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← Netanyahu's "Very Much"

"Change the Face of the Middle East"

Governments usually describe a war by its limited aim: stop a missile program, free hostages, push back an army. Benjamin Netanyahu has described the wars on Iran in a different way. His phrase, repeated in 2025 and 2026, is that Israel will "change the face of the Middle East." This page shows what he has said that means: a region reordered around Israel as the dominant power, with the Gulf states routing their oil through Israel and a new alliance built with Israel at its center. It is the regional side of the Greater Israel idea, and it is why the Iran war matters to that idea.

June 2025: the first war on Iran​

During the twelve-day war in June 2025, at Tel Nof Airbase, Netanyahu said: "Two days after the war began, I said: we will change the face of the Middle East. That is exactly what we are doing." He tied it to two aims: removing Iran's nuclear and missile threat, and destroying Hamas (JNS, June 2025). Two months later he said "Very much" to the Greater Israel vision on i24. See the twelve-day war.

2026: "I promised you"​

The second war on Iran began at the end of February 2026 as a joint US-Israeli operation. Seven weeks after launching the operation with Donald Trump, according to a 14 May 2026 essay by the historian and sociologist Mazen Al-Najjar, Netanyahu said: "I promised you that we would change the face of the Middle East" (Mazen Al-Najjar essay as reposted by Elisabeth Eliseeva on X, 16 May 2026). The same essay reports that he began calling Israel a "regional superpower," and sometimes a "global superpower." On 31 March 2026 he said, on video: "We are working on transforming Israel into a supernation in the region and globally" (Red Pill US on X, 31 March 2026).

A six-sided alliance with Israel at the center​

According to the same essay, days before the 2026 war, during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Israel, Netanyahu described "an integrated system, like a six-sided alliance around or within the Middle East," comprising "India, Arab states, African states, Mediterranean states (Greece and Cyprus), and Asian states," with Israel as the linchpin. He promised to turn it against "the radical Shiite axis… and the emerging radical Sunni axis," and Israel was quick, the essay says, to name its next target: Turkey.

The former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy, writing in The Guardian as summarized in that essay and on Wikipedia, reads Netanyahu's Greater Israel as "not only a project of territorial expansion but also of regional dominion": Israel would outbalance Iran and weaken the Gulf states, and if the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb were closed, Gulf fuel exports would have to be routed through Israeli ports, with Israel the key of a "hexagon of alliances" (Wikipedia text as pasted by noctem26 on X, 17 June 2026). See Regional Dominion.

Pipelines to the Mediterranean​

When Iran answered the 2026 strikes and the Strait of Hormuz was choked, Netanyahu, as quoted in the Al-Najjar essay, called for "alternative routes to the Straits of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab," predicting "the extension of oil and gas pipelines westward through the Arabian Peninsula to Israel, and then to our ports on the Mediterranean." The war that closed the Gulf's shipping lanes became, in his words, the case for running the Gulf's energy through Israel.

A Hebrew-language article by two senior figures at the Israeli military's strategy institute, as described in the same essay, said the army would achieve "operational control in areas far from Israel, without actual control on the ground," giving Israel "a superior status as the queen of the jungle" and "a regional order that promotes Israel's objectives." Before the war, two former Israeli security leaders wrote for the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security that the major Sunni states saw the overthrow or severe weakening of Iran's government as consolidating Israel's position as the dominant regional power.

Security zones as the map changes​

The "face" he describes is already visible on the ground. In May 2026 he said: "We have changed our security concept. We initiate, we attack, and we have created three security zones deep within enemy territory," in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza (NPR, 31 May 2026). In the same years, his finance minister said the war "should end with a political declaration expanding Israel's borders," and an Israeli reserve colonel warned that a "security-ideological coalition" was "using a defensive-preventive narrative to advance a messianic agenda of 'Greater Israel'" (Udi Evental).

The Channel 14 sequence​

An Israeli outlet put the order of operations in plain words before the 2026 war. On 2 October 2024 the English account of Channel 14, a pro-government network, posted: "At the moment, given that Iran shares no border with Israel and is not a hindrance to the establishment of Greater Israel, Israel should focus on Syria before starting the war with Iran" (C14 News English on X, 2 October 2024). Syria came first, in December 2024. The war with Iran came next. See Iran and the Greater Israel map and Why the Iran War Serves Greater Israel.

Evidence rating for "Israel's prime minister ties the wars on Iran to reshaping the region around Israel": STRONG.

Status: Benjamin Netanyahu, Narendra Modi, Daniel Levy, Mazen Al-Najjar, and Udi Evental are alive. Nothing on this page states that any of them committed a crime.

Sources​

Last Updated: 2026-09-26

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