomes unfinished victory; each failure generates a demand for further force or expansion.

Greater Israel may radicalize over time not merely because its supporters are extreme, but because the security promised by territorial completion keeps failing to arrive.

This is no longer only a warning about a possible future.
The underlying bargain has been tested since 1948: security through sovereign strength.
Since 1967, an increasingly powerful territorial answer has been added: security through permanent control of more land. Israel has gained extraordinary military power and national endurance. It has not gained the promised release from existential fear, recurrent war, occupation, resistance or dependence on external protection.

The cost has been enormous: Palestinian dispossession, statelessness and lost lives; Israeli deaths and trauma; repeated wars and permanent mobilization; damaged institutions, moral corrosion and declining international legitimacy.
Not all these costs can be attributed to Israel, or to a single doctrine. But they are costs that the Greater Israel answer has plainly failed to end and, in important respects, has compounded.

After almost eight decades, the burden of proof has reversed.
The question is no longer whether completing territorial control might finally make the promise work.
It is why more control, more force and less Palestinian political agency should be expected to produce the security, acceptance and normality they have never yet produced.

The Great Israel project might therefore fulfill its map while defeating its purpose.
The Jewish people would possess sovereignty throughout the land, but within a state compelled to remain permanently armed, exceptional and dependent on protection.

The security mirage has shaped Israel since 1948;
Greater Israel Mirage has intensified it since 1967.
It has cost Palestinians and Israelis enormously.
Completing the Mirage is not a credible path out of the conflict, but a way of making its risks and costs permanent.