Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Israel’s wars of choice in the Middle East, wholeheartedly backed by the Trump administration and the Biden administration before it, have produced multiple ramifications and decidedly mixed results. Iran’s tyrannical theocratic government has been set back on its heels, and Hamas has been decimated as a terrorist military force; that’s good.
But the price has been solidifying the autocratic rule of the corrupt, expansionist-minded ultra-nationalist Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel; that’s bad, as is the associated humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Gaza with America’s silent acquiescence, if not unofficial approval.
The former development has transformed Israel, long celebrated as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” into something more closely resembling Hungary’s “illiberal democracy” so admired by American conservatives. The latter consequence, the deaths of thousands, either as disposable collateral damage or by a deliberate policy of starvation and expulsion, borders on ethnic cleansing.
By its savage and revengeful response to the Hamas attacks in Gaza, the Netanyahu government has more than exacted commensurate suffering and bloodletting from the largely helpless and innocent Palestinian population. A late-May estimate of 54,000 mostly civilian deaths, including 16,000 children (per The Guardian Weekly, June 6), ought to have settled the score for 1,200 dead Israelis. Apparently, it did not, and thousands more have perished since then.
The ruling conservative elements of Israel’s government and society evidently want more, and they’re going back to the country’s founding for their guidance and inspiration. Under Donald Trump, in particular, this back-to-the-future movement is being endorsed by Washington; its key elements include (1) allowing Netanyahu a free hand in pursuing what’s called a Greater Israel and (2) marginalizing the Palestinians with an eye to either expelling them from the country altogether — Netanyahu suggests Egypt as a destination, Trump proposes Libya — or sequestering them in internment camps.
Israel’s military successes against its neighbors Iran, Syria and Lebanon, made possible with uncritical American help, have rendered it the superpower of the Middle East. The door is now open for the implementation of a long-held expansionist dream of the Zionist right.
The dream includes annexing the Palestinian West Bank (“Judea and Samaria”), a Netanyahu goal announced in 2022, as well as absorbing Gaza and opening it to Jewish settlement. A two-state solution involving Palestinians is, needless to say, off the table; their wishes and concerns are, at this point, irrelevant. Also on the agenda will be territorial acquisitions in southern Lebanon and Syria to create defensive “buffer” zones.
That such moves are under way should come as no surprise in light of the region’s history. When the post-World War I peace conferences placed Palestine, formerly part of the defeated Ottoman Empire, under a British League of Nations mandate (1922-48), part of the understanding was an eventual implementation of Great Britain’s promise, contained in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, of a Jewish homeland there.
Winston Churchill, as British colonial secretary, set the boundaries of Britain’s Middle East mandate; he divided it at the Jordan River (Palestine to the west, Iraq and the new Arab Kingdom of Transjordan, today’s Jordan, to the east), with Palestine’s southern boundary bordering Egypt and its northern boundary bordering Syria and what became Lebanon, the French Middle East mandate.
The rub was that the Zionist delegates in attendance at Versailles in 1919 had other ideas; they included nominal head Chaim Weizmann and, most especially, the conservative contingent led by extremist right-winger Vladimir Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of future Likud leaders Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu, and Netanyahu’s current coalition partner Bezalel Smotrich.
Prominent historians Tom Segev (“One Palestine Complete,” 1999), an Israeli, and Margaret MacMillan (“Paris, 1919,” 2001), a Canadian, have both traced, from different vantage points, the expansionist mindset that motivated Israel’s founders and still motivates its current government. The Zionist attendees at Paris, anticipating an eventual Jewish state, wanted as large a Palestine as possible under the British Mandate.
Segev points out that Jabotinsky, like his understudy Begin, held the mystical belief that the Jewish people had a historically based right to the entirety of biblical Palestine “from the Nile to the Euphrates;” that is, from Egypt to well into Iraq. Begin, for his part, believed the land could, and should, be redeemed by force and actively advocated an Israel that extended to the Iraq border.
Between conferences (Versailles in 1919 and San Remo in 1922), Segev relates, the Zionists worked to persuade the British to expand what should be considered future Jewish land under the Balfour Declaration. Their claim, their “Zionist dream map,” he writes, included southern Lebanon, Syria’s Golan Heights, and much of the area east of the Jordan River. But, he adds, they were forced to settle for about half what they initially wanted.
MacMillan fills in some critical blanks. The Zionists, she notes, kept pressing their territorial pitch; they wanted much more of what is now Jordan. “It is absolutely essential for the economic development of Palestine,” MacMillan quotes Weizmann as saying, “that the line [between the British and French mandates] be drawn so as to include the territories east of the Jordan which are capable of receiving and maintaining large Jewish mass settlements.”
Weizmann insisted to Churchill that the lands east of the Jordan had always been an integral and vital part of Palestine. The Zionists also coveted lands to the north, as far as the Litani River in present-day southern Lebanon, but Churchill, concerned with the negative opinion of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs, who’d been left entirely out of the discussions that obviously affected them, concluded that the future Jewish national home would be “in” British Palestine, but not occupy all of it - - to the future frustration of Zionism’s hard right.
The Zionist hard-liners, beginning with Jabotinsky and Begin, and continuing in a straight ideological line to current Likud Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition supporters, were and are territorial maximalists. They remain today dedicated to the idea of expanding the Israeli patrimony, following through on the original Zionist dream expressed at Versailles in 1919. With the neutralization of Iran and the elevation of Donald Trump, a like-minded ally, to the U.S. presidency, that dream must seem tantalizingly within reach.
The question for Americans is whether they want to sign on to this project for the duration, or cut Israel loose to proceed on its own without the continued “ironclad” guarantee of U.S. support and backing no matter what.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
