Daniel Levy served as an Israeli peace negotiator at the Oslo II talks and is president of the US/Middle East project
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| First responders and residents gather at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut's Tallet al-Khayyat neighbourhood, on 8 April 2026. Photograph: Fadel Itani/AFP/Getty |
Mon 13 Apr 2026
Much remains unclear about the significance and durability of the two-week pause in the US and Israel’s war on Iran. But one aspect of the conflict remains as clear today as it was six weeks ago. Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan. Benjamin Netanyahu does.
Israel’s war aims were to maximally degrade the capacity of the Iranian state, achieving not so much regime change as state implosion. Despite the ceasefire, Netanyahu has emphasised that this is “not the end of the campaign” and that Israel’s “finger is on the trigger” to resume combat. A seasoned strategist, he has spent the second Trump administration seizing the opportunity of geopolitical fluidity to reach for his end goal: a Greater Israel.
When it’s invoked on the Israeli right, “Greater Israel” is often seen as a purely territorial concept: an attempt to increase the size of territory that Israel claims as its own. This is certainly integral to its meaning. After all, Israel has been expansionist and entailed the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians since its inception, and this process has now accelerated considerably.
In the past two-and-a-half years, Israel has flattened and reconquered Gaza, killing tens of thousands of people and laying waste its civilian infrastructure, squeezing its population, according to one estimate from last year, into just 12% of an already tiny strip of land. In the West Bank, Israel continues a campaign of destruction and displacement towards Palestinian people and property that is unparalleled since the six-day war in 1967, expanding its matrix of control and settlement.
After the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in 2024, Israel seized territory in Syria (beyond the illegally annexed Golan Heights) and is in the process of reconstituting a zone of occupation in southern Lebanon. Government ministers from the Religious Zionism and Jewish Power factions, and Likud parliamentarians, openly agitate for Israeli sovereignty and settlement in that country. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for Israel to “expand to Damascus”, and Netanyahu himself claimed to feel “very much connected” to this territorial vision of Greater Israel.
However, Greater Israel should be seen as a geopolitical and strategic concept as much as a territorial one. The acquisition and control of land is, in many respects, the obvious and easy part... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/13/benjamin-netanyahu-middle-east-greater-israel