Greater Israel

Greater Israel is an anti-Zionist and often antisemitic conspiracy theory about how Israel supposedly plans to militarily and diplomatically expand its territory to encompass most of the Middle East and chunks of North Africa. One of the most specific versions of this is about how Yasser Arafat found a weird shape on the Israeli 10-agora coin which he decided was the planned map for Greater Israel.[1]

Some dare call it
Conspiracy
What THEY don't want
you to know!
Sheeple wakers
v - t - e

History

Zionist pipe dream

Cranks like the good writing team of Globalresearch claim greater Israel was proposed by Jewish scholar Oded Yinon.[2] The Yinon PlanFile:Wikipedia's W.svg was first set forth in an essay written by Yinon and was published in the Hebrew journal Kivunim (Directions) in February 1982.[3][4] There actually is a shade of truth to this conspiracy theory. Prior to the actual establishment of Israel, there was a minority of Zionists who regarded as rightfully theirs all British territory in the Levant, including Jordan.[5] Irgun,File:Wikipedia's W.svg a Zionist paramilitary organisation at one point led by Menachem Begin,File:Wikipedia's W.svg a later PM of Israel, were fighting for a Jewish-majority state on both sides of the river Jordan.[6] Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, wrote a letter to his son saying "a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning."[7] As this unrealistic dream consistently failed to materialize, Israelis and Zionists have largely gave up on it.[8]

Hysteria

The "Greater Israel" concept eventually became a conspiracy theory. Osama bin Laden was an adherent; he gave an interview in 1998 claiming that Western military presence in Saudi Arabia was aimed "to support the Jewish and Zionist plans for expansion of what is called the Great Israel."[9] Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was also a believer. His conviction was based on the Israeli 10-agora coin; he would carry them around in his shirt pocket and say,[10]

“”This is a 10-agora piece. It is a new Israeli coin. And what does it show? The Jewish seven-branched candelabrum against the background of an incredible map: an outline shows the region which goes from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia, from the Red Sea to the Euphrates. It is a glaring demonstration of Zionist aspirations.

Israel's mint has provided the more realistic explanation: the formless blob behind Israel's state emblem is actually the shape of a historical coin issued by Antigonus II MattathiasFile:Wikipedia's W.svg, a historical king of Biblical Judea.[11] Nonetheless, in 2014, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood repeated the claim during a pro-Hamas tirade.[12] Arafat struck again in 1988 to claim that the two blue bars on Israel's flag represented Israel's ambition to expand "from the Euphrates to the Nile".[1] General Nasser of Egypt tirelessly went on about the Greater Israel conspiracy, claiming that Israel wanted to annex the whole Middle East and turn the Arab race into "a horde of refugees."[13]

Meanwhile, other conspiracy wackos have surfaced to claim that Israel creates puppet governments and sows crises (up to and including DAESH) in order to destabilize the Middle East enough to begin annexing territory for Greater Israel.[14]

  • "Greater Israel" based on the weird coin blob. Seriously, those borders don't make any fucking sense.

Why the theory is stupid

As mentioned above, nobody sane in Israel truly considers "Greater Israel" to be a thing. At all. Even the most hardcore Zionists have given up on it. Why? Because of two problems. Firstly, the world's Jews have largely not immigrated to Israel as the Zionists originally expected. In fact, the United States has a roughly equal population of Jews to Israel: about 6.5-ish million.[15] That's hardly the kind of population needed to completely replace the existing Arab population of the Middle East, or even to inhabit the lands supposedly coveted by Greater Israel. Secondly, the Palestinian population is growing rapidly and the people there are quite willing to fight it out.[citation NOT needed] David Kimche, who was director general of Israel's foreign ministry in the 1980's, noted: "The old Zionist nationalists' anthem was a state on 'the two banks of the River Jordan.' When that became impractical, we talked about 'greater Israel,' from the Jordan to the sea. But people now realize that this, too, is something we won't be able to achieve."[8]

gollark: The BBC article (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55388846) talking about it links this report on it: https://khub.net/documents/135939561/338928724/SARS-CoV-2+variant+under+investigation%2C+meeting+minutes.pdf/962e866b-161f-2fd5-1030-32b6ab467896?t=1608470511452
gollark: *Up to* 70% faster, but it's still quite worrying and it appears that a bunch of travel out of the country has been shut down.
gollark: Apparently flu season was much better than usual in the southern hemisphere this year.
gollark: It seems weird to put children before the everyone else bit. They're basically least at risk.
gollark: As in, no testing unless you returned from China recently or something like that.

See also

References
  1. Imperial Israel: The Nile-to-Euphrates Calumn by Daniel Pipes. Middle East Quarterly. March 1994
  2. “Greater Israel”: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East Globalresearch
  3. http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/move-over-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-make-room-for-the-yinon-plan/2015/09/25/
  4. Yinon, Oded (February 1982). Beck, Yoram, ed. "אסטראטגיה לישראל בשנות השמונים" [A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s]. Kivunim 14:49–59.
  5. Pappé, Ilan (1994). The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951. London: I.B.Tauris. p. 21. ISBN 978-1-85043-819-9.
  6. Pappé, Ilan (1994). The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951. London: I.B.Tauris. p. 21. ISBN 978-1-85043-819-9.
  7. Letter from David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos, written 5 October 1937 Obtained from the Ben-Gurion Archives in Hebrew, and translated into English by the Institute of Palestine Studies, Beirut.
  8. Why 'Greater Israel' Never Came to Be New York Times
  9. Interview: Osama bin Laden Frontline. Archived.
  10. La Repubblica, Apr. 3, 1990. 'Arafat made the same point again in a speech to the Jerusalem Committee of the Arab League on 9 Apr. 1990.
  11. 10 Agorot
  12. Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Praises Hamas; Repeats Yassir Arafat’s “10 Agorot” Claim Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch
  13. Speech, Mar. 26, 1964. Quoted in Y. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel, transl. by Misha Louvish (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1972), p. 73.
  14. Conspirators celebrate: So Israel created Da'ash to take over the world The Marker (in Hebrew)
  15. See the Wikipedia article on Jewish population by country.
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