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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.
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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" : "Seeds of Chronic Hope",
"author" : "Corinne Jabbour",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/seeds-of-chronic-hope",
"date" : "2026-03-04 12:06:00 -0500",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Heirloom%20Corn%20at%20Buzuruna%20Juzuruna.jpg",
"excerpt" : "",
"content" : "Gathering in BeirutOn the 22nd of November 2025, a day which coincided with Lebanon’s Independence day, we gathered with a crowd at a venue facing the Beirut Port silos, which still stand half demolished, a constant reminder that our crises are in fact not tragic misfortunes, but carefully designed and manufactured atrocities. We gathered that day for the public launch of the Agroecology Coalition in Lebanon (ACL). Agroecology is not just a science or farming practices, but the movement calling for food justice and sovereignty.Mathematics of PredationThe global food system today demands that we forfeit our farmers’ rights and autonomy, our people’s dignity, health, and wellbeing, and the resilience and abundance of the environment we are a part of, all to achieve its goals. It is not driven by hatred for farmers or hatred for the environment and its people, but rather simply by the cold mathematics of this economic system that do not take things like justice, dignity, sovereignty or the health of the ecosystem into account. As a result, they are methodically sacrificed when the outcome is more profit, because this system’s one and only goal is: Ever increasing profit for ever increasing capital accumulation, no matter the cost, a fact proven yet again by today’s colonial wars, and the re-escalation of Israeli aggressions and land invasion in Lebanon.Green Colonialism in LebanonThe World Bank’s hundreds of millions of dollars in “recovery and reconstruction” loans arrive alongside efforts to redirect our production further toward export. New laws compromise seed sovereignty, threaten our cannabis heritage varieties, and surrender the autonomy of our fishermen. Layer by layer we are stripped of food sovereignty and pushed deeper into hegemonic global markets - green colonialism advancing under the banner of modernization. Our news channels are filled with the echoes of our politicians promising wealth and prosperity through global markets. These promises ignore the reality that our country’s one airport, two ports, and limited land crossings can - and have been - paralyzed by Israel within hours. They forget what happened to our imports and exports during Covid, or after the 2019 currency collapse. We grow thirsty crops that do not fill our needs but fulfill the desires of the Global North, and we send them our produce and within it our water, our labour, and the health of our land. Then to complete the dance, our government ships in food grown in poorer soil on distant land, drowning our local markets and driving our farmers into the arms of export traders, or pushing them to abandon farming and migrate to the city… As our Gibran once wrote, “Woe to a nation that eats what it does not grow!”The Trap of Conventional AgricultureOur farmers are coerced into buying hybrid seeds, synthetic chemical fertilizers, biocides (pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, rodenticides…), and other inputs at prices controlled by multinational corporations and their local allies. They sell their crops at prices controlled by traders in the wholesale markets, prices so low they barely cover their costs!“Being a farmer is like being in love with a bad woman, the whole world will tell you she is bad but all you see is the beauty in her!” This was the reply of Georges, a seasoned farmer from a mountain village in the Chouf, when I asked him why he still chooses to be a farmer one disappointing season after another. As we walked through his terraces he told me some stories: “We used to sprinkle grains on the snow, to help the birds through the harsher days of winter… My father would tell us to skip harvesting some of the fruits on the high branches of the trees, he would say that those were the share of the birds from this season!” How did capitalism succeed at slowly eroding our worldview, where we shared our harvest with the birds? How far can this love for the land and its abundance carry our increasingly burdened growers? How long can they stand in the face of the scourge of the industrial model of food production that has invaded our way of life?Our farmers are stuck in a rat race, bullied into finding ways to intensify production with every season. Instead of fair distribution where farmers get their fair share, the only choice this system offers them is: “We will take the largest share of the profit generated by your hard labour, but if you keep finding ways to produce more, the small percentage we allow you to keep might become enough for you.” The outcome is farmers under tremendous pressure to produce more, better, and faster, and that intensification requires more and more synthetic chemicals!As for people who are choosing what to eat, they find themselves with limited choices, mostly laced with toxins, because within this system, clean and nutritious food has become a luxury! Beyond human health, these intensive production methods and long-distance transportation are crumbling our entire ecosystem and massively contributing to climate change, the consequences of which we are all experiencing, from unpredictable and extreme weather, to raging wildfires and prolonged droughts. Our farmers are among those paying the highest price for this change!A System of OppressionThis system, in complicity with our local varieties of comprador aspiring billionaires, continues to turn every right that we have, every care we offer each other, every abundance we receive from nature, into commodities to be bought and sold for profit. Today’s realities in the Global South are living testament to the price that the many have to pay in service of the few, and we are the many!We reject attempts to depoliticize food, we reject attempts to sanitize this predatory dynamic with performative gestures and token measures. The charades of charity and benevolence have long expired. These tools of neo-colonialism are now seen for what they are, instruments of oppression and hegemony. We do not need an invitation to drown further in debt through loans offered under the guise of development and recovery by the same powers that fund, arm and enable the Zionist colonial project that brings on that destruction. This system has exposed itself through its oppression and subjugation of nature, women, and colonized peoples. Through military complexes, genocides, sanctions, poverty, and famine, it leaves devastation in the wake of its hollow promises of prosperity through progress and development.Tangible AlternativesWhat brought us together that day in Beirut was not just a common perspective on the root of the so-called “crises”, but a shared conviction that this system is dying, and that real, tangible, solid alternatives already exist. Alternatives that spring from the ground and require change on all levels, including the political level. Alternatives that converge the world into ways of life that prioritize human wellbeing, dignity, and harmony with the planet that is our home.For the food system, one such alternative is Agroecology, the fundamental pillar of food sovereignty. It is not just a set of farming practices or the science behind them, agroecology is a social movement that places the autonomy of small scale farmers at its center, embraces traditional knowledge, and adopts democratic and horizontal methods for governance and knowledge transfer. It is a roadmap, not for superficial reform, but for radical transformation from exploitation to sovereignty. We need to liberate our commons, our seeds, our water, our land, our spaces, our festivals, our ancestral knowledge and worldview. We need to meet our growers, trust and support them. We need to rebuild resilience into our food system in preparation for the inevitable changes that have already begun to impact our food production. We need to decentralize our seed banks, our power sources, and our decision making. Systems such as seed harvesting and propagation have been managed collectively by farmers ever since agriculture was born in our fertile crescent, it is our treasured pool of biodiversity that should not be handed over to corporations. Intellectual property rights over seeds are the equivalent of visiting the ruins of Baalbek, installing a gate at the entrance, and claiming that the ruins are now yours because of that final modification! The absurdity of this system is not lost on us.The time has come to reclaim food, health, ecosystem, and lives with dignity, for ALL people, not SOME people, as rights and not as commodities for sale! The time has come to decolonize our food, to delink ourselves from this parasitic system that has been bleeding us dry for decades, and will not stop until it starves the world, and the last bird on the last tree goes silent.We gathered that day, not for romantic ideals, but a concrete political project, a vision, and a battle for liberation that we do not wage alone. We are part of a global and widespread movement that includes farmers, peasants, and peoples everywhere, all clearly and loudly united in their categorical demand for their fundamental right to food sovereignty!Chronic HopeAfter the day had ended, with smiles, inspiration, and a warm atmosphere of camaraderie, while walking away from that venue and passing by the remains of the silos, the walk took me back 5 years, where I took those same steps after the Beirut Port explosion. I had been walking and looking around at the destruction with tears blurring my vision and silently rolling down my cheeks. I remember looking down at the ground and finding seeds in the corner where the sidewalk meets the shoulder of the road. The pods on the trees had popped open at the pressure of the explosion, spreading their seeds everywhere along with the shattered glass and rubble. I couldn’t help smiling through my tears, smiling and thinking: “We are those seeds, and we will never stop bringing life back into the death that is brought upon us.”"
}
,
{
"title" : "When Sufien Met Nefisa: An Excerpt from 'Paradiso 17' by Hannah Lillith Assadi",
"author" : "Hannah Lillith Assadi",
"category" : "excerpts",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/when-sufien-met-nefisa",
"date" : "2026-03-03 11:26:00 -0500",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Assadi.jacket.jpg",
"excerpt" : "This is an excerpt from Paradiso 17, a new novel by Hannah Lillith Assadi, which maps the journey of a Palestinian boy, Sufien, through exile from his homeland to the Middle East, Europe, and then America. This particular moment is from his time in Kuwait and his first experience with young love. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.",
"content" : "This is an excerpt from Paradiso 17, a new novel by Hannah Lillith Assadi, which maps the journey of a Palestinian boy, Sufien, through exile from his homeland to the Middle East, Europe, and then America. This particular moment is from his time in Kuwait and his first experience with young love. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.What Sufien always remembered about Kuwait was the voice of the Gulf, that rolling tongue, languorous and all-knowing, like the voice of the divine.The new house, his father’s, recently built by the government, stood alone. Sufien was accustomed to stone walls, stone ceilings, the musty smell of old buildings. This place was echoey, almost alien in its bigness. The most unfamiliar part was its modern electricity. Sufien had been raised by candlelight. Walking outside and looking up, he saw the constellations spread out like cities in every direction. Sufien had never seen a night like this. It was so dry, and he was so thirsty. This was the loneliest part of the desert: the clarity of the sky. There was no blanket. No hills, no trees. The land was just exposed to the beyond. Sometimes Sufien could hear the din of some distant party carried across the dunes, which made him think, maybe that better place is just there. What he learned in time, though, was that the desert carried sounds for miles. By the time that happier gathering reached his ear, it was just a ghost. What he missed again, what he missed forever, was the camp—that camp at the end of the world back in Syria. And now all there was in the night after all of his little brothers and sisters were asleep—there were seven of them now—and after even his parents had fallen asleep, was Sufien, alone, trying to shut his eyes despite the moan of the wind in the sand. He had stayed up with the night from a very young age, and always would. Night was the texture of his soul.There were other problems for Sufien in Kuwait. The schoolmaster belittled his Palestinian dialect, and made him sit apart from the other students. This sense of deprivation only made Sufien more willful. So he conquered algebra. Sufien understood even then that math was the only language which had completely evaded human evil even if it might be used to forward it. Once it was clear he had excelled beyond any other pupil, studying calculus by the equivalent of the eighth grade, he looked for other pathways to excellence. None of the other Kuwaiti pupils could speak English fluently, for instance, nor had anyone else memorized as many verses of the Quran. None except Nefisa.Nefisa was from Haifa, a girl of the sea, not the Gulf but Sufien’s sea, the Mediterranean, the sea which had informed the blood of his ancestors. She had his people’s eyes, the eyes of a lion, hazel, that whirl of blue, and silky dark hair, and when she was deep in thought over an equation or reciting a script of ancient poetry, she cupped her hands across her brow and squinted like she was trying to see something far into the distance. It was the first time Sufien recognized beauty. He was only thirteen, but he felt the pain of it, the inability to hold on to it, the way it could simultaneously exist and not be grasped. A thing, a real thing, was something a person could touch, point to, like a soccer ball, or his mother’s hand, or a dinar. Whereas Nefisa smelled of rain, which he had scarcely felt or seen in the years since they came to Kuwait. When she passed Sufien in the hall or on the way to the car which always waited for her after school, a 1953 baby blue Volvo station wagon, her father’s, the same model Sufien’s own father had but in turquoise, he smelled off of her a yearning petrichor, that perfume of the desert.There had to be some way to keep her, or rather keep what he felt when he beheld her. Keep it still. Keep it forever. Keep beauty. Thinking of Nefisa, the curl of her words when she recited the Quran in his own accent, or seeing the way her breasts had risen under her shirt, the fabric of her hair, like velvet, he felt like something was slipping from his grasp. Like he needed more time, more pages, more words. The poet’s curse had stricken him.The present, that enviable superpower of childhood, had abandoned him, and now he understood time and space. If she left him, if Nefisa escaped his gaze, as she did every day, if she removed herself beyond the steel doors of that station wagon, and disappeared from view, then everything would. He understood missing. Yes, this was first love. There is no difference between it and an encounter with death but a degree of charm.Sufien, Nefisa said one day. Oh, can you hear it, the voice of a pubescent girl? Shaky and sweet. She said, Walk me home. But what did Sufien know of love and how much it could hurt? To be face-to-face with desire? Almost no one of us can handle it even once we’ve known it and known it again. He looked at her and knew she could see him. Too much of him. He felt naked. So he ran ahead of her toward his father’s house.From that day onward, Sufien avoided Nefisa. It was simpler not to behold her, the gentleness of her cheekbones, the sad curvature of her mouth. She was like a tiny adult already, mourning the heaviness of the life she would later live. Her parents would be killed in the war to come once they returned to Palestine. And she would be a refugee once more, in Gaza. She would never marry, and never bear children. And on her final evening, she would walk into the sea. So they would find her like that, thrown out, half buried in the sand, after some great final exhale.Meanwhile Sufien regretted what he had not said to Nefisa for so long that it burrowed deeply inside of him. He had loved her; he had loved her purely. But he was just thirteen then. He had not yet had the courage to feel something so big.They say Allah works in mysterious ways, but everyone forgets to say how beautiful are His mysteries.Sufien might have expected his mother or his father to be the ones to greet him on his way to the land of the dead all those decades later. It would be Nefisa. When they were finally rejoined, he was no longer thirteen, but a shriveled old man, a hundred pounds of failed flesh clinging to his skeleton, his body undone by cancer, drool falling down his face. Whereas there she was, more beautiful than he had ever seen her, a grown woman, and also the child he had known, the way people can be all things at once in a dream. She was like the archetypal fool, sitting there at the pool, or was it the spring on Jebel Kan’aan, or was it the Sea of Galilee?, dipping her toes into the everlast- ing water, splashing about, a being even younger than a toddler, and likewise timelessly old.Nefisa, Nefisa, Nefisa, he would whisper. Is it you?She would say, Come, walk me home."
}
,
{
"title" : "Nature As the Battlefield: Ecocide in Lebanon and Corporate Empire",
"author" : "Sarah Sinno",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/ecocide-lebanon-chemical-warfare",
"date" : "2026-02-25 15:16:00 -0500",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/PHOTO-2026-02-25-13-34-24%202.jpg",
"excerpt" : "",
"content" : "Photo Credit: Sarah SinnoOn February 2, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)issued a statement announcing that Israeli occupation forces had instructed their personnel to remain under cover near the border between south Lebanon and occupied Palestine. They were ordered to keep their distance because the IOF had planned aerial activity involving the release of a “non-toxic substance.” Samples collected and analyzed by Lebanon’s Ministries of Agriculture and Environment, in coordination with the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL, confirmed that the substance sprayed by Israel was the herbicide, glyphosate. Laboratory results showed that, in some locations, concentration levels were 20 to 30 times higher than normal. Not to mention, this is not the first instance of herbicide spraying over southern Lebanon, nor is the practice confined to Lebanon. Similar tactics have been documented in Gaza, the West Bank, and Quneitra in Syria.While the IOF didn’t provide further explanation as to its purpose, these operations are part of a broader Israeli strategy to establish so-called “buffer zones” by dismantling the ecological foundations upon which communities depend. The deployment of chemical agents kills vegetation, producing de facto “security” no-go areas that empty entire regions of their Indigenous inhabitants. Cultivated fields are deliberately destroyed, soil fertility declines, and water systems become polluted. Farmers lose their livelihoods, and communities are forcibly uprooted. Demographic realities are reshaped, and space is incrementally cleared for future settlers. Simply put, these tactics function as a mechanism of displacement, dispossession, and elimination—and are importantly part of a long history of this kind of colonial territorial engineering.Glyphosate and Ecological HarmFor decades, glyphosate has been marketed as a formulation designed to kill weeds only and increase crop yields. But the consequences of its use on humans and the environment cannot be ignored: In 2015, Glyphosate was classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” and it has been associated with a range of additional health risks, including endocrine disruption, potential harm to reproductive health, as well as liver and kidney damage. In November of last year, the scientific journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology formally withdrew a study published in 2000 that had asserted the chemical’s safety.Beyond its human health implications, glyphosate is ecologically harmful. Studies have shown that it degrades soil microorganisms; others have linked it to increased plant vulnerability to disease. It can also leach into water systems, contaminating surface and groundwater sources. Exposure may be lethal to certain species like bees. Even when it does not cause immediate mortality, glyphosate eliminates vegetation that provides habitat and shelter for bees, birds, and other animals, disrupting food webs and ecological balance. What’s more, research indicates that glyphosate can alter animal behavior, affecting foraging and feeding patterns, anti-predator responses, reproduction, learning and memory, and social interactions.Despite a growing body of scientific literature highlighting its risks to both human health and the environment, and bearing in mind that corporate giants manufacturing such products have been known to fund and even ghostwrite research to promote the opposite, glyphosate remains the most widely used herbicide globally.The Monsanto ModelTo understand how it became so deeply entrenched, normalized within agriculture systems in some contexts, and used as a weapon of war in others, it is necessary to look more closely at the corporation responsible for its global expansion: Monsanto.Founded in 1901, Monsanto’s corporate history reflects a longstanding pattern of chemical production linked to environmental devastation. Over the past century, the corporation has manufactured products later proven harmful and has faced tens of thousands of lawsuits, resulting in billions of dollars in settlements.Among the products it manufactured were polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), synthetic industrial chemicals that were eventually banned worldwide due to their toxicity. Through their production and disposal, including the discharge of millions of pounds of PCBs into waterways and landfills, Monsanto contributed to some of the most enduring chemical contamination crises in modern history, the consequences of which continue to reverberate today.One of the most notorious cases unfolded in Anniston, Ala., where Monsanto’s chemical factory polluted the entire town from 1935 through the 1970s, causing widespread harm to the community. Despite being fully aware of the toxic effects of PCBs, the company concealed evidence, according to internal documents, a conduct that reflects a longstanding pattern of disregard for both environmental care and human health. Whether in the case of PCBs or glyphosate, the underlying logic remains consistent: ecological systems and communities are harmed in order to prioritize profit and, at times, territorial expansion.Monsanto also became the world’s largest seed company. Through the enforcement of restrictive patents on genetically modified seeds, the corporation consolidated unprecedented control over global food systems. By prohibiting seed saving, a practice upheld by farmers and Indigenous communities for millennia, it undermined seed sovereignty and compelled farmers to purchase new seeds each season rather than replanting from their own harvests. What had long functioned as part of the commons since the origins of human civilization, the foundational basis of food and life itself, was privatized. Monsanto transferred control over seeds from cultivators to corporations, further creating systems of structural dependency.What was once embedded in reciprocal relationships between land, seed, and cultivator is now controlled by the same chemical-producing corporations implicated in the degradation of land—as is the case of what is unfolding in southern Lebanon. Power is thus consolidated within an industrial architecture that, at times, prohibits the exchange and regeneration of seeds and, at other times, renders the land uninhabitable. In both cases, it undermines the ability to grow food and remain rooted in the land, thereby threatening the conditions necessary for survival.Chemical WarfareAlongside its record of manufacturing carcinogenic products, dumping hazardous chemicals into the environment, and contributing to the destruction of agricultural systems, Monsanto has also been linked to chemical warfare. During the Vietnam War (1962–1971), it was among the U.S. military contractors that manufactured Agent Orange, a defoliant used to strip forests and destroy crops that provided cover and food to Vietnamese communities.The chemical contained dioxin, one of the most toxic compounds known, contributing to the defoliation of millions of acres of forest and farmland. It has been associated with hundreds of thousands of deaths and long-term illnesses, including cancers and birth defects.Although acts of ecocide long predated this period, well before the term itself was coined, it was in the aftermath of Agent Orange that the word “ecocide” was first used to describe the deliberate destruction of ecosystems and began to enter political and legal discourse.The Vietnam War exposed a structural link between chemical production, corporate power, and a military doctrine in which ecosystems and farmlands are targeted precisely because they sustain human life. Nature, because it nourished, protected, and anchored Indigenous communities, was treated as an obstacle to military and imperial control. As a result, it became a battlefield in its own right.Capital and RuinThis historical precedent continues to reverberate today in Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. Decades apart, these are not isolated acts of ecological destruction but part of a continuous trajectory carried out by the same imperial, corporate, and financial machinery.In 2018, Monsanto was acquired by Bayer. Bayer’s largest institutional shareholders include BlackRock and Vanguard, the world’s two largest asset management firms.Both firms have been identified in reports, including those by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, as major investors in corporations linked to Israel’s occupation apparatus, military industry, and surveillance infrastructure. These include Palantir Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft, Amazon, and Elbit Systems.Mapping these financial linkages reveals how ecocide is structurally embedded within broader systems of violence that are deeply entrenched and mutually reinforcing. Ecocide and genocide are financed through overlapping capital networks that connect chemical production, militarization, and territorial control.The spraying of glyphosate over agricultural land in southern Lebanon must therefore be situated within this historical continuum. The same corporate-financial structure that profits from destructive chemicals and agricultural control is interwoven with the industries that maintain a settler-colonial stronghold."
}
]
}
