Netanyahu’s Ethnostate and the Greater Israel: A Biblical Mythology or a Geopolitical Project?

Netanyahu and Trump are conditioning the end of the war in Iran on the condition that all countries in the region sign the Abraham Accords, a tacit submission to Israel. Drawing on Daniel Levy, Omer Bartov, and the Pew Survey, I address the reasons, the urgency, and the limits of Netanyahu’s simultaneous battles on several fronts in the quest for a Greater Israel project.

Greater Israel: Beyond Biblical Mythology, a Geopolitical Blueprint

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and now head of the U.S./Middle East Project, offers a sharp analytical lens for understanding today’s events. He suggests that Greater Israel isn’t just about land—it’s about Israel aiming to establish itself as the dominant hard-power player across the Middle East. As Levy puts it, this is about seeing how far Israel can extend its reach and consolidate its role as the region’s unrivaled hegemon.

Territorial control—occupying the Golan, reasserting presence in southern Lebanon, pushing forward with West Bank annexation, and the continuation of the genocide in Gaza—is only the most visible layer. The deeper game is about forging new regional alliances, as the one with the UAE, systematically weakening rival states, and building webs of hard-power dependency that lock neighboring governments into Israel’s orbit.

The ideological consolidation of this project was the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, which constitutionally defined Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people.” For many, including the PLO’s Saeb Erekat, this law was the moment when a Zionist aspiration became a formal legal reality, and for critics, a codification of a system of apartheid. What was once an ambition is now written into the legal foundations of the state.

Omer Bartov, a leading scholar on genocide and Israeli history, traces this shift with a heavy sense of loss. In his book Israel: What Went Wrong?, he shows how Zionism, once rooted in the humanitarian ideals of 19th-century Jewish emancipation, has been transformed into a state project of ethno-nationalism, exclusion, and, in the end, violence. As Bartov puts it, what began as a struggle for Jewish liberation has become a machinery for dominating Palestinians, with all the tragedy that implies.

The pace and simultaneity of Israeli military operations in recent years demand careful analysis. In just two years, Israel has bombed Gaza, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Qatar and Yemen; it has occupied the Golan Heights, Gaza, the West Bank, and parts of southern Lebanon. Israel even succeeded in drawing the United States into a direct conflict with Iran, a move that, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio accidentally admitted, was driven more by Israeli rather than American priorities. As for Netanyahu, this is a posture of someone........

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