More and more newspapers are writing about Israeli expansionism, including The New York Times. But they all make the same error in reasoning: they attribute it to the current alliance between Netanyahu and extremists such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. In doing so, they suggest that it is only because of those extremists and that future governments would act differently. Yet within the Israeli mainstream, there have long been currents that seek more territory. The reasons vary: sometimes they are biblical or historical, such as the idea that the League of Nations had also promised Jordan to the Jews; sometimes they concern space or security.
As early as 1918, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi described “our land” in a book as an area extending to the Litani River in southern Lebanon. The river was not an arbitrary line: it controls water, fertile land and strategic depth that the Zionist project had always desired. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, the Zionist movement presented a map on which precisely that river formed the northern border.
In 1921, Chaim Weizmann complained to Churchill that Palestine had been “cut off from the Litani” by the British-French border arrangement. Toward the end of 1921, Justice Brandeis, the leader of American Zionism, sent a telegram to Balfour making exactly the same point. He regretted the loss of the waters of the Litani and pointed to the economic importance of the plains of Transjordan.
“Our right to Palestine, in its entirety, is inviolable and eternal,” Ben-Gurion declared at the Zionist Congress in Zurich in 1937. A few months later he said: “I am an enthusiastic supporter of a Jewish state within the historic boundaries of the Land of Israel… I will not give up a single inch of our soil.” “Our movement is maximalist. Even all of Palestine is not our final goal,” he later said. He opposed naming Israel’s borders in the Declaration of Independence because he hoped to conquer more territory during the civil war. He accepted the partition plan only temporarily and said that borders are not fixed.
When the British approached him to launch the Suez War, he presented his own “fantastic” plan for the reorganization of the Middle East. Jordan was to be divided. Iraq would receive the East Bank of the Jordan in exchange for a promise to settle Palestinian refugees there. Israel would conquer the West Bank and Lebanese territory up to the Litani River, and would take control of the Strait of Tiran in the Gulf of Aqaba.
In 1963, shortly after taking office as prime minister and minister of defense, Levi Eshkol discussed a possible expansion of Israel’s borders. Chief of Staff Tzvi Tzur argued that Israel had the right to acquire strategic depth by conquering Sinai, the West Bank and northern Lebanon. Future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin outlined to Eshkol his ideal borders for Israel: they should include the Jordan River, the Suez Canal and the Litani River. Ezer Weizman, commander of the air force, believed that within five years Israel should consider a preventive war to shift the borders. And Shimon Peres wanted to take preventive steps to secure “more comfortable borders.”
Menachem Begin wanted to retire in a settlement in Sinai. He believed that God had promised Palestine to the Jews, did not recognize the existence of Jordan, and believed it should be conquered and absorbed into an exclusively Jewish nation — a dream he never entirely abandoned.
Moshe Dayan advocated large-scale Jewish settlements to strengthen Israel’s claim to the West Bank. In 1973 he told Time magazine: “There is no more Palestine. Finished.” In April 1973 he proclaimed the vision of “a new State of Israel with broad borders, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israeli government extending from the Jordan to the Suez Canal.”
Ariel Sharon planned the invasion of Lebanon. He developed the “grand plan” to establish Israel’s political hegemony in the Middle East. He wanted to destroy the PLO in Lebanon in order to break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the incorporation of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The influx of Palestinians from Lebanon and the West Bank into Jordan would eventually overthrow the Hashemite monarchy and transform the East Bank into a Palestinian state.
The Drobles Plan of 1978 was intended to prevent a Palestinian state through settlements. The Jewish Nation-State Law of 2018 states that “the state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” And the coalition agreement goes even further: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, and Judea and Samaria.” And the Israeli opposition thinks along the same lines.
Therefore, the West must recognize the Palestinian state now.
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