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

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"Since the US-brokered ceasefire was announced on 10 October, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians in Gaza; according to a UN official, at least 70 are children – like Jumaa and Fadi."

A boy sits slumped amid the rubble in Nuseirat, central Gaza, after an overnight Israeli airstrike on 29 October in which at least 50 Palestinians died. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images

 ‘Bloodshed was supposed to stop’: no sign of normal life as Gaza’s killing and misery grind on

Seham Tantesh in Gaza, Julian Borger and Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem

 Sat 6 Dec 2025

The term ceasefire ‘risks creating a dangerous illusion life is returning to normal’ for Palestinians squeezed into the remaining 42% of their land behind Israel’s ‘yellow line’

When Jumaa and Fadi Abu Assi went to look for firewood their parents thought they would be safe. They were just young boys, aged nine and 10 and, after all, a ceasefire had been declared in Gaza.

Their mother, Hala Abu Assi, was making tea in the family’s tent in Khan Younis when she heard an explosion, a missile fired by an Israeli drone. She ran to the scene – but it was too late.

Since the US-brokered ceasefire was announced on 10 October, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians in Gaza; according to a UN official, at least 70 are children – like Jumaa and Fadi.

They were killed, their mother said, at “a time when bloodshed was supposed to stop”.

“After the ceasefire was announced, I felt a bit of safety and believed that nothing would harm my children any more,” Abu Assi said. “But fate had another plan.”

She is focused now on keeping her two surviving daughters alive. “I still hear explosions and gunfire,” she said. “I do not feel that the war has ended.”

The toll from Israeli attacks in Gaza has fallen significantly compared with the preceding two years of war, when on average 90 Palestinians were killed each day, but significant numbers of civilians are still losing their lives.

On average, Israeli weapons now kill seven people a day. That rate of violent death would be considered an active conflict in many other contexts, raising questions about how accurately “ceasefire” describes the new status quo.

“It’s something that if you want to you can call a ceasefire, which is very convenient for the Americans and for everyone who wants this off their television screens and off their streets and off their annoying parliamentary and political schedules,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator and the president of the US/Middle East Project....READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/06/bloodshed-was-supposed-to-stop-no-sign-of-normal-life-as-gazas-killing-and-misery-grind-on

  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]