Land and territory have always been at the heart of the struggle between the Zionist immigrants/settlers and the native Palestinians. To a large extent, the political history of Zionism and the Israeli state has been a description of an ongoing debate over territorial aspirations and concepts of frontiers. The territorial/boundaries issue has also been the most concrete expression of Israeli expansionism. Since its establishment, Israel has been defining and redefining its territorial ambitions. What are the final boundaries of the Israeli state? In May 1999, Israel’s pragmatic expansionists, led by Ehud Barak, returned to power in Israel, with a pledge...

In the wake of Israel’s 1967 conquests, the deep-rooted perception ofEretz-Yisraelas a whole was not only found in the traditional Zionist maximalism of the Revisionist Herut (later Likud) camp, but increasingly gained ground in all the main political parties, including the traditionally pragmatic Labour Party. This maximalist concept of state frontiers was based on a Zionist political and military strategy (backed by a very powerful army equipped with nuclear weapons) which served as a means to essentially imperialist ends: the creation of a Middle East more favourable to a greatly enlarged and regionally dominant Jewish state. This territorially...

The main division within Zionism has been between the Labour and the Revisionist movements. The latter, the forerunner of the presentday Likud, was established by Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky in 1925 and advocated the ‘revision’ of the Palestine British Mandate to include Transjordan as well as Palestine.¹ Many Israeli and pro- Zionist authors still propagate the myth that the Palestine Mandate had encompassed both Palestine and Transjordan, an area within which the ‘promised’ ‘Jewish National Home’ of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 might be established. The myth of the so-called ‘partition of Palestine’ in 1921–22, encouraged mainly by Revisionist Zionists,²...

Since 1967, the cutting edge of imperial Israel has been provided by Jewish fundamentalism. The founding fathers of modern Zionism and the State of Israel were almost all of them atheists or religiously indifferent, although their legitimisation of the Zionist enterprise in the biblical narrative and record was always a powerful driving force to gain international support. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, had been little concerned with the exact location of the ‘Judenstaat’ and the scope of its boundaries. Since 1967, however, the new religious Zionism, often described as the messianic redemptionist or fundamentalist trend, has transposed the...

It was the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights in 1967 which resurrected the dormant far right in Israel. Between 1948 and 1967, few had been willing to follow figures such as the Lehi veteran Yisrael Eldad into the wilderness of confrontational ultra-nationalism which sought a Land from the Nile to the Euphrates.¹ Unlike the far right, Menahem Begin adopted a pragmatic attitude towards the question of Sinai and the Peace Treaty with Egypt; he also believed that Sinai did not belong to the ‘biblical Land of Israel’. It was in part his sponsorship of...

Studies on Israeli public opinion have often emphasised the salience of the Palestinian issue, the territorial controversy and demographic debate in defining the dovish-hawkish divide and the Israeli Jewish population’s attitudes towards Greater Israel.¹ This chapter will largely concentrate on the evolving Israeli-Jewish population’s attitudes towards both the one million Palestinians living in Israel proper, often described as ‘Israeli Arabs’, who are Israeli citizens and constitute nearly 20 per cent of the state’s total citizens, and the three million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, who are still subject to military rules and regulations. Since 1967,...

There have been continuous debates and struggles over the everchanging definitions and actual borders of the Israeli state. Outside influences, regional wars and Arab resistance – the Anglo-Zionist-Hashemite secret diplomacy during the 1948 war, the tough attitude taken by the two superpowers against the tripartite collusion during the Suez War of 1956 and the then Israeli occupation of Sinai, the October war of 1973 with its huge human costs for Israel, President Jimmy Carter’s mediations in the late 1970s and the Israeli–Egyptian negotiations culminating in the Camp David Accords of 1979, and the current resistance by the Hizbullah guerrillas...