From its inception in the late 19th century, political Zionism was never merely about establishing a safe haven for Jews in a sliver of land on the Mediterranean coast. The ideological writings of the founders of Zionism, Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and later the religious-nationalist movements made clear that “Eretz Yisrael” was envisioned expansively, bounded not by the 1948 or 1967 lines, but stretching into territories now belonging to Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and parts of Egypt.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917, British Mandate policies and the gradual settlement project all operated under the same long arc: incremental expansion until the “historic homeland” was fully under Jewish sovereignty.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest remarks to i24 News, framing himself as being on a “historic and spiritual mission” tied to the vision of Greater Israel, are not a break from Zionism. They are its purest expression. And yet, the brazenness of saying this in 2025, in the middle of one of the most destructive military campaigns in living memory, should shake the world.
Netanyahu is not simply signaling obstinacy on a Palestinian state; he is openly embracing a project that erases it entirely. This is not a policy nuance; it is a declaration of intent to annex, cleanse and re-engineer the demographics of the region. Worse still, it is being met not with universal condemnation, but with continued military, financial and diplomatic backing from Israel’s state sponsors, chiefly the U.S., the U.K., Germany and a chorus of compliant Western allies. These governments feign outrage at humanitarian disasters while replenishing the very arsenals that created them. Their lectures on “international law” ring hollow when, in practice, they underwrite a settler-colonial blueprint drawn up over a century ago.
Let’s be blunt: This is not a defensive war, nor an accidental drift toward extremism. It is the fulfillment of a vision that predates the establishment of the State of Israel itself. Every bomb dropped on Rafah, every land seizure in the West Bank, every strangulation of Gaza’s economy is another brick laid in the architecture of Greater Israel. And every Western veto at the U.N., every arms shipment, every “unbreakable bond” speech is mortar between those bricks.
But here lies the paradox of imperial overreach: The very ambition that fuels expansion becomes the seed of collapse. Israel’s long game, to normalize permanent occupation, to make apartheid banal, will eventually be its end game. No state can indefinitely sustain legitimacy while denying millions of people their rights and dignity. The map Netanyahu dreams of may one day be drawn, but it will be inked in the colors of perpetual resistance.
History has shown that regimes built on dispossession do not crumble when they are weakest; they crumble when they believe themselves unassailable. And Netanyahu, by proclaiming his “historic mission,” may have just marked the beginning of that end.
