Who Leads the South? Reimagining “Greater Israel” in an Afro-Arab Century

This map tries to compress the planet’s drift into a new order. In its legend, the world is sorted into four broad camps: a Global West (shaded orange), a Global North (light blue), a Global East (purple), and a Global South (gold). Whatever its flaws, the map captures a truth the word “multipolar” often hides: the world is not just splitting into many powers. It is reorganizing around directional centers of gravity.

The West still has a clear anchor in the United States. The East has consolidated around China. The North, in strategic and energy terms, has increasingly been shaped by Russia’s posture and resource leverage.

And the South? On the map it is a single block, but in practice it remains an unanswered question. Not because the South lacks scale, but because it lacks structure. It has momentum without a spine: vast demographic growth, intensifying climate pressure, critical sea lanes and mineral inputs, and yet no durable architecture that turns these facts into coordinated leverage.

To talk about the South seriously, we need a more concrete definition than the catchall “Global South.” The most coherent southern system today is the Afro-Arab corridor: the Arab world (including Israel) together with Sub-Saharan Africa. It is a contiguous space stretching from the Sahel to the Gulf, from West Africa to the Levant, bound together by the Red Sea, migration flows, food and energy dependencies, trade corridors, and increasingly shared climate stress.

This corridor will shape the coming century. It includes many of the world’s fastest-growing cities and populations. It sits astride chokepoints that matter to everyone: the Bab el-Mandeb, the Suez route, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It holds resources that sit at the center of modern supply chains. But politically, it remains under-institutionalized. The African Union and the Arab League exist, yet they do not operate as a unified Afro-Arab platform. Cooperation happens; integration is still shallow.

So the structural question becomes: who anchors the South? Who can help translate capital, technology, and human talent into institutions that actually work?

It is here that the idea sometimes labeled “Greater Israel” must evolve, or be retired. For decades, the phrase has been trapped in territorial discourse: borders, settlements, annexation. That framing is politically incendiary and strategically outdated. In the 21st century, influence is less about acreage than about networks: connectivity, standards, platforms, and reliability.

A reimagined “Greater Israel” would not mean territorial expansion. It would mean strategic expansion: an enlargement of responsibility and integration within the Afro-Arab South. If the phrase is too loaded, call it Israel as a southern node. The claim is the same. Israel’s comparative advantages align unusually well with what the corridor most needs to build resilience.

Israel sits at the hinge of Africa and Arabia. It is technologically advanced, militarily capable, economically innovative, and institutionally sophisticated. It has hard-won expertise in water systems, desert agriculture, cybersecurity, emergency response, and infrastructure resilience. These are not niche strengths. They are the sectors that will determine stability across large parts of Africa and the Arab world in the decades ahead.

At the same time, a substantial portion of Israeli society traces its roots to the Middle East and North Africa. Cultural familiarity with the region is not theoretical; it is lived. Yet Israel’s geopolitical imagination remains overwhelmingly West-oriented. That alignment has often been rational and beneficial. But a century defined by demographic gravity, climate stress, and supply-chain reordering will pull power southward. If Israel wants to avoid becoming a small outpost on someone else’s map, it needs a complementary southern strategy.

What a Southern Pivot Would Require

Israel cannot lead the South like an empire. It could, however, help convene it like a platform. That means shifting from episodic engagement to institutional design, focused on mechanisms that deliver reliability. Three moves matter most:

Put Africa at the center of foreign policy, not at the margins. Treat African states and regional bodies as co-equal partners in building infrastructure, public health capacity, food security, and climate resilience. Prioritize long-horizon programs (joint research, standards, training pipelines) over short-term optics.

Move normalization with Arab states (including the Abraham Accords) beyond bilateral security deals toward multilateral integration: energy interconnectors, logistics corridors, digital standards, joint research initiatives, and coordinated climate adaptation. Treat the Red Sea and Eastern Mediterranean less as borders and more as connective tissue.

Build institutions that can outlast leadership changes. The South is hungry for platforms that work: predictable financing, transparent procurement, interoperable digital systems, and regional crisis response. If Israel wants to be taken seriously as a convening node, it should help build these public goods rather than simply sell bilateral projects.

The Legitimacy Constraint

There is, however, a condition Israel cannot ignore: legitimacy. The Afro-Arab South is acutely sensitive to narratives of dispossession and domination. Any Israeli ambition to serve as a convening node in this space will be constrained so long as the Palestinian question remains politically frozen.

This is not moralism. It is strategic realism. In the South, legitimacy is not a moral accessory; it is strategic infrastructure. Leadership cannot be asserted. It must be accepted, and acceptance requires visible commitment to dignity and a credible political horizon for those who share the same geography.

Without that, Israeli integration will be read as domination by another name, and regional partners will hedge toward alternative conveners. Those alternatives already exist. Turkey, the Gulf, and external powers including China are building influence through ports, telecoms, security contracts, and finance. The South will be anchored. The only question is by whom and on what terms.

The West has its anchor. The East has its anchor. The North has its anchor. The South is not empty. It is unfinished. Israel can help shape its institutional future, but only if it learns a new measure of power: not territory, but reliability.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)