Great Israel Begins Before the Border Moves

The most dangerous territorial projects do not begin with tanks. They begin when a larger map stops sounding ridiculous.

That is why texts like Jonah Lissner’s The Empire of Zion: The Messianic Middle East should not be dismissed as fringe eccentricity. Their scholarly weakness is obvious. Their political usefulness is the real issue. They do not need to persuade as history. They need to function as atmosphere. They widen the horizon of what can be imagined, then quietly teach readers to experience that widened horizon not as ambition, but as inheritance.

This is how maximalist politics prepares itself. First, language is stretched. “Israel” no longer names a state within disputed borders. It begins to name a transhistorical mandate. “Jew” becomes too narrow. “Hebrew” becomes a civilizational container. Then the map expands in the mind before it expands anywhere else. Borders, treaties, reciprocity, and limits begin to look provisional beside the vocabulary of destiny, restoration, return, and scope. By the time policy arrives, the imagination has already been trained to receive it.

That is why the language of Great Israel should not be treated as folklore. Folklore decorates. This language operates. It creates a zone in which propositions that once sounded delusional can circulate long enough to become discussable, then plausible, and finally administratively actionable. It performs one of the oldest tasks in politics: converting fantasy into horizon, and horizon into expectation.

In a country living under prolonged war, strategic anxiety, internal fracture, and moral exhaustion, this mechanism becomes even more potent. Large narratives promise coherence where reality offers attrition. They promise destiny where politics offers compromise. They promise chosenness where ordinary statecraft looks weak, procedural, and humiliating. They give suffering a grand architecture. They give fear a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)