From the Euphrates to the Nile : A Moral Defense of Greater Israel

frontpagemag.com · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

Full Article

Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE. As incursions by Israel continue into the refugee-occupied territories of Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, there has been ramped-up concern over the concept of Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael Hashlema – the biblically promised Land of Israel) becoming more a reality. These concerns exist against the backdrop of Prine Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s affinity for the idea. His own Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich continues to flaunt the idea —much to the consternation of the Arab and Western world. The extension of Israel’s influence here is contentious. It could remain in the realm of political dominance of the region, or as Smotrich and other expansionists envision the doctrine, it would see Israel expanding its borders to Damascus. One could apply a literal maximalist Biblical interpretation of Genesis 15: 18-21 which would see it controlling territories from the Euphrates River to the Nile; or parts of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Given, as I will argue, that not one single Islamic state in the Middle East has legitimate sovereignty—that degree of expansionism, too, would be moral. In the immediate future, that expansionism must start with crushing the capabilities of Iran to ever develop nuclear weapons. Military strikes against Iran to annihilate its military infrastructure and come to the aid of the Iranian people who were once part of a magnificent civilization are imminent. It is time to rid them of their oppressive and despicable theocratic regime. What I intend to do in this article is not debate the coordination, plausibility, or practicality of the application of Greater Israel. Instead, I offer a moral defense of the idea itself. That is, I will argue, given the existence of certain geopolitical existential threats in the Middle East – which, among other things, undermine Israel’s security – that Israel’s expansionist doctrine is both morally and strategically defensible. I will also argue that sovereignty, properly understood, is not a political concept applicable to the politically regressive countries that comprise the Middle East. My position is hardline: whether we are talking about Israeli expansionism from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, the Euphrates River to the Nile River, those countries that operate under a Koranic mandate to destroy Israel and eliminate Jewry have every right to be subjugated under Israeli law and inducted into the pantheon of civilizational order. My idea here is not just expansionism, but political incarceration of globally indecent societies. Israel must and will have to become the dominant political hegemon in the entire Middle East—a moral-political imperium to maintain geo-political stability and civilizational order. Historical memories will serve us well here. From its re-inception in 1948, Israel was faced with the onslaught of the Arab-Israeli war by Transjordan (now) Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. Supporting expeditions came from Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They all had the intention of building a Pan-Arab confederacy to annihilate the newly re-formed state of Israel. In 1950 Jordan illegally annexed Judea and Samaria, both of which Israel legally and morally recaptured in the 1967 Day War. Those who look to regional factionalism, internecine squabbles, and alleged irreversible hatred among Islam’s Sunni-Shia divide overlook the fact that Jew hatred and hatred for Israel is stronger than these hatreds predicated on a narcissism of minor difference. Writing neither as a conservative nor liberal but simply as an independent, I believe a Greater Israel ought to achieve certain moral imperatives against the backdrop of what unites the Arab states into what we may call a Conceptual Common Denominator; that is, attributes that unite them all in a way that poses an existential threat to Isreal. They are all united by Islam, which is both a religion and a political and civilizational doctrine unified by Sharia. The core to all Islamic doctrine is to ensure that there exists an Islamic state throughout the entire world which is called a Caliphate. Nowhere is this more evident and explicit than in the Charter of Hamas that also calls for the elimination of Jewry from the Middle East and the entire world, the elimination of all non-Muslims and the establishment of a global Caliphate. Any Charter, whether it is that of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas (both terrorist organizations) rooted in a religious doctrine that calls for the elimination of a people from a region and ultimately from the world; and further, that authorizes anyone belonging to the religion to issue a fatwa, which in contemporary political Islam is a nihilistic license to kill anyone critical of Islam by any vigilante whose sensibilities are offended by reasonable criticisms against Islam, is a Genocidal Doctrine. Elimination of a people as enshrined in a governing constitution or charter from a region and the world is a eugenical doctrine mandating genocide. If the source out of which arises a genocidal doctrine fully consistent with the political ideology of Islam is not vanquished, then Israel is complicit in the genocide of her own people. Such societies and countries must be subjugated and controlled by the only country in the region that is not a politically failed state—Israel. There is a duty mandated by Islam to expand Islamic law worldwide. When states cannot declare jihad, then individual Muslims are expected to execute the mandate. Let us not forget that our very own Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who fled the Netherlands for the United States, must live under 24-hour police protection since she became critical of Islam over two decades ago. She has been the subject of multiple fatwas and death threats. The director of her short film Submission, Theo Van Gogh, was assassinated by an ordinary Muslim for the simple reason that the film dared to be critical of the treatment of women in Islamic societies. Remember the twelve people murdered at the office of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, France for the crime of depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammed? The killers were, again, two ordinary Algerian, French-born Muslims who identified as members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Acting under the auspices of Islam, we find that such individuals are not acting under the regulative principles of a restraining ideology; rather, they are ones that allow the homicidal impulses—the nihilistic ferality if you will—of sheer brutes, to run amok in the civilized world. The fact that Israel is surrounded by such countries with prevailing doctrines is untenable. They are failed states in the political sense, moral cesspits that must be reined in by Israel. This genocidal component inherent in the charters of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority explains why Israel’s attempts to establish peace and the closest plausible achievement of a two-state solution have failed miserably. As Caroline Glick points out in The Israeli Solution, the PLO-established Palestinian Authority never amended its charter which not only calls for the destruction of Israel, but added incendiary anti-Jewish materials to the school curriculum. Children were taught to seek a violent jihad to annihilate Jews, whom they were taught are subhuman evildoers who must be annihilated for Muslims to be free. To dispel the lie that Israel has fought against peace and a two-state solution, Glick invites us to remember some key facts. In July 2000, President Clinton brought Ehud Barak, Israel’s tenth Prime Minister, and Yasser Arafat, head of the PLO, and their negotiating teams to Camp David with the intent of achieving a peace deal. During the two-week summit, Barak made the Palestinians offers of peace that, in Glick’s words, “were unprecedented.” He offered to share sovereignty over Jerusalem. This was something no Israeli leader had ever done before. He offered them all of Gaza, 92 percent Judea and Samaria, and control of the Jordan valley. And how did Arafat and the Palestinians respond to such Israeli benevolence? By declaring a vicious Second Intifada, which saw the slaughter of over 1,000 Jews and 64 foreign nationals. Again, as Glick points out, on September 16, 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made Mahmoud Abbas, Chairman of the PLO, a comprehensive offer of peace and Palestinian statehood. It was an even more benevolent and expansive offer than the previous one. On the condition to end the Palestinian conflict with Israel, Olmert offered Abbas 94 percent of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), and an additional 327 square kilometers of land within sovereign Israel adjacent to the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria. He offered the Palestinians sovereignty over the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and offered to transfer sovereignty over the Temple and other sacred areas of Jerusalem’s Old City to an international body. He also offered a limited right of return of immigration to a truncated Israel to descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948-49. Abbas rejected the offer. After Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and handed it to the Palestinian Authority, and it was taken over by Hamas in 2007, how was Israel treated? From then until now it was besieged by barrages of rocket attacks. Between 2005 and 2014 there were about 20,000 rockets and mortars fired from Gaza into Israel. In 2021 under Operation Guardian of the Walls, more than 4,300 rockets were fired in just 11 days. And in its October 7, 2023, attack against Israel, Hamas initiated its massive surprise attack with a barrage of over 5,000 rockets. In response to Olmert’s proposal, Abbas waged a propagandistic campaign at the United Nations to achieve Palestinian sovereign statehood status beyond the framework of a peace treaty with Israel. During this time, he refused to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu and steadfas