The Limits of Greater Israel

How Much Jewish Geography Is Enough?

Israel at maximum girth, circa 1971. Source: Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography

The 19th-century Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen once said that the Slavs had no history, only geography. By contrast, Sir Isaiah Berlin noted, “The position of the Jews is the reverse of this. They have enjoyed rather too much history and too little geography. And the foundation of the State of Israel must be regarded as a piece of historical redress for this anomalous situation.”¹ Berlin wrote these words in 1953, less than a decade after Israel was established. The Jews, but not the Arabs, had accepted the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which called for a Jewish state in 56% of British Palestine and an Arab state in the remaining 43%.² Israel then defeated the Arab armies that sought to sweep the Jews into the sea, resulting in its de facto internationally recognized borders (the “Green Line”) encompassing ~78% of the territory. (I’m excluding Jordan, originally part of the British Mandate for Palestine, from these calculations. If Jordan is included, the Jews ended up with ~18%.) For the next two decades, the West Bank³ was annexed by Jordan and Gaza was occupied by Egypt.

The 1967 Six-Day War, during which Arab states again sought to throw the Jews into the sea, resulted in Israeli control over the Palestinian-majority West Bank and Gaza, as well as Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights. The Sinai was returned to Egypt as a result of the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty, while the other territories remained under Israeli control. Following the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, the Palestinians began governing parts of the West Bank and Gaza, the ultimate (if tacit) goal being to establish an independent Palestine alongside Israel. But largely due to Palestinian terrorism and intransigence during final-status negotiations, that objective was never met. The West Bank thus remains divided into the Oslo-established areas A (under full Palestinian control), B (under joint Israeli–Palestinian control), and C (under full Israeli control). Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas seized power there in 2007, and Israel invaded following the terror group’s 2023 October 7 massacre. So, without recounting 3000 years of history in full, matters stand today.

Shtetls with Assault Rifles

But to return to Sir Berlin’s initial remarks: how much geography do the Jews need? For radical leftists and Arab conspiracy theorists, Zionism is imperialism. But if that’s the case, then Israel—which is roughly the size of New Jersey (inside the Green Line) or Maryland (including the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights)—must be the smallest empire in history.⁴ Moreover, in its inception, Zionism wasn’t even predicated on Jewish statehood. Theodor Herzl, who founded the modern Zionist movement in the late 19th century, was a pragmatist focused on resolving the plight of persecuted Jews through collective resettlement. To that end, he would have accepted an autonomous Jewish province within the Ottoman Empire. Even Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the forefather of today’s Likud party, once proposed a Jewish canton within a Damascus-based “Confederation of Semitic Peoples.”⁵ The 1917 Balfour Declaration proclaimed British support for a Jewish “national home” in the Holy Land, but did not use the term “state.” The Zionist movement only officially adopted statehood as a goal in 1942, once the catastrophe unfolding in Europe was clear and attempts at a compromise with the Arabs had failed.

The normative Arab response to the question of how much geography the Jews should have was zero.⁶ In principle, the Palestinians rejected both the partition of British Palestine and any measure of Jewish autonomy within an Arab state. They denounced the 1937 Peel Commission, which called for a Jewish state in ~17% of the land (with a clean north–south division), and the 1939 White Paper, which planned for a majority-Arab state with Jewish political rights. Once established, the Jewish state grew in size each time the Arabs tried to destroy it. In this, there’s nothing particularly unusual about Israel’s situation. A predictable result of starting a war is that you’ll lose territory if the other side wins. In 1870, France declared war on Prussia (shortly to become the German Empire) and, after its defeat the following year, lost Alsace-Lorraine as a result. Consequently, the English language borrowed the term “revanchism” (from the French word for revenge), which refers to a political movement aimed at reversing territorial losses. Palestinian nationalism is historically defined by revanchism, which also underlies Arab and Muslim attitudes toward Israel (and Jews more broadly).

But Israel’s expanded geography is complicated by demography. Alsace–Lorraine was a majority German region with a relatively small population (~2 million) compared to both Germany (~41 million) and France (~36 million) at the time. France reclaimed Alsace–Lorraine after World War I, lost it during World War II, and recovered it permanently in 1945. Today, most residents have assimilated into the dominant French culture, although many still speak a German dialect and retain local traditions. By contrast, the West Bank and Gaza are majority Arab and relatively close in population to Israel. Given its mere ~9.8 million citizens (about 75% Jewish), Israel cannot realistically absorb ~5.3 million hostile Palestinians.⁷ Nor can Israeli settlements, dispersed throughout the West Bank, tip the population balance. After all, when it comes to numbers, the Jews aren’t exactly the Han Chinese, who’ve drastically reduced the Muslim Uyghurs’ majority in Xinjiang.⁸ Ironically, isolated Jewish settlements re-create the very demographic conditions that early Zionists sought to escape—a chain of small, vulnerable enclaves amid a resentful majority, dependent on an external authority for their survival. Historian Howard Sachar referred to Jews in Eastern Europe as an “apparently unassimilable Semitic archipelago in a Slavic sea.”⁹ In its genius, Israel’s settler movement decided that the only problem with shtetls was their lack of superior firepower.¹⁰

Geography vs Demography

The obvious solution to the Holy Land’s demographics (a roughly equal number of Jews and Arabs) is separation: a majority Jewish state next to a majority Arab state. But the obvious objection is that this has been tried before and failed. For example, Israel offered the Palestinians a state over all of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and almost the entirety of the West Bank in 2008. Per then–Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s proposal, Israel would have annexed the large, contiguous settlement blocs, while Palestine would gain an equal portion of Israeli territory. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never responded to the plan. Following Israeli withdrawal, the Palestinians could have also built a model proto-state in Gaza, but Hamas preferred to use the territory as a terror base instead. All of this is true, but it also doesn’t change the basic demographic reality. So if the Palestinians can’t be trusted with a state, why not file for divorce by other means instead? Jordan could annex the West Bank and Gaza to form the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine. Arab states could help oversee a provisional Arab Mandate of Palestine as part of a regional normalization deal. Israel could retain military control over the West Bank while evacuating far-flung settlements. Whatever the answer may be, it’s certainly not doubling down on what Alex Stein calls “shtetl Zionism” by expanding the Pale of Settlements in the West Bank; let alone founding new unsustainable enclaves in Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon.¹¹

The term “Greater Israel” refers to a maximalist, religiously inspired vision of Israel’s borders. But a geographically larger Israel with the demographic stability of Yugoslavia and the international standing of 1980s South Africa is smaller by any other measure. The Likud legislator who said applying Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank is “more urgent” than Saudi normalization is wrong, but he’s at least answering the right question. What’s more important, additional territory or regional acceptance?¹² And demographically, is it “urgent” that Israel assume formal sovereignty over millions of non-citizens who seek its destruction? Or is it more important to conscript and economically integrate the Haredim, given that they’re the fastest-growing segment of Israel’s population? After nearly 2000 years of exile, the Jews once again have their own geography.¹³ But as Jewish history shows, geography alone doesn’t determine a people’s fate. Mighty empires fall when they overextend, and so can small but mighty nations. If Israel can achieve internal equilibrium and regional acceptance within smaller but secure borders, then let’s sing Dayenu. A great but not Greater Israel would have been enough for us.

1. Isaiah Berlin, The Power of Ideas (2000), p. 143.

2. Jerusalem and environs, the final 1%, would have been internationalized.

3. The West Bank has historically been called Judea and Samaria, which is its official Israeli designation. Jews are indeed native to Judea, just as Samaritans are native to Samaria. But for obvious demographic reasons, handing Samaria over to the ~900 contemporary Samaritans would be foolish in the extreme. So, in the long run, would be the Jewish annexation of Judea.

4. Its closest rival might be the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia (1561–1795) in today’s Latvia, which established a short-lived overseas empire in the 17th century that included colonies in the Caribbean and West Africa.

5. Jabotinsky later advocated for a Jewish state encompassing the entire Holy Land and what is now Jordan. However, he did so based on the prophetic premonition that a disaster was looming for Europe’s Jews, and thus urgent mass resettlement was required. In 1937, he testified to the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission: “[I]t is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine would also prefer to be the Arab State No. 4, No. 5, or No. 6 . . . but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation.” Jabotinsky’s 1936 “evacuation plan” called for the immigration of 1.5 million European Jews to Palestine, but was vetoed by the British.

Jabotinsky explicitly rejected the purely historical or religious case for Zionism, arguing: “The first question is, ‘Do you need land?’ If you don’t need it, if you are sufficiently provided for, it is then impossible to be backed by historical rights.” Thus the establishment of a Jewish state was morally justified by Jewish need. But the expansion of that Jewish state, once established, lacks the original moral justification. Today’s religiously motivated settlers lack the “claims of starvation” of a stateless, persecuted people, and so are not—despite their own arguments and those of Israel’s enemies—merely following in the footsteps of the early Zionists.

6. And so it often remains.

7. Although Israel could at least make it easier for earnest Palestinians to convert to Judaism, which is, after all, in many cases their ancestral religion (along with Samaritanism).

8. To the resounding silence of the Muslim world.

9. Howard Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World (2005), p. 56.

10. At least there’s been homeward progress, insofar as Israeli shtetlers have traded living among hostile Slavs for living among hostile fellow Semites. But Chelm in the Promised Land was not the Zionist dream.

11. In his wisdom, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said in 1968 that Jews should settle unpopulated areas of the Negev instead of the newly conquered West Bank and Gaza.

12. The Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco), required Israel to first suspend its previously planned annexation of the West Bank. More recently, Saudi Arabia has made clear that any Israeli normalization agreement is contingent on a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

13. Though the Khazar Khaganate (650–969 CE), whose rulers adopted Judaism, offered the tantalizing prospect of a post-exilic Jewish steppe empire. Unfortunately, the Khazars were vanquished by neighboring peoples (most notably the Rus) before they could establish Zion on the Don.