Even before the State of Israel came into existence, Arab leaders accused Zionists of seeking to establish a state that would cover most of the Middle East. This notion of a Greater Israel, quite distinct from the one understood by Zionists, eventually became so routinized and accepted, it by now serves as the conventional wisdom in all the Arabic-speaking countries and Iran. However fantastical, the fear has real significance, virtually guaranteeing misunderstanding, poisoning attitudes toward Israel, and making resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict more difficult. Although a distant and difficult topic for Americans to deal with, it deserves U.S. government attention as part of the general effort to forward Arab-Israeli peace negotiations.
On May 25, 1990, the United Nations Security Council left its permanent quarters in New York City and moved its representatives and staff all the way to Geneva, Switzerland, just so Yasir Arafat, who had been prohibited from entering the United States, could address the Council. And what did Arafat have to say on this momentous occasion? One of the subjects he chose to highlight for this august body was his proof that the Israeli government sought to expand far beyond its present borders. “Please allow me to show you this document,” he told the assembled diplomats. “This document is a ‘map of Greater Israel’ which is inscribed on this Israeli coin, the 10-agora piece.” Producing a map, Arafat elucidated in detail the boundaries of Israel purportedly represented on the coin: “all of Palestine, all of Lebanon, all of Jordan, half of Syria, two-thirds of Iraq, one-third of Saudi Arabia as far as holy Medina, and half of Sinai.”[1]
In another, yet more imaginative argument, Arafat discerned a hidden symbolism of expansionist intent in the Israeli flag: its two horizontal blue lines represent the Nile and Euphrates rivers, he told a Playboy interviewer, “and in between is Israel.”[5] (In fact, the blue lines derive from the design on the traditional Jewish prayer shawl.)
Qadhdhafi imagined an Israel headquartered in Cairo stretching from Pakistan to Spain, from Turkey to Yemen! In his most paranoid moments, he presented Greater Israel as a joint Zionist-American plot “to occupy the Arab world and the Islamic world,” with special emphasis on the control of Mecca and Medina.[29] In other words, Greater Israel will serve as an instrument to eliminate Islam.
After 1985, Hafiz al-Asad of Syria often raised the Greater Israel theme, presenting it as an imminent danger which he single-handedly stopped and calling on the Arabs to mobilize “to prevent the establishment of Greater Israel.”[30] Along these lines, Syria’s Defense Minister Mustafa Tallas told a military audience that, “Had it not been for Hafiz al-Asad, Greater Israel would have been established from the Nile to the Euphrates.” As if that were not achievement enough, he claimed that Asad’s forces “prevented Israel from occupying the sources of oil.”[31] Asad even portrayed the attainment of Greater Israel as a Jewish religious duty and accused Israelis of “talking mildly to deceive world opinion.”[32] The Syrians brought Greater Israel into their diplomacy, too. In January 1992, during the peace process negotiations, the Syrian delegation displayed a map of Greater Israel and claimed it represented the Jewish state’s territorial goals. Needless to say, the Israeli delegation quickly rebutted this absurd assertion.
Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iranian propaganda has strongly emphasized the threat of Greater Israel, often in connection with accusations of Jewish plans to control the world. A 1985 Tehran reprint of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion included a map, the “Dream of Zionism,” which purports to show Greater Israel’s ideal boundaries. It showed within this Israel the whole of inhabited Egypt, Saudi Arabia down to Medina, all of Syria, Iraq, and Kuwait, the oil-producing region of Iran, and a good-sized slice of Turkey.
Imperial Israel: The Nile-to-Euphrates Calumny https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/imperial-israel-the-nile-to-euphrates-calumny
https://zb10-7gsop1v78.bitchute.com/KaXyy87SWtst/h4vM8xY0SJfV.mp4