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

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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 steadfastly rejected any attempts to renew the establishment of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel. (Glick, pp.72-73).

But should any of this have come as a surprise to the world, and to Israel in particular? How can one reason with and negotiate with terrorists whose sole aim is to dismember your citizens through a pay-for-slay program, wipe out your entire people from the region, and follow a doctrine that explicitly forbids negotiating with “the enemy”? The good faith and benevolence of Israel which acted with full knowledge of the evil contained in the PLO charter is unprecedented. Peace is inimical to the mandates of the Charter. There could not have been, and will never be, peace with such individuals. The antidote to this dilemma, as I have written elsewhere is, among other things, the total annexation of Judea and Samaria.

Abbas had a lot of audacity demanding sovereignty. The same audacity holds for every Islamic country in the world governed by Sharia which makes the changing of faith (apostasy) a capital offense punishable by death. Israel has every right to invade, if it wishes to, and subjugate every Middle Eastern country because, as I shall argue, not one of them can claim the right to de jure sovereignty; de facto sovereignty is merely sovereignty by custom.

Sovereignty is neither an irreducible political primary, nor a legalistic axiom. It is subjected to principles of constraints: the constraints of justice for all, equality before the law for all, and the protection of freedoms which include the right to bodily integrity, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and opinion, freedom  of assembly, freedom of religious worship, and the freedom to pursue a conception of the good life consonant with one’s unique disposition and orientation as a human being.

In the modern age, since the birth of political liberalism in the 17^th century, proper governance has come from the free will of the people who consent to be governed on the condition that political actors protect their rights and protect their well-being as human beings. Political actors have a delegative role in politics. As John Stuart Mill, the 19^th century classical liberal philosopher reminds us, political actors are our tenants, our servants. We employ them to protect our property, chief among them being the property we own in our personhood. We the people employ them to vouchsafe the inviolability and inalienability of our God-given rights. We authorize them to govern in our name by means of a social contract. It is the people who confer autonomous status on the state to grant it leverage to perform its function as fiduciary of the people. If sovereignty has any principle of irreducibility affixed to it, then it is grounded in the will of a rational people who could never and will never will their own subjugation, oppression, and evisceration of their legal personalities. No rational people could conceivably will their own destruction.

By this logic, every Islamic country governed by Sharia that mandates gender-apartheid, non-religious reciprocity, and the totalitarian prescription of how a life ought to be lived, nullifies its own sovereignty. Their de facto sovereignty is invalid because the philosophical foundational principles establishing de jure sovereignty are already explicitly invalidated via a violation of the social contract by which a rational people form a government and thereby enter the historical process.

For several reasons, Lebanon cannot be a sovereign nation; not when it has Hezbollah, a terrorist organization, governing broad swaths of the country—especially in the South, and when it poses an existential threat to Israel. It has usurped the proper function of a government and of what a free society ought to look like. The fact is that countries that systematically violate the rights of their citizens forfeit any legitimate claim to sovereignty. They therefore exist in a state of nature, and outside the historical process. In this case, it is up to Israel to assume the default duty of politically incarcerating such nations to both protect its own national self-interests, and to protect the rights of citizens of such politically failed states. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Qatar are terrorist states. That they use their sovereignty for the purpose of sponsoring Jihadism and terror to make a mockery of the noble ideal enshrined in the concept of sovereignty, should alarm all of us.

State constitutions that are pernicious and constitutively destructive of Jews and non-Muslims supersede the will of a rational people. If we find such situations, as is the case with many Palestinian Gazans who still support Hamas, that the will of a people are in alignment with codified precepts of destruction, then Israel can and should properly retake ownership of the entire Gaza Strip. Terrorists and their supporters have no business governing a country.

It is embarrassing to make invidious comparisons here, but when we think of Israel we think of a country that has Arab-Israeli citizens in their Knesset, an Arab-Israeli Christian judge, George Karra, who presided over the Tel Aviv District Court panel that convicted and sentenced former Israeli President Moshe Katsav to seven years in prison for rape in 2010-2011. Karra later served as a Supreme Court of Israel justice from 2017 to 2022. Israel also has several wealthy Arab families running major businesses such as Nazareth Transport and Tourism and the Affi Group. Israel has granted citizenship and permanent residency to 2—2.1 million Arabs who live with full equal rights accorded to all Israeli citizens. They make up to 20-21% of Israel’s population. Are there any Jews sitting in the so-called  houses of representation in Iran, Jordan, Saudia Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, or any Islamic country in the Middle East? The answer is a resounding no.

So much for Israel being an apartheid state.

Short of an Islamic Reformation, it will be difficult to justify the proper sovereignty of any Islamic state. And, given the fact that if we were to subject each nation to a political decency test in terms of rights protection (remembering here also, that Israel serves as a refuge for Christians and sexual minorities living in the Middle-East, sexual minorities beheaded in Saudi Arabia, and violently persecuted in every Islamic state in the region), which nation would come out with the highest scores? That would be Israel. By any judicious and fair standard, Israel has the right to proclaim political and civilization supremacy. It has the moral right to conquer, and place in political receivership any one of those politically regressive countries operating under the guise of pseudo-sovereignty.

Let us remember that under Islamic rule, Sharia or Islamic law is the law of the land. The world is divided into two parts under Islamic political ideology. The Dar al-Islam where Sharia is the law of the land, and where the punishment for apostasy in all Islamic countries is death, and the Dar-al-Harb, the “house of war” where Sharia is not the law of the land.  The whole function of Islam is to annihilate Dar al-Harb until the entire world becomes Dar al-Islam. The means of achieving this is Jihad—war against all non-Muslims. Proof of this exists in the fact that the three largest sponsors of terrorism in the world—as mentioned before—happen to be near Israel. They are, again: Iran, governed by a monstrously evil theocratic regime; Saudi Arabia, a medieval kingdom where the concepts of individual rights and liberty are alien concepts; and Qatar, another politically regressive fiefdom that along with the two previously mentioned countries, sponsor terrorist cells including Hezbollah and Hamas, and surreptitiously plot the destruction  of the West and Israel in particular. The worldwide sponsorship of terrorism by rogue states in such proximity to Israel entices other Arab states to engage in roguery.

When we speak of the Middle East, except for Israel, two words should come to mind: rogue states. These countries are ecological, political ballasts that destroy the political happiness of their citizens. They are radical social disruptors and moral sinkholes that drag the region down into a state of geopolitical insecurity. Israel always faces the looming threat of reformed religious Pan-Arab nationalism, a more virulent Islamism, or some distorted version of Pan-Arabism that could arise at any time—Jew hatred always supersedes tribal and national factionalism.

I have given only a partial moral defense for a Greater Israel here, given the confines of space. A more detailed and comprehensive defense should be forthcoming in a book project. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that Islamic rogue states can be politically rehabilitated. The only solution is for Israel to radically dominate them by removing their sphere of influence from the region. This entails, among other things, merging with the United States to ensure that they cannot use their economic resources for evil purposes. This means controlling their economic infrastructures; waging a counter jihad against theirs and stop pretending that peace is possible with those who hate you and constitutionally will your destruction.

Greater Israel must proclaim its civilizational supremacy in the region and cease to care about its image in the world—after all, a sizable portion of Western countries are filled with world leaders and citizens who are Jew haters. No amount of temporizing, compromising and mouthing stale generalities, platitudes, shopworn bromides, virtue-signaling, and performing political connections when literally none can be made with any country in that region—will solve Israel’s dilemma. Until Israel announces that it is the epicenter and the future of the Middle East, there will be no solution. Those who fail to heed the face of Greater Israel will face חשבון זועם – a wrathful reckoning.