What Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right really mean when they invoke ‘Greater Israel’ - The concept is about much more than acquiring territory, it is also about Netanyahu’s desire for Israel to become a regional superpower.

Daniel Levy served as an Israeli peace negotiator at the Oslo II talks and is president of the US/Middle East project 

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

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

"Just when the outcome of a war and the stability of global markets hung in the balance, the president chose spectacle over engagement." The Guardian view on US-Iran talks: Trump’s diplomacy falters as risk of war grows

An American blockade in the strait of Hormuz raises energy-market dangers after failed negotiations – pushing a fragile ceasefire closer to collapse

JD Vance in a televised address before he left Islamabad, Pakistan, on 12 April 2026, without a deal. Photograph: Sohail Shahzad/EPA

As the US vice-president, JD Vance, took to a podium in Pakistan after 21 hours of diplomacy and said no deal had been reached to end the war with Iran, his boss Donald Trump was in Miami watching a mixed martial arts fight. The contrast was stark. Just when the outcome of a war and the stability of global markets hung in the balance, the president chose spectacle over engagement. Mr Trump may intend to project strength. But the impression he creates – in Tehran and among America’s allies – is of a president less interested in the substance of diplomacy than in the politics surrounding it.

The talks in Islamabad didn’t fail accidentally; the US and Iran were talking past each other. Washington’s position is that Iran must abandon its capacity to develop a nuclear weapon, while Tehran insists it is not seeking one and has the right to a civilian nuclear programme. The US vice-president’s “final and best offer” would have required Iran to give up that capacity altogether – terms that looked less like the basis of a negotiation than an attempt to impose the conditions of victory.

Washington also wanted free passage through the strait of Hormuz, a vital global energy artery. Tehran, instead, sought control of the strait through transit fees as well as having sanctions lifted, assets unfrozen and reparations paid, alongside a wider regional ceasefire. Given the gap, the positions were never likely to be reconciled in a single round of negotiations. The result was talks without trust – and a war without resolution.

Winston Churchill rightly argued that jaw-jaw is better than war-war. Talks are preferable because fighting is destructive, unpredictable and costly. The irony is that Mr Trump is negotiating over a nuclear programme that was once contained by a deal he ripped up, while trying to reopen a strait closed by an illegal war he chose to start. A deal between Iran and America – however imperfect – would leave the world better off than continued conflict. This is especially true when markets in oil, gas and finance are so intimately linked.

Time is running out to get back to the negotiating table. The fate of the current ceasefire depends not only on Washington and Tehran, but on Israel, whose forces’ expanded campaign in southern Lebanon... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/12/the-guardian-view-on-us-iran-talks-trumps-diplomacy-falters-as-risk-of-war-grows

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]