On June 14, the United States and Iran agreed to a framework to end their war. The Strait of Hormuz is to reopen, the bombing of Lebanon is to end, and most importantly, the killing is to stop. After more than 100 days of war that killed thousands, including Iran’s most senior leaders, and pushed the world economy to the brink, even a fragile truce feels like first light.
To grasp why this war happened, and the string of wars before it, we must name their common cause: “Greater Israel” – not the country of Israel but an idea of it, a terrible one. The idea of “Greater Israel” has been the cause of wars in Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
It holds that Israel should stretch over all of historic Palestine – from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea – and to parts of neighboring countries as well. According to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a fundamentalist Protestant, “Greater Israel” stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates. Last summer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu professed to be “very” attached to a vision of “Greater Israel.”
This absurd and dangerous doctrine has two parents. The first are secular hardliners like Netanyahu who say Israel must control all the land from the river to the sea to be safe. The second is the Jewish supremacist creed of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir that God gave the land to the Jews alone.
“Greater Israel” is paranoia, megalomania, and religious zeal braided into a single program. The doctrine should have been repudiated decades ago, but it has driven Israel’s foreign and military doctrine for three decades – and has survived because Netanyahu has taken the US for a ride.
The war on Iran was simply the latest “Greater Israel” fantasy. The government of 90 million people was to be toppled in a single, glorious day. Of course, it did not happen. Israeli and American bombs killed Iran’s leaders on February 28, but that did not deliver the promised collapse. It resulted instead in thousands of dead, a choked Strait of Hormuz, and a global oil shock.
US President Donald Trump has been battered by joining the “Greater Israel” delusion, and he knows it. The new agreement with Iran is his escape valve, a way out of a fatuous war that was never his to win. That is precisely why Israel’s “Greater Israel” politicians are trying to strangle the new agreement in the cradle, for peace with Iran is a defeat for “Greater Israel.”
Here is the deeper truth: “Greater Israel” is not saving Israel; it is killing it. The friction now visible between Trump and Netanyahu is only the surface. According to a recent Pew opinion survey, the world now holds an overwhelmingly unfavorable view of Israel. In the US, Israel’s indispensable patron, six in 10 adults view it unfavorably.
So the way to peace in West Asia is to stop “Greater Israel.” End the war on Iran, stop the genocide in Gaza, and halt the strangulation of the West Bank. Most importantly, do the thing the doctrine forbids: create the State of Palestine as the 194th UN member state alongside the State of Israel on the 1967 lines with genuine security for both.
The Iran ceasefire makes the case in miniature: It was won not on the battlefield but through mediation. It became possible when Washington decided it wanted peace more than it wanted “Greater Israel’s” war. Israel can survive, but not as “Greater Israel,” a disastrous idea that has marched it and the US from one war to the next.
Source: www.aljazeera.com