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What Greater Israel Means: The Three Maps

"Greater Israel" is the English name for a Hebrew phrase, Eretz Yisrael HaShlema. It means "the Whole Land of Israel" or "the Complete Land of Israel." It is the idea that the Jewish state's rightful borders are larger than the borders the world recognizes. If you came here because you heard that Iran is being bombed and wondered what the war is really for, this is the first idea to understand, because Israeli ministers, Arab and Iranian governments, and American officials all use it.

The phrase covers three maps, one inside the next. The smallest is already built and governed. The middle one is being taken by the army right now. The largest is the horizon that ministers, settler leaders, and even Israel's opposition leader say they hope to reach. This page explains each map in plain language, shows who uses it in their own words, and shows how the three fit together.

Evidence rating: CONFIRMED that all three maps are stated, in their own words, by Israeli officials, Israel's governing party, and senior public figures.

Map one: the Whole Land of Israel, "between the Sea and the Jordan"​

The first map is Israel plus the land it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War: the West Bank (which Israeli officials call Judea and Samaria), East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, which Israel took from Syria. The claim is that no Palestinian state may exist anywhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

This map is written into the founding program of Likud, the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Its 1977 platform says: "The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." (Jewish Virtual Library, Likud original platform) The same geography is in the governing guidelines of Netanyahu's current coalition, which claim for the Jewish people "an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel" (Times of Israel, 28 December 2022). The full story of the platform, from 1977 to today, is on The Likud Charter and the Jordan River.

Israelis themselves have always understood the phrase this way. When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave it up in 2008, he explained what he had meant by it: "I used to believe that everything from the Jordan Riverbank to the Mediterranean Sea was ours" (Ynetnews, 14 September 2008). The Times of Israel, in the same August 2025 report that carried Netanyahu's "Very much," defined the term for its readers: "The term Greater Israel was used after the Six Day War of June 1967 to refer to Israel and the areas it had just conquered — East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights" (Times of Israel, 12 August 2025).

Even writers who defend Israel accept that this first map is real. Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote that "Greater Israel refers to 1948 Israel, plus the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights" (Hussain Abdul-Hussain on X, 1 September 2025). Hussein Ibish, an Arab-American analyst, calls it "Israel plus the occupied territories, the de facto greater Israel that has existed since 1967" (Hussein Ibish on X, 8 June 2024). A widely viewed explainer by Mario Nawfal put the present state of things in one line: the narrow "Whole Land of Israel" "has moved from fringe ideology to active political practice via settlements and annexation talk" (Mario Nawfal on X, 30 March 2026).

This is the part being built today, settlement by settlement. See Settlements: The Part of Greater Israel Already Being Built and West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan: The Steps Already Taken.

Map two: both banks of the Jordan, and north to the Litani​

The second map is older than the state of Israel. Before 1948, the Revisionist Zionists led by Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky claimed both banks of the Jordan River, meaning today's Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Kingdom of Jordan. Jabotinsky's 1930 hymn, as the political scientist Nadav Shelef prints it, runs: "There are two Banks to the Jordan — This one is ours, and that [one] as well." The underground militia Irgun, later led by Menachem Begin, used an emblem of a rifle over a map of both banks with the words "Only thus." Begin and Yitzhak Shamir both became Likud prime ministers. The full history is on Jabotinsky and "Both Banks of the Jordan".

The Zionist movement's own 1919 border proposal to the Paris Peace Conference reached north into southern Lebanon toward the Litani River and east of the Jordan. Menachem Ussishkin told that conference: "The historic desire of the Jewish nation is to be returned to its [territorial] borders and to restore the land that was divinely promised to the children of Israel 4,000 years ago" (as quoted from Bishara, 2011, in a Threads post, 23 May 2026).

Israel's founders did not let that map go. The historian Zachary Foster has collected their own words: Moshe Dayan in 1949, that the "frontier of Israel should be on Jordan [River]... present boundaries [are] ridiculous from all points of view"; Yigal Allon, later deputy prime minister, "I never forgave the Israeli government under Ben-Gurion for not letting us finish the job in '48-49"; the government's own 1951 Year Book, "to maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic state bent upon ... expansion"; and Yitzhak Rabin in 1963, outlining ideal borders at "the Jordan River in the east, the Suez Canal in the south and west and the Litani River in the north" (Zachary Foster on X, 3 April 2026).

That map is back on the ground. Since December 2024 the Israeli army holds the Syrian side of Mount Hermon and a buffer zone in southern Syria, and since March 2026 a "security zone" in southern Lebanon up to the Litani. In April 2026 Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Israel will "expand our borders to the Litani" and hold "the Hermon crown" (Ynetnews, April 2026). In March 2026 a Jerusalem Post op-ed, quoted by Zachary Foster, argued that "Israel must control the territory up to the Litani River and resettle it with Jewish communities," and that "Ben-Gurion also made clear that the Jordan River was never meant to be the eastern border of the Land of Israel" (Zachary Foster on X, 14 March 2026). Aimen Dean, a former MI6 informant, described this middle map when he said the amulet Netanyahu was handed in 2025 could mean "the 1967 occupied territories and Golan; that plus parts of Jordan, Sinai, and Syria; or the full Nile-to-Euphrates version" (Aimen Dean on X, 14 August 2025). The country-by-country record is on The Neighbors, Country by Country and Lebanon and Syria Since 2024.

Map three: from the Nile to the Euphrates​

The third map comes from the Bible. Genesis 15:18 says God promised Abram's descendants the land "from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates." Read with the "river of Egypt" as the Nile, that covers Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, most of Syria, much of Iraq, Egypt's Sinai, and slices of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Commentators differ on whether the "river of Egypt" is the Nile or a smaller stream in Sinai; the people who state this map as a goal read it as the Nile.

For decades, Israel's defenders said only Israel's enemies talked about this map. That changed after 2023, when senior figures began saying it themselves:

  • Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, in a 2024 documentary: "It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus" (Middle East Eye, 11 October 2024). In August 2026, as captioned by Mario Nawfal: "God promised us the Land of Israel in its full biblical extent. I sincerely hope and pray that one day that vision will be fulfilled" (Mario Nawfal on X, 2 August 2026).
  • Daniella Weiss, the leading settler organizer, to Haaretz: "I want to have for the Jewish nation the promised land from the bible, the land that was promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, from the Euphrates to the Nile. And I'm sure it will be" (Haaretz interview).
  • Yair Lapid, the leader of Israel's opposition, whom Americans usually hear described as a centrist, in February 2026: "the biblical borders of Israel are very clear," and asked how broad, "As broad as possible" (Al Jazeera, 24 February 2026). See Yair Lapid: "As Broad as Possible".
  • Mike Huckabee, the United States ambassador to Israel, asked by Tucker Carlson about the land from the Nile to the Euphrates: "It would be fine if they took it all" (The National, 20 February 2026). See Ambassador Huckabee: "It Would Be Fine If They Took It All".

The full record of this map, from Herzl's diary to 2026, is on Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates.

How the three maps fit together​

The three maps are not rival ideas. They are one idea at three distances. The smallest is held and governed. The middle one is being taken now under the name of security. The largest is the horizon, and the people who hold it say plainly that they expect to get there in stages.

Weiss said it would happen, only "I cannot know how many years it will take, because it wasn't specified by our prophets." Smotrich, asked in the same 2024 documentary whether Israel's borders should go past the Jordan, answered, in the translation posted by Kevork Almassian, "Absolutely, but slowly" (Kevork Almassian on X, 10 October 2024). Another translation of that clip, posted by Critical Perspectives, reads: "I want a Jewish state. Bit by bit. It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus. Until Damascus" (Critical Perspectives on X, 10 October 2024). Lapid named his only limits as "considerations of security and policy and time." The Israeli commentator Avi Abelow told his followers in March 2026: "Do not be afraid to say proudly that "of course one day the Jewish people will liberate our Biblical borders from the Euphrates to the Nile"" (Avi Abelow on X, 18 March 2026).

Even the voices on Israel's right who once dismissed the charge now describe the movement. Days before Assad's government fell in Syria, an Israeli account that usually attacks the "Greater Israel" charge wrote: "Our ambition was never a Greater Israel. But perhaps now, for the sake of security and stability in the region, it should be. ... We should take back the Golan and Sinai and every inch of land we ever gave for peace" (Mor Edge Insight on X, 7 December 2024). Amit Segal, one of Israel's best-known political analysts and no critic of the right, described Smotrich's "three-year plan to annex Judea and Samaria de facto, if not de jure," and concluded that "the dream of Greater Jerusalem is alive and well" (Amit Segal on X, 16 February 2026). Al Jazeera summed up where the wide map now sits: open calls for a vastly expanded Israel were once restricted to the fringes, but "those fringes — far-right figures like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — are now in government" (Al Jazeera, 26 February 2026). Andreas Krieg, a security analyst at King's College London, put the change most plainly: "For nearly two decades, I have been telling Arabs that their concern over the "Greater Israel" narrative is unfounded / What are you going to tell them now when these radicals are in the government?!" (Andreas Krieg on X, 11 October 2024).

Evidence rating: STRONG that the maps work as a ratchet: each step taken is held, and the larger map is stated as the goal to be reached over time.

Why this matters to an American family​

The first map drives the conflict the United States is pulled into over the Palestinians. The second map is where Israeli troops are standing today in Lebanon and Syria, with American weapons. The third map is the one that reaches Iraq, and the power that has stood against all three is Iran. That is why the war on Iran cannot be understood as only a fight about a nuclear program. See Why the Iran War Serves Greater Israel and Iran and the Greater Israel Map.

What a citizen can check​

  • Read the 1977 Likud platform. It is short, and the "between the Sea and the Jordan" sentence is in the first section.
  • Put Olmert's 2008 words beside Lapid's 2026 words. Both are Israeli leaders on the record.
  • When someone says "Greater Israel is a myth," ask which of the three maps they mean, and then look at which one the army is standing on.

Status: Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Yair Lapid, Ehud Olmert, Daniella Weiss, Mike Huckabee, Tucker Carlson, Amit Segal, Avi Abelow, Hussain Abdul-Hussain, Hussein Ibish, Aimen Dean, Andreas Krieg, Zachary Foster, and Kevork Almassian are alive. Ze'ev Jabotinsky is deceased (1940). Menachem Ussishkin is deceased (1941). Moshe Dayan (1981), Yigal Allon (1980), and Yitzhak Rabin (1995) are deceased. Nothing on this page states that any living person committed a crime.

Sources​

Research captures: twitter/t18__v205.md, twitter/t18__v209.md, twitter/t19__v217.md, twitter/t19__v221.md, twitter/t20__v229.md, twitter/t20__v231.md, twitter/t22__v256.md, twitter/t29__v337.md

Last Updated: 2026-09-26

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