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“Greater Israel”: A Not So Hidden Ambition
Supporters of Zionism, atheist and religious alike, generally rely on two points of religious dogma to validate the occupation of Palestine: the idea that followers of Judaism are “God’s chosen people”, to the exclusion of all others; and the idea that God “gave” the “children of Abraham” all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates rivers. The borders are vaguely and contradictorily defined in multiple places in the Torah (Old Testament).
The concept of “Eretz Israel” (Hebrew “Land of Israel”, with the connotation of expansionism that “Greater Israel” implies in English) is based on a merger of religious fundamentalism and modern political ethno-nationalism, whereby ancient texts are used to justify a modern military expansionist state.
Military invasion attempts into South Lebanon since October 2024, along with recurrent calls for expanding the entity’s border by occupation leaders, have revived contention over long-entrenched Zionist territorial ambitions in the region. The shameless display of a map that engulfs Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia spotted on the sleeves of occupation soldiers is hardly symbolic, nor exclusive to fringe elements of settler society. The concept of ‘Greater Israel’, long dismissed by “Israelis” and their supporters as a conspiracy theory promoted by paranoid Arabs and anti-Semites, verily captures the essence of Zionism as an expansionist settler-colonial movement with biblical, territorial claims that extend from the Nile to the Euphrates.
LEFT-RIGHT DIVIDE
There is a common misconception that attributes the expansionist behavior of the Israeli entity to the most extreme factions of its society, represented by ultranationalist settlers. These are the ones who hold beliefs from biblical scriptures, whom are often caught on camera harassing and killing Palestinians, stealing their homes, burning their olive trees, and destroying crops and killing herds, all under the full protection of the Occupation Army (IOF) of course. However, to limit the occupation’s aggressive aspirations to conspicuous right-wing extremists is a misreading that leads to the prevailing tendency to appeal to left-right, or religious-secular, nuances within the Zionist entity. This deceptive framing is especially popular among Western liberals.
The public “Israeli” attitude towards its internal affairs does, however, reflect a polarity. The culture is characterized by a religious-secular divide, which involves ongoing debates over the status of religion, the character of the entity as a “Jewish state”, and its territorial borders. This left-right dichotomy exists over a range of internal issues concerned with political and socio-economic questions. However, when it comes to the colonial-expansionist identity of the entity, that dispute most certainly dissolves, and makes no difference to those on the receiving end of its terror.
“Israeli” leaders from across the political spectrum have collectively and directly contributed to the military occupation of Palestine, creeping into more territory by the day, in a steady, consistent and systematic manner since the very establishment of the entity. To clarify, it is not only the likes of Daniela Weiss, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich whose aspirations are problematic, and dangerous, and “extreme”.
To name just a few, the first Prime Minister of the occupation state, the ‘secular’ David Ben Gurion, who led the largest socialist- Zionist party, was also a chief architect of the 1948 Nakba. It was Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, the founder of the Labor Party, who occupied the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai desert, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem following the 1967 Six Day War. The most ‘moderate’ of them all, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed as ‘a peacemaker,’ actually accelerated land theft in the West Bank, and when asked, “what is to be done with the Palestinian population?” he responded with a hand gesture motioning to ‘drive them out!’
Most importantly, these leaders did not emerge from a vacuum; they were brought to power by “Israeli” voters, who also showed overwhelming support for the ongoing genocide against Gaza. Back in November 2023, only 3% of Israelis were in favor of a permanent, “unconditional” ceasefire. The annihilation of Gaza unifies the settler state left and right alike.
FROM THE NILE TO THE EUPHRATES
The possibility of establishing a Zionist entity in Uganda, Argentina or the Sinai Peninsula was initially considered towards the end of the 19th century by Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism. However, the idea that a Jewish entity must spread across the so-called ‘historic biblical land of the Jews’ in Palestine took precedence.
In his 1898 diaries, Herzl mentions a discussion with Max Bodenheimer, another notable figure of the Zionist movement and his close associate, who suggests that a ‘Jewish State’ should extend “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates”, an idea which Herzl approved to be ‘in part excellent’. In his 1896 pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, Herzl envisions an Israeli entity that would set out as follows: “the northern frontier is to be the mountains facing Cappadocia in Turkiye; the southern, the Suez Canal’. He also points out that it would serve as a “wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism”.
It’s worth mentioning that Herzl’s legacy still reverberates powerfully across the entity today, to the extent that the Knesset passed the Herzl Law as recently as 2004. The Herzl Law makes it mandatory for all Israelis to study his work in order to “structure the state of Israel, its goal and image in accordance with his Zionist vision”.
Rabbi Fischmann, a member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine who assisted in drafting “Israel’s” Declaration of Independence, explained at the U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry on 9 July 9, 1947 that “the Promised Land was quite a large one:, from the river of Egypt, up to the Euphrates”, and that “the promise was given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, about 4000 years ago and it was reaffirmed to Moses”.
There is no shortage of examples of Zionist leaders expressing their ambition of establishing a “Greater Israel”, but it is important to keep one thing in mind: The Zionist movement underwent many phases, and Zionist ideologues’ opinions about the exact definition of ‘a greater Israel’ and the ideal delineation of its borders fluctuated throughout the years.
ONGOING COLONIZATION OF PALESTINE
Given the constraining circumstances surrounding Zionist colonization in its early days, Zionist expediency understood that to gain leverage, a temporary compromise between its grandiose territorial ambitions, and its immediate instrumental needs, was required.
The Zionist movement was willing to come to terms with less territory at first, in exchange for a ‘state’ with political sovereignty. However, its determination to seize more when a ripe opportunity came along was never abandoned, as a comparison of historic and present-day maps reveals.
In 1948, the Zionist state stole 78% of Palestine. Ever since, new rounds of aggression and expansion have been implemented in an unfettered manner. Since 1967, 100,000 hectares of Palestinian lands have been stolen. In the first months of the genocide in Gaza alone, Israel stole 1,270 hectares of Palestinian land.
In fact, records of evidence show that through exercising patience, the colonial occupation has patiently been playing the long game, gradually bringing more Palestinian land under its control by the day. To claim otherwise – that Israel will remain indefinitely satisfied with dominating only a fragment of the land that it maintains belongs to the Jewish people – would be absurd. In fact, this was accurately expressed in 1937 by Ben Gurion, a central figure in the founding phase of the colonial entity, who also served as its first Prime Minister for almost 15 years “a partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning…’’, and “we shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them”, implying that Israel should never settle for any limitations concerning its borders. This is precisely why, up until the present day, Israel has failed to define its borders.
THE LITANI RIVER
If we consider our current situation, one year into the genocide in Gaza, Israel is attempting to create a “buffer zone” in South Lebanon, something it has incessantly attempted to do since its inception: in 1948, as well as 1978, 1982-2000 and 2006. Amid its current inability to deter Hezbollah from launching attacks against it in support of Gaza, Israel has been seeking to change the status quo by pushing the resistance away from Lebanon’s southern border, and beyond the Litani specifically. Historically, the Litani River has always held strategic importance for Zionist ambitions.
The Litani, the longest river in Lebanon, stretches 170 kilometers southward from the Beqaa Valley, flows along the eastern front of Lebanon’s mountain range, and diverts sharply westward towards the Mediterranean Sea, north of Tyre. Historical documents revealing Zionist plans to take control of it date back as far as prior to the establishment of the entity. Its importance is due to it being a vital water source, along with the fact that its surroundings are of military-strategic value.
The head of the World Zionist Organization, who would later become the occupation state’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, put forward a map for a proposed Jewish colony at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The map he presented fell short of the land guaranteed in accordance with ‘God’s Promise’, from the Nile to the Euphrates. Rather, the proposed borders were drawn according to geopolitical calculations to dominate water resources in the region, incorporating:
“First the whole of Mandated Palestine … secondly, southern Lebanon, including the towns of Tyre and Sidon, the headwaters of the River Jordan on Mount Hermon and the southern portion of the Litani River… thirdly, on the Syrian front, the Golan Heights, including the town of Quneitra, the River Yarmuk and El-Himmeh Hot Springs … fourthly, on the Jordan front, the whole of the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea and the Eastern Highlands up to the outskirts of Amman, running southwards along the Hejaz Railway to the Gulf of Aqaba, leaving Jordan with no access to the sea; fifthly, on the Egyptian front, from EI-Arish on the Mediterranean in a straight southerly direction to the Gulf of Aqaba”.
The priority of accessing water resources was also articulated in a 1919 letter Weizmann sent to David Lloyd George, Prime Minister and head of the British delegation, in which he wrote:
“The whole economic future of Palestine is dependent upon its water supply for irrigation and for electric power, and the water supply must mainly be derived from the slopes of Mount Hermon [Golan Heights], from the headwaters of the Jordan, and from the Litani River in Lebanon”
It wasn’t until 1967 that Israel would partially fulfill its aspiration of controlling more territory and dominating water resources by occupying the Syrian Golan Heights, East of the Jordan River, as well as the Sea of Galilee, also known as ‘Lake Tiberias,’ —but not the Litani River. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was quoted saying that “Israel had achieved provisionally satisfying frontiers, with the exception of those with Lebanon.” The idea of occupying South Lebanon was enthusiastically adopted by Moshe Dayan as well as Ben Gurion, and was also referred to in the diaries of Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett.
Ben Gurion’s conviction of an Israel with the Litani as its northern border was noted in a book he published in 1918. This idea would remain an essential part of his vision for the entity for years to come, as would the idea of redrawing the borders by fragmenting Lebanon to allow for the establishment of a Christian state with with the Litani as its southern border managed by ‘Israel’.
Zionist plans to annex the region or expand its control over it are not a thing of the past – on the contrary, they always tend to resurface. Established in 2024, a group called “The South Lebanon Movement” has been advocating for the colonization of South Lebanon.
HEGEMONY THROUGH DISRUPTION
Zionist expansionism does not only manifest as direct occupation and control of territory. When the entity abstains from or is unable to claim land, it makes use of other cost- effective tools to spread its hegemony.
This was best articulated in a notorious article that recently resurfaced entitled “A Strategy For Israel In The Nineteen Eighties” published in 1982 in the quarterly Kivunim – a journal of the Department of Information of the World Zionist Organization that encapsulates the Zionist ideology. The piece was written by journalist and senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official Oded Yinon, who precisely advocated for a strategic divide-and-rule plan to fragment the region in Israel’s favor:
“Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short-term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today”.
This describes, in great detail, the current track on which the Levant is heading, confirming the premise of this strategy which was laid out forty years ago. More recently in 2002, then- former president Netanyahu testified before US Congress in fervent favor of “taking out Saddam” by invading and destroying Iraq. This was not about regional peace — remember that a large part of Iraq is contained in “Greater Israel” — the goal was fragmenting and weakening all nations contained within the land of “God’s promise”. Therefore rather than being cohesive nations, the fragmentation of these historically diverse states into sectarian and ethnic groupings, where sub- state identities are exacerbated and mired in conflict, makes them more vulnerable to “Israeli” hegemony, and less capable of projecting power and coordinating action against it. This creates the ideal grounds for submission to the entity’s greater plans. In that case, even if a “Greater Israel” isn’t physically achieved, it will at the very least still be capable of imposing its supremacy over the region.
CONCLUSION
It requires no extensive amount of research to identify from “Israel’s” behavioral pattern, along with statements issued by its officials, that its appetite for expansion is far from quenched. We are witnessing this appetite in real-time. The trajectory of this entity, since its illegitimate establishment in 1948, is self-evident to those of us who have been experiencing its brutality daily. It makes no difference whether it is driven by biblical scriptures associated with the return of “God’s chosen people to the promised land” and the fulfillment of messianic prophecies, or rooted in pragmatic secularism, linked its current territorial occupation, conspires to annex more land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, or conquer the entire area, from the Nile to the Euphrates, the supremacy engrained in its very foundation makes it a danger that cannot be overstated. Equally dangerous are the misleading attempts to dismiss awareness of its territorial ambitions and muddy its imperialistic nature.
Failure to address the extent to which these expansionist ideas are inscribed indelibly in their settler-colonial project will have detrimental implications. Even the so-called “two- state solution”, always a distraction from recognizing the fundamental illegality of the occupation, is an illusionary mantra that has been rejected by the “Israeli” regime itself, which is colonizing more land by the day with full support from the West. This support for “Israel’s” manifest destiny is echoed in the shocking 2019 presidential declaration that the Syrian Golan Heights, invaded by Israel in 1967, were to be recognized as part of the Zionist state. As sitting senior ministers within the occupation government openly declare their intent to invade and colonize Lebanon and Syria, what is to stop their US-backed armies from furthering their goals of occupying the entire region from Jordan to Iraq?
When IOF soldiers wear a “Greater Israel” badge on their uniform, signaling their aggressive intentions towards the whole region, we must believe them.
REFERENCES
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{
"article":
{
"title" : "“Greater Israel”: A Not So Hidden Ambition",
"author" : "Sarah Sinno",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/greater-israel-ambition",
"date" : "2024-11-01 13:13:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/greater-israel-fig-2-thumb.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Supporters of Zionism, atheist and religious alike, generally rely on two points of religious dogma to validate the occupation of Palestine: the idea that followers of Judaism are “God’s chosen people”, to the exclusion of all others; and the idea that God “gave” the “children of Abraham” all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates rivers. The borders are vaguely and contradictorily defined in multiple places in the Torah (Old Testament).",
"content" : "Supporters of Zionism, atheist and religious alike, generally rely on two points of religious dogma to validate the occupation of Palestine: the idea that followers of Judaism are “God’s chosen people”, to the exclusion of all others; and the idea that God “gave” the “children of Abraham” all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates rivers. The borders are vaguely and contradictorily defined in multiple places in the Torah (Old Testament).The concept of “Eretz Israel” (Hebrew “Land of Israel”, with the connotation of expansionism that “Greater Israel” implies in English) is based on a merger of religious fundamentalism and modern political ethno-nationalism, whereby ancient texts are used to justify a modern military expansionist state.Military invasion attempts into South Lebanon since October 2024, along with recurrent calls for expanding the entity’s border by occupation leaders, have revived contention over long-entrenched Zionist territorial ambitions in the region. The shameless display of a map that engulfs Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia spotted on the sleeves of occupation soldiers is hardly symbolic, nor exclusive to fringe elements of settler society. The concept of ‘Greater Israel’, long dismissed by “Israelis” and their supporters as a conspiracy theory promoted by paranoid Arabs and anti-Semites, verily captures the essence of Zionism as an expansionist settler-colonial movement with biblical, territorial claims that extend from the Nile to the Euphrates.LEFT-RIGHT DIVIDEThere is a common misconception that attributes the expansionist behavior of the Israeli entity to the most extreme factions of its society, represented by ultranationalist settlers. These are the ones who hold beliefs from biblical scriptures, whom are often caught on camera harassing and killing Palestinians, stealing their homes, burning their olive trees, and destroying crops and killing herds, all under the full protection of the Occupation Army (IOF) of course. However, to limit the occupation’s aggressive aspirations to conspicuous right-wing extremists is a misreading that leads to the prevailing tendency to appeal to left-right, or religious-secular, nuances within the Zionist entity. This deceptive framing is especially popular among Western liberals.The public “Israeli” attitude towards its internal affairs does, however, reflect a polarity. The culture is characterized by a religious-secular divide, which involves ongoing debates over the status of religion, the character of the entity as a “Jewish state”, and its territorial borders. This left-right dichotomy exists over a range of internal issues concerned with political and socio-economic questions. However, when it comes to the colonial-expansionist identity of the entity, that dispute most certainly dissolves, and makes no difference to those on the receiving end of its terror.“Israeli” leaders from across the political spectrum have collectively and directly contributed to the military occupation of Palestine, creeping into more territory by the day, in a steady, consistent and systematic manner since the very establishment of the entity. To clarify, it is not only the likes of Daniela Weiss, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich whose aspirations are problematic, and dangerous, and “extreme”.To name just a few, the first Prime Minister of the occupation state, the ‘secular’ David Ben Gurion, who led the largest socialist- Zionist party, was also a chief architect of the 1948 Nakba1. It was Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, the founder of the Labor Party, who occupied the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai desert, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem following the 1967 Six Day War. The most ‘moderate’ of them all, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed as ‘a peacemaker,’ actually accelerated land theft in the West Bank, and when asked, “what is to be done with the Palestinian population?” he responded with a hand gesture motioning to ‘drive them out!’2Most importantly, these leaders did not emerge from a vacuum; they were brought to power by “Israeli” voters, who also showed overwhelming support for the ongoing genocide against Gaza. Back in November 2023, only 3% of Israelis were in favor of a permanent, “unconditional” ceasefire3. The annihilation of Gaza unifies the settler state left and right alike.FROM THE NILE TO THE EUPHRATESThe possibility of establishing a Zionist entity in Uganda, Argentina or the Sinai Peninsula4 was initially considered towards the end of the 19th century by Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism. However, the idea that a Jewish entity must spread across the so-called ‘historic biblical land of the Jews’ in Palestine took precedence.In his 1898 diaries, Herzl mentions a discussion with Max Bodenheimer, another notable figure of the Zionist movement and his close associate, who suggests that a ‘Jewish State’ should extend “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates”5, an idea which Herzl approved to be ‘in part excellent’. In his 1896 pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, Herzl envisions an Israeli entity that would set out as follows: “the northern frontier is to be the mountains facing Cappadocia in Turkiye; the southern, the Suez Canal’6. He also points out that it would serve as a “wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism”7.It’s worth mentioning that Herzl’s legacy still reverberates powerfully across the entity today, to the extent that the Knesset passed the Herzl Law8 as recently as 2004. The Herzl Law makes it mandatory for all Israelis to study his work in order to “structure the state of Israel, its goal and image in accordance with his Zionist vision”.Rabbi Fischmann, a member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine who assisted in drafting “Israel’s” Declaration of Independence, explained at the U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry on 9 July 9, 1947 that “the Promised Land was quite a large one:, from the river of Egypt, up to the Euphrates”, and that “the promise was given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, about 4000 years ago and it was reaffirmed to Moses”9.There is no shortage of examples of Zionist leaders expressing their ambition of establishing a “Greater Israel”, but it is important to keep one thing in mind: The Zionist movement underwent many phases, and Zionist ideologues’ opinions about the exact definition of ‘a greater Israel’ and the ideal delineation of its borders fluctuated throughout the years.ONGOING COLONIZATION OF PALESTINEGiven the constraining circumstances surrounding Zionist colonization in its early days10, Zionist expediency understood that to gain leverage, a temporary compromise between its grandiose territorial ambitions, and its immediate instrumental needs, was required.The Zionist movement was willing to come to terms with less territory at first, in exchange for a ‘state’ with political sovereignty11. However, its determination to seize more when a ripe opportunity came along was never abandoned, as a comparison of historic and present-day maps reveals.In 1948, the Zionist state stole 78% of Palestine. Ever since, new rounds of aggression and expansion have been implemented in an unfettered manner12. Since 1967, 100,000 hectares of Palestinian lands have been stolen13. In the first months of the genocide in Gaza alone, Israel stole 1,270 hectares of Palestinian land14.In fact, records of evidence show that through exercising patience, the colonial occupation has patiently been playing the long game, gradually bringing more Palestinian land under its control by the day. To claim otherwise – that Israel will remain indefinitely satisfied with dominating only a fragment of the land that it maintains belongs to the Jewish people – would be absurd15. In fact, this was accurately expressed in 1937 by Ben Gurion, a central figure in the founding phase of the colonial entity, who also served as its first Prime Minister for almost 15 years “a partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning…16’’, and “we shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them”17, implying that Israel should never settle for any limitations concerning its borders. This is precisely why, up until the present day, Israel has failed to define its borders.THE LITANI RIVERIf we consider our current situation, one year into the genocide in Gaza, Israel is attempting to create a “buffer zone” in South Lebanon, something it has incessantly attempted to do since its inception: in 1948, as well as 1978, 1982-2000 and 2006. Amid its current inability to deter Hezbollah from launching attacks against it in support of Gaza, Israel has been seeking to change the status quo by pushing the resistance away from Lebanon’s southern border, and beyond the Litani specifically. Historically, the Litani River has always held strategic importance for Zionist ambitions.The Litani, the longest river in Lebanon, stretches 170 kilometers southward from the Beqaa Valley, flows along the eastern front of Lebanon’s mountain range, and diverts sharply westward towards the Mediterranean Sea, north of Tyre. Historical documents revealing Zionist plans to take control of it date back as far as prior to the establishment of the entity. Its importance is due to it being a vital water source, along with the fact that its surroundings are of military-strategic value.The head of the World Zionist Organization, who would later become the occupation state’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, put forward a map for a proposed Jewish colony at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The map he presented fell short of the land guaranteed in accordance with ‘God’s Promise’, from the Nile to the Euphrates18. Rather, the proposed borders were drawn according to geopolitical calculations to dominate water resources in the region, incorporating:“First the whole of Mandated Palestine … secondly, southern Lebanon, including the towns of Tyre and Sidon, the headwaters of the River Jordan on Mount Hermon and the southern portion of the Litani River… thirdly, on the Syrian front, the Golan Heights, including the town of Quneitra, the River Yarmuk and El-Himmeh Hot Springs … fourthly, on the Jordan front, the whole of the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea and the Eastern Highlands up to the outskirts of Amman, running southwards along the Hejaz Railway to the Gulf of Aqaba, leaving Jordan with no access to the sea; fifthly, on the Egyptian front, from EI-Arish on the Mediterranean in a straight southerly direction to the Gulf of Aqaba”.19The priority of accessing water resources was also articulated in a 1919 letter Weizmann sent to David Lloyd George, Prime Minister and head of the British delegation, in which he wrote:“The whole economic future of Palestine is dependent upon its water supply for irrigation and for electric power, and the water supply must mainly be derived from the slopes of Mount Hermon [Golan Heights], from the headwaters of the Jordan, and from the Litani River in Lebanon”It wasn’t until 1967 that Israel would partially fulfill its aspiration of controlling more territory and dominating water resources by occupying the Syrian Golan Heights, East of the Jordan River, as well as the Sea of Galilee, also known as ‘Lake Tiberias,’ —but not the Litani River. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was quoted saying that “Israel had achieved provisionally satisfying frontiers, with the exception of those with Lebanon.” The idea of occupying South Lebanon was enthusiastically adopted by Moshe Dayan as well as Ben Gurion20, and was also referred to in the diaries of Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett21.Ben Gurion’s conviction of an Israel with the Litani as its northern border was noted in a book he published in 191822. This idea would remain an essential part of his vision for the entity for years to come23, as would the idea of redrawing the borders by fragmenting Lebanon to allow for the establishment of a Christian state with with the Litani as its southern border managed by ‘Israel’.Zionist plans to annex the region or expand its control over it are not a thing of the past – on the contrary, they always tend to resurface. Established in 2024, a group called “The South Lebanon Movement” has been advocating for the colonization of South Lebanon24.HEGEMONY THROUGH DISRUPTIONZionist expansionism does not only manifest as direct occupation and control of territory. When the entity abstains from or is unable to claim land, it makes use of other cost- effective tools to spread its hegemony.This was best articulated in a notorious article that recently resurfaced25 entitled “A Strategy For Israel In The Nineteen Eighties” published in 1982 in the quarterly Kivunim – a journal of the Department of Information of the World Zionist Organization that encapsulates the Zionist ideology. The piece was written by journalist and senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official Oded Yinon, who precisely advocated for a strategic divide-and-rule plan to fragment the region in Israel’s favor:“Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short-term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today”26.This describes, in great detail, the current track on which the Levant is heading, confirming the premise of this strategy which was laid out forty years ago. More recently in 2002, then- former president Netanyahu testified before US Congress in fervent favor of “taking out Saddam” by invading and destroying Iraq. This was not about regional peace — remember that a large part of Iraq is contained in “Greater Israel” — the goal was fragmenting and weakening all nations contained within the land of “God’s promise”. Therefore rather than being cohesive nations, the fragmentation of these historically diverse states into sectarian and ethnic groupings, where sub- state identities are exacerbated and mired in conflict, makes them more vulnerable to “Israeli” hegemony, and less capable of projecting power and coordinating action against it. This creates the ideal grounds for submission to the entity’s greater plans. In that case, even if a “Greater Israel” isn’t physically achieved, it will at the very least still be capable of imposing its supremacy over the region.CONCLUSIONIt requires no extensive amount of research to identify from “Israel’s” behavioral pattern, along with statements issued by its officials, that its appetite for expansion is far from quenched. We are witnessing this appetite in real-time. The trajectory of this entity, since its illegitimate establishment in 1948, is self-evident to those of us who have been experiencing its brutality daily. It makes no difference whether it is driven by biblical scriptures associated with the return of “God’s chosen people to the promised land” and the fulfillment of messianic prophecies, or rooted in pragmatic secularism, linked its current territorial occupation, conspires to annex more land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, or conquer the entire area, from the Nile to the Euphrates, the supremacy engrained in its very foundation makes it a danger that cannot be overstated. Equally dangerous are the misleading attempts to dismiss awareness of its territorial ambitions and muddy its imperialistic nature.Failure to address the extent to which these expansionist ideas are inscribed indelibly in their settler-colonial project will have detrimental implications. Even the so-called “two- state solution”, always a distraction from recognizing the fundamental illegality of the occupation, is an illusionary mantra that has been rejected by the “Israeli” regime itself, which is colonizing more land by the day with full support from the West. This support for “Israel’s” manifest destiny is echoed in the shocking 2019 presidential declaration that the Syrian Golan Heights, invaded by Israel in 1967, were to be recognized as part of the Zionist state. As sitting senior ministers within the occupation government openly declare their intent to invade and colonize Lebanon and Syria, what is to stop their US-backed armies from furthering their goals of occupying the entire region from Jordan to Iraq?When IOF soldiers wear a “Greater Israel” badge on their uniform, signaling their aggressive intentions towards the whole region, we must believe them.REFERENCES Farber, S. (2020). A Zionist State at Any Cost. Jacobin. Retrieved from: https:// jacobin.com/2020/04/david-ben-gurion-state-at-any-cost-review ↩ Shipler, K. (1979). Israel Bars Rabin From Relating ‘48 Eviction of Arabs. New YorkTimes. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/23/archives/israel- bars-rabin-from-relating-48-eviction-of-arabs-sympathy-for.html ↩ JP Staff (202). Most Israelis support humanitarian pause, but only if hostages released – poll.The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved from: https://www.jpost.com/israel- news/article-772623 ↩ Erakat, N. (2019). Justice For Some: Law and Question in Palestine. Standford University Press. ↩ Herzl,T. (1960).The complete diaries ofTheodor Herzl (R. Patai, Ed.; H. Zohn, Trans.). Herzl Press. ↩ United Nations General Assembly Thirty Second Session (1977). New York. Retrieved from: https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/nl7/803/48/pdf/nl780348.pdf ↩ Herzl, T. (1896) The Jewish State. Leipzig and Wien: M. Breitenstein’s Verlags- Buchhandlung ↩ Abuhazeira, O. (2007). Herzl Day. YNet News. Retrieved from: https://www. ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3393335,00.html ↩ United Nations General Assembly (1947). Special Committee on Palestine: Verbatim Record of the Twenty Fourth Meeting. Jerusalem Palestine. Retrieved from: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-210700/ ↩ Sayegh, F. (1965). Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. Palestine Liberation Organization. Retrieved from: https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/ DOC12_scans/12.zionist.colonialism.palestine.1965.pdf ↩ Galnoor, I. (2009).The Zionist Debates on Partition (1919-1947). Israel Studies, 14(2), 74–87. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30245854?read- now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents ↩ Haddad, M. (2020). Palestine and Israel: Mapping an Annexation. Al Jazeera. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/26/palestine-and-israel- mapping-an-annexation ↩ Israel’s Occupation: 50Years of Dispossession (2017). Amnesty International. Retrieved from: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel- occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/ ↩ Imbert, L. (2024). Israel grabs largest tract of West Bank land in three decades, Le Monde. Retrieved from: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/07/06/ israel-grabs-largest-tract-of-west-bank-land-in-three-decades_6676844_4.html ↩ Sayegh, F. (1965). Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. Palestine Liberation Organization. Retrieved from: https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/ DOC12_scans/12.zionist.colonialism.palestine.1965.pdf ↩ Bar-Zohar, M. (1977). Ben-Gurion: A Biography. NewYork: Delacorte Press. ↩ Chomsky, N. (1984). The Fateful Triangle: the United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Montreal: Black Rose Books. ↩ Sayegh, F. (1965). Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. Palestine Liberation Organization. Retrieved from: https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/ DOC12_scans/12.zionist.colonialism.palestine.1965.pdf ↩ United Nations General Assembly Thirty Second Session (1977). New York. Retrieved from: https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/nl7/803/48/pdf/nl780348.pdf ↩ Israel in Lebanon (2009). Al Jazeera. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera. com/news/2009/8/12/israel-in-lebanon ↩ Rokach, L. (1985) Israel’s SacredTerrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents. Belmont, Massachusetts: Association of Arab American University Graduates ↩ Ben Gurion, D. & Ben Zvi,Y. (1918). EretzYisrael in the Past and Present. New York: Poale Zion Palestine Committee. ↩ Shlaim, A. (2001).The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. W. W. Norton & Company ↩ OLJ (2024). Who is this ‘small group’ of Israelis who dream of colonizing southern Lebanon? L’Orient Le Jour. Retrieved from: https://today.lorientlejour. com/article/1410033/who-is-this-small-group-of-israelis-who-dream-of-colonizing- southern-lebanon.html ↩ Matoi, E. (2024). Greater Israel: an Ongoing Expansion Plan for the Middle East and North Africa. Middle East Political and Economic Institute. Retrieved from: https://mepei.com/greater-israel-an-ongoing-expansion-plan-for-the-middle- east-and-north-africa/ ↩ Yinon, O. (1982). A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. Kivunim. Retrieved from: https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/A_strategy_for_Israel_in_the_Nineteen_ Eighties.pdf ↩ "
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "Ziad Rahbani and the Art of Creative Rebellion",
"author" : "Céline Semaan",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/ziad-rahbani-creative-rebellion",
"date" : "2025-07-28 07:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_for-EIP-ziad-rahbani.jpg",
"excerpt" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.",
"content" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.Ziad Rahbani’s passing marks more than the end of a brilliant life—it marks the closing of a chapter in the cultural history of our region. His funeral wasn’t just a ceremony, it was a collective reckoning; crowds following his exit from the hospital to the cemetery. The streets knew what many governments tried to forget: that he gave voice to the people’s truths, to our frustrations, our absurdities, our grief, and our undying hope for justice. Yet he died as an unsung hero.Born into a family that shaped the musical soul of Lebanon, Ziad could have taken the easy path of replication. Instead, he shattered the mold. From his early plays like Sahriyye and Nazl el-Surour, he upended the elitism of classical Arabic theatre by placing the working class, the absurdity of war, and the contradictions of society at the center of his work. He spoke like the people spoke. He made art in the language of the taxi driver, the student, the mother waiting for news of her son.In his film work Film Ameriki Tawil, Ziad used satire not only as critique, but as rebellion. He exposed the rot of sectarian politics in Lebanon with surgical precision, never sparing anyone, including the leftist circles he moved in. He saw clearly: that political purity was a myth, and liberation required uncomfortable truths. His work, deeply rooted in class consciousness, refused to glorify any side of a war that tore his country apart.And yet, Ziad Rahbani never lost his clarity on Palestine. While others wavered, diluted their positions, or folded into diplomacy, Ziad remained steadfast. His support for the Palestinian struggle was not an aesthetic position—it was a political and ethical commitment. And he did so not as an outsider or savior, but as someone who understood that our futures are intertwined. That the liberation of Palestine is integral to the liberation of Lebanon. That anti-sectarianism and anti-Zionism are not contradictions, but extensions of each other.He brought jazz into Arabic music not as a novelty, but as a defiant act of cultural fusion—proof that our identities are not fixed, but fluid, diasporic, ever-evolving. He blurred the lines between Western musical forms and Arabic lyricism with intention, not mimicry. His collaborations with his mother, the legendary Fairuz, carried the weight of generational dialogue, but his own voice always broke through—wry, melancholic, grounded in the everyday.Ziad taught us that being a revolutionary doesn’t require a uniform or a slogan. It requires listening. It requires holding complexity, laughing in the face of despair, and making room for joy even when the world is on fire. He reminded us that culture is the deepest infrastructure of any resistance movement. He refused to be sanitized, censored, or simplified.As we mourn him, we also inherit his clarity. For artists, for organizers, for thinkers: Ziad Rahbani gave us a blueprint. Create without permission. Tell the truth. Fight for Palestine without compromising your own roots. And never forget that the people will always hear what is real.He was, and will always be, a compass for creative rebellion."
}
,
{
"title" : "Saul Williams: Nothing is Just a Song",
"author" : "Saul Williams, Collis Browne",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/saul-williams-interview",
"date" : "2025-07-21 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_SaulWilliams_Shot_7_0218.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.",
"content" : "Collis Browne: Is all music and art really political?Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.Even now, we are reading the writings of Palestinian poets in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention those who are part of the diaspora, who are charting their feelings and intimate experiences while living through a genocide. These works of art are all politically charged because they are charged with a reality that is fully suppressed by oppressive networks and powers that control them.Shakespeare’s work was always political. He found a way to speak about power to the face of power, knowing they would be in the audience. But also found a way to play with and talk to the “groundlings,” the common people who were in the audience as well.Collis Browne: Was there a moment when you realized that your music could be used as a tool of resistance?Saul Williams: Yeah, I was in third grade, about eight or nine years old. I had been cast in a play in my elementary school. I loved the process of not only performing, but of sitting around the table and breaking down what the language meant and what the objective and the psychology of the character was, and what that meant during the time it was written. I came home and told my parents that I wanted to be an actor when I grew up. My father had the typical response: “I’ll support you as an actor if you get a law degree.” My mother responded by saying, “You should do your next school report on Paul Robeson, he was an actor and a lawyer.”So I did my next school report on Paul Robeson. And what I discovered was that here was an African American man, born in 1898, who had come to an early realization as an actor that the messages of the films he was being cast in—and he was a huge star—went against his own beliefs, his own anti-colonial and anti-imperial beliefs. In the 1930s, he started talking about why we needed to invest in independent cinema. In 1949, during the McCarthy era, he had his passport taken from him so he could no longer travel outside of the US, because he refused to acknowledge that the enemies of the US were his enemies as well. He felt there was no reason Black people should be signing up to fight for the US Empire when they were going home and getting lynched.In 1951, he presented a mandate to the UN called “We Charge Genocide.” In it he charged the US Government with the genocide of African Americans because of the white mobs who were lynching Black Americans on a regular basis. [Editor’s note: the petition charges the US Government with genocide through the endorsement of both racism and “monopoly capitalism,” without which “the persistent, constant, widespread, institutionalized commission of the crime of genocide would be impossible.”] When Robeson met with President Truman, Truman said, “I’d like to respond, but there’s an election coming up, so I have to be careful.”Paul Robeson sang songs of working-class people, songs that trade unionists sang, songs that miners sang, songs that all types of workers sang across the world. He identified with the workers and with the working class, regardless of his fame. He was ridiculed by the American Government and even had his passport revoked for his activism. At that early age, I learned that you could sing songs that could get you labeled as an enemy of the state.I grew up in Newburgh, New York, which is about an hour upstate from New York City. One of my neighbors would often come sing at my father’s church. At the time, I did not understand why my dad would allow this white guy with his guitar or banjo to come sing at our church when we had an amazing gospel choir. I couldn’t understand why we were singing these school songs with this dude. When I finally asked my parents, they said, “You have to understand that Pete—they were talking about Pete Seeger—is responsible for popularizing some of the songs you sing in school.” He wrote songs like “If I Had a Hammer,” and he too was blacklisted by the US government because of the songs he chose to sing and the people he chose to sing them for, and the people he chose to sing them with. I learned at a very early age that music and art were full of politics. Enough politics to get you labeled as the enemy of the state. Enough politics to get your passport taken, or to be imprisoned.I was also learning about my parents’ peers, artists whom they loved and adored. Artists like Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni, all from the Black Arts Movement. Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka made a statement when they started the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem that said essentially that all art should serve a function, and that function should be to liberate Black minds.It is from that movement that hip-hop was born. I was lucky enough to witness the birth of hip-hop. At first, it was playful, it was fun, but by the mid to late 1980s, it began finding its voice with groups like Public Enemy, KRS-One, Queen Latifa, Rakim, and the Jungle Brothers. These are groups that started using and expressing Black Liberation politics in the music, which uplifted it, made it sound better, and made it hit harder. The first gangster rap was that… when it was gangster, when it was directly challenging the country it was being born in.As a teenager, I identified as a rapper and an actor. I would argue with school kids who insisted, “It’s not even music. They’re just talking.” I would have to defend hip-hop as music, sometimes even to my parents, who found the language crass. But when I played artists like KRS-One and Public Enemy for my parents, they said, “Oh, I see what they’re doing here.”When Public Enemy rapped, “Elvis was a hero to most, But he never meant shit to me you see, Straight up racist that sucker was, Simple and plain, Motherfuck him and John Wayne, ‘Cause I’m Black and I’m proud, I’m ready and hyped plus I’m amped, Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps,” my parents were like Amen. They understood. They understood why I needed to blast that music in my room 24/7. They understood.When the music spoke to me in that way, suddenly I could pull off moves on the dance floor like doing a flip that I couldn’t do before. That’s the power of music. That’s power embedded in music. That’s why Fela Kuti said that music is the weapon of the future. And, of course, there’s Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. What’s Billie Holiday’s most memorable song? “Strange Fruit.” That voice connected, was speaking directly to the times she was living in. It transcended the times, where to this day, when you hear this song and you understand that the “strange fruit” hanging from Southern trees are Black people who have been lynched, you understand how the power of the voice, when you connect it to something that is charged with the reality of the times, takes on a greater shape.Collis Browne: Public Enemy broke open so much. I grew up in Toronto, in a mostly white community, but I was into some of the bigger American hip-hop acts who were coming out. Public Enemy rose to a new level. Before them, we were only connecting with punk and hardcore music as the music of rebellion.Saul Williams: Public Enemy laid down the groundwork for what hip-hop is: “the voice of the voiceless.” It was only after Public Enemy that you saw the emergence of huge groups in France, Germany, Bulgaria, Egypt, and across the world. There were big acts before them. Run DMC, for instance, but when Public Enemy came out, marginalized groups heard their music and said, “That’s for us. Yes, that’s for us.” It was immediately understood as music of resistance.Collis Browne: What have you seen or listened to out in the world that has a clear political goal, but has been appropriated and watered down?Saul Williams: We can stay on Public Enemy for that. Under Secretary Blinken, Chuck D became a US Global Music Ambassador during the genocide in Gaza. There are photos of him standing beside Secretary Blinken, accepting that role, while understanding that the US has always used music as a cultural propaganda tool to express soft power. I remember learning about how the US uses this “soft power” when I was working in the mid-2000s with a Swiss composer, who has now passed, named Thomas Kessler. He wrote a symphony based on one of my books, Said the Shotgun to the Head, and we were performing it with the Cologne, Germany symphony orchestra, when I heard from the head of the orchestra that, in fact, their main financier was the US Government through the CIA.During the Cold War, it was crucial for the American Government to put money into the arts throughout Western Europe to try to express this idea of “freedom,” as opposed to what was happening in the Eastern (Communist) Bloc. So it was a long time between when the US Government started enlisting musicians and other artists in their propaganda campaigns and when I encountered this information.There’s a documentary called Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, which talks about how the US Government used (uses) music and musicians to co-opt movements and propagate the idea of American freedom and democracy outside the US in the hope of winning over the citizens of other countries without them even realizing that so much of that art is there to question the system itself, not to celebrate it. Unfortunately, there are situations in which an artist’s work is co-opted to be used as propaganda, and the artist buys into it. They become indoctrinated, and you realize that we’re all susceptible to the possibility of taking that bait."
}
,
{
"title" : "The Culture of Artificial Intelligence",
"author" : "Sinead Bovell, Céline Semaan",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/sinead-bovell-on-ai-artifial-intelligence",
"date" : "2025-07-20 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/sinead-bovell-headshot.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Céline Semaan: It is being reported that AI will make humans dumber than ever, that it is here to rule the world, and to subjugate us all by bringing on a climate apocalypse. Being an AI and tech expert, how can you help people better understand AI as a phenomenon that will impact us but that we shouldn’t necessarily fear?",
"content" : "Céline Semaan: It is being reported that AI will make humans dumber than ever, that it is here to rule the world, and to subjugate us all by bringing on a climate apocalypse. Being an AI and tech expert, how can you help people better understand AI as a phenomenon that will impact us but that we shouldn’t necessarily fear?Sinead Bovell: It depends on where you are… in the Global North, and particularly in the US, perspectives on artificial intelligence and advanced technologies are more broadly negative. When you look at regions in the Global South, when you look at regions in Asia, AI is seen in a much more positive light. Their societies tend to focus on the benefits new technology can bring and what it can do for their quality of life. The social media ecosystem thrives on negative content, but it really does depend on where you are in the world as to how negatively you’re going to view AI. When it comes to the actual fears and the threats themselves, most of them have some validity. Humans could become less intelligent over time if they’re overly reliant on artificial intelligence systems, and the data does show that AI can erode core cognitive capacities.For example, most of us can’t read maps anymore. If you are in the military and your satellite gets knocked down and you need to understand your coordinates, that might be a problem. But for the average person, not reading a map has allowed us to optimize our time; we can get from A to B much more quickly. What do we fill the time with that AI gives us back with? That’s a really important question.Another important question is: How do we purposely engineer cognitive friction into the learning and thinking environment so we don’t erode that core capability? That’s not something that is just going to happen. We are humans, we take the path of least resistance, like all evolutionary species do. If you look at the printing press, the chaotic abundance of information eventually led to the scientific method and the peer review. Educators, academics, scientists, and creators needed to figure out a way to sort through the valuable information and the nonsense, and that led to more cognitive friction. Those pathways haven’t been developed yet for AI. How we use and assimilate AI depends on the actions we take when it comes to the climate apocalypse, for instance. As of now, how AI uses water and energy is nothing short of a nightmare. However, it’s not really AI in isolation. It’s our social media habits in general. When you look at them in aggregate and globally, our digital habits and patterns aren’t good for the climate in general. And then AI just exacerbates all of that.AI is not a technology that you are going to tap into and tap out of. It’s not like Uber where maybe you don’t use the app because you would prefer to bike, and that’s the choice that you make. AI is a general-purpose technology, and it’s important that we get that distinction, because general-purpose technologies, over time, become infrastructure, like the steam engine, electricity, and the internet. We rebuild our societies on top of them, and it’s important that we see it that way, so people don’t just unsubscribe out of protest. That only impedes their ability to make sure they keep up with the technology, and give adequate feedback and critiques of the technology.Céline Semaan: I recently saw you on stage and heard your response to a question about whether AI and its ramifications could be written into an episode of the TV show Black Mirror. Would you be able to repeat the answer you gave?Sinead Bovell: The stories we see and read about AI are usually dystopian. Arguably, there are choices we continue to make over and over again that we know will lead to negative outcomes, yet we don’t make different choices. To me, that’s the real Black Mirror episode… can we rely on ourselves? In some circumstances, we continually pick the more harmful thing. Most of the big challenges we face are complicated but not unsolvable. Even with climate, a lot of the solutions exist, and actually most of them are grounded in technology. What isn’t happening is the choice to leverage them, or the choice to subsidize them so they become more accessible, or the choice to even believe in them. That scares me a lot more than a particular use case of technology. Most of the biggest challenges we face are down to human choices, and we’re not making the right choices.Céline Semaan: Are you afraid of AI taking over the world and rendering all of our jobs useless? How do you see that?Sinead Bovell: There’s AI taking over the world, and that’s AI having its own desire and randomly rising up out of the laptop or out of some robot. I’m not necessarily concerned about that. You can’t say anything is a 0% chance, right? We don’t know. There are so many things you can’t say with 100% certainty. I mean, are we alone the universe? It’s really hard to prove or disprove those types of things. Where I stand on that is… sure allocate research dollars to a select group of scientists who can work on that problem. However, I am quite concerned about the impact AI is going to have on the workforce. We can see the destruction of certain jobs coming. It’s going to happen quickly, and we’re not preparing for it properly. Every general-purpose technology has led to automation and reconfiguration of the shape of the workforce. Let’s look at the first industrial revolution which lasted from approximately 1760-1840. If we were to zoom in on people working in agriculture, by the end of the 19th Century, around 70-80% of those people were doing something different. That is an astounding change. People had jobs, they just looked very different from working on the farm. But what if that happens in seven years rather than 80 years? That’s what scares me. I think the transition will be quite chaotic because it’s going to be quite quick, but it doesn’t have to be. History isn’t a great predictor of the future, but it does give you a lot of examples of what you don’t need to do again.The reason the industrial revolution turned out to be a good thing in the end, in terms of the life we all live, is that, for instance, we have MRIs and don’t have to have our blood drained to see if we’re sick. But people were just left to fend for themselves. It was chaos, and it turned into this kind of every person for themselves. Kind of figure it out. Get to the city. Bring your family. Don’t bring your family. It was really chaotic. How are we going to not repeat that? I don’t know if we are putting the security measures in place to make sure people are protecting that transition.The most obvious one to me is health care in the United States. I don’t know the exact number, maybe it’s around 60% of people, but don’t quote me on that, are reliant on their job for health care. That’s where their insurance comes from. What is going to happen to their insurance if their job goes away or if they transition to being self-employed? How do we help people transition? People don’t even dare go down that road, but those are the types of conversations that need to happen.Céline Semaan: In 10 years from now, will we look at AI as just another super calculator. And we will be asking the same questions that we are asking today, meaning that the change we’re seeking is not necessarily technological, but philosophical and cultural. How do you see that?Sinead Bovell: AI will look like much more of a philosophical, cultural, and social transition than solely a technological one. This is true of a lot of general-purpose technologies.The inventions in technology lead to how we organize our societies and how we govern them. If you look at the printing press, it led to a secular movement and gave power to that engine. You get big social, philosophical, cultural changes, and revolutions in society when you experience this scale of technical disruption. I think we will look back on the AI inflection point as one of the most pivotal transitions in human history in the past couple 100 years. I would say it’s going to be as disruptive as the printing press and maybe steam engine combined. And we made it through both of those. There was a lot of turmoil and chaos, but we did make it through both of those.We are a much more vibrant, healthy society now. We live longer and, relatively speaking, we have much more equality. There is a path where it works out, but we have to be making the decisions to make that happen. However, it’s not practical that a subset of the population makes the decisions on behalf of everyone. And that’s why I think it’s so important for people to get in the game and not see AI as this really technical device or technology, but instead, as a big social, cultural and philosophical transition. Your lived experience qualifies you to participate in these conversations; there’s nobody who can carry the weight of this on their own."
}
]
}
