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Much remains unclear about the significance and durability of the two-week pause in the US and Israel’s war on Iran. But one aspect of the conflict remains as clear today as it was six weeks ago. Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan. Benjamin Netanyahu does.
Israel’s war aims were to maximally degrade the capacity of the Iranian state, achieving not so much regime change as state implosion. Despite the ceasefire, Netanyahu has emphasised that this is “not the end of the campaign” and that Israel’s “finger is on the trigger” to resume combat. A seasoned strategist, he has spent the second Trump administration seizing the opportunity of geopolitical fluidity to reach for his end goal: a Greater Israel.
When it’s invoked on the Israeli right, “Greater Israel” is often seen as a purely territorial concept: an attempt to increase the size of territory that Israel claims as its own. This is certainly integral to its meaning. After all, Israel has been expansionist and entailed the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians since its inception, and this process has now accelerated considerably.
In the past two-and-a-half years, Israel has flattened and reconquered Gaza, killing tens of thousands of people and laying waste to its civilian infrastructure, squeezing its population, according to one estimate from last year, into just 12% of an already tiny strip of land. In the West Bank, Israel continues a campaign of destruction and displacement towards Palestinian people and property that is unparalleled since the six-day war in 1967, expanding its matrix of control and settlement.
After the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in 2024, Israel seized territory in Syria (beyond the illegally annexed Golan Heights) and is in the process of reconstituting a zone of occupation in southern Lebanon. Government ministers from the Religious Zionism and Jewish Power factions, and Likud parliamentarians, openly agitate for Israeli sovereignty and settlement in that country. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for Israel to “expand to Damascus”, and Netanyahu himself claimed to feel “very much connected” to this territorial vision of Greater Israel.
However, Greater Israel should be seen as a geopolitical and strategic concept as much as a territorial one. The acquisition and control of land is, in many respects, the obvious and easy part. Israel’s prime minister is pursuing something both more ambitious and more sophisticated than the simple control of territory – a project of dominion that is made up of new alliances, underwritten by hard power dependency.
To understand this, we need to go back a few years. After the terrible crimes inflicted on Israelis on 7 October, and as the magnitude and cruelty of Israel’s response in Gaza became clear, its attempts at regional integration – normalising relations with Arab neighbours – became increasingly stuck. Netanyahu faced a choice: either resume efforts at regional normalisation via a more accommodationist approach to the Palestinians, or double down on his zero-sum negation of a Palestinian future. In opting for the latter, Netanyahu needed to remove Iran as a regional power balancer – a move that required direct and massive US military engagement alongside Israel.
In the days preceding the Iran war, two influential former Israeli security figures writing for the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security observed that, from the point of view of key regional Sunni states, overthrowing the Iranian regime or weakening it significantly would establish Israel’s status as the “dominant regional power”.
Achieving this necessitates not only collapsing Iran but simultaneously weakening the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – and making them dependent on Israel for security and energy export routes. In other words, the war’s spillover impact of GCC states being hit by Iranian drones and missiles can be seen as an intentional design feature for Israel, not a regrettable side-effect.
Predictably, when Israel and the US launched this war, the GCC’s access to global markets via the strait of Hormuz was severely impacted. And when Israel escalated by targeting Iranian energy infrastructure, Iran made good on its threat to respond in kind against the Gulf.
Netanyahu took the opportunity to call for “alternative routes instead of the chokepoints of the Hormuz Strait and the Bab-al-Mandab Strait”, anticipating “oil pipelines, gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to Israel, right up to our Mediterranean ports”.
In his public pronouncements, Netanyahu has connected some of the dots of his project for Greater Israel dominion. Just days before the start of this war, during a visit to Israel by the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, Netanyahu shared his vision to “create an entire system, essentially a kind of hexagon of alliances around or within the Middle East”, including “India, Arab nations, African nations, Mediterranean nations (Greece and Cyprus), and nations in Asia”. Israel would be the key nodal point of this alliance.
A recently published piece in Hebrew from two high-ranking figures at the official strategy institute of the Israel Defense Forces helpfully filled in some of the blanks. They argued that Israel’s military would not only conquer territory directly, but also achieve “operational control even in areas far from Israel’s borders, without occupying and holding territory”. Israel would be granted “a superior status as a kind of ‘queen’ of the jungle” (it is not uncommon to hear the rest of the Middle East referred to as “the jungle” in Israeli political discourse), establishing “a regional order that will further Israel’s goals”.
In recent speeches, Netanyahu has started referring to Israel not only as a “regional superpower”, but “in some respects, a global superpower”. Israel is looking to place itself at the centre of a regional alliance that could be sustained even if US power draws down. Netanyahu has promised that the hexagon alliance would be deployed against the “radical Shia axis … and the emerging radical Sunni axis”. Israel has not been shy in naming the next “threat” to be addressed: Turkey.
Talk of a Greater Israel dominion might be treated as typical wartime hyperbole. Recent Israeli policy tells us it would be a mistake to do so. A permanent war orientation runs deep in Israel’s political class, government and opposition, security establishment, new-right elite and media. This thinking, however, carries tremendous potential for overreach and blowback; it is a danger for Israel itself and something the region will not accept.
In the long list of postwar challenges, deterring and containing this project of Greater Israel dominion might be among the most important.
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