Quite how long “Greater Israel” has been in the planning we can debate but it unquestionably predates the Hamas attack of October 2023 by many years. Indeed the attack itself can credibly be seen as a response to progress on Netanyahu’s Lebensraum plan. That in no way excuses Hamas’s terrorism, but it does help explain it.
The Settler mindset is inherent in Israeli behaviour and rhetoric. Absurd justifications for the sequestration of Arab land even invoke the situation that existed on the territory two thousand years ago. Israelis, or many of them, have effectively argued for the creation of a sort of Volksgemeinschaft community that would not only be developed within the existing borders but in new lands to be permanently seized from Arabs – predominantly Palestinians. This is the dream of a “Greater Israel”.
If for decades a substantial expansion of the size of Israel has been a driver then it is hardly surprising that the many attempts at establishing the basis of a “Two state solution” have failed. Palestinians’ presence in large areas of the West Bank and Gaza, geography that many Israelis see as legitimately theirs, has eventually led to the ethnic cleansing now underway.
The creation of a Palestinian state is increasingly dead in the water. Israel no doubt expects the international community to intervene though the scale of what it wants, the removal of up to 5 million people, is enormous. Whether the West will be complicit in this process remains to be seen.
Paddy’s Blogs in a crazy world 
The belief in a ‘Greater Israel’ is the central plank of Zionism. Since the ninteeth century, Jews have worked towards expelling all Palestinians and Arabs from their land. The Isrealis justify it to themseleves on religious grounds. Not political nationalism.
Not the same thing as Hitler’s Lebensraum, room to breath. Although the effect certainly is.
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