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Empire of Sand: The Strategic Impossibility of “Greater Israel” in a Multipolar World
Tahir Azad
Analysis Series
Analysis//0008/April/2026/London-Dialogue. 24 April 2026
Introduction
Few concepts in modern political history have proved as intellectually seductive, analytically contested, and ultimately self-defeating as the notion of Greater Israel, or Eretz Yisrael HaShlema, the Whole Land of Israel. Invoked variously as divine covenant, historical entitlement, and geopolitical strategy, the idea has shaped Israeli territorial behaviour since before the state itself was formally established in May 1948. At its most expansive, the vision encompasses territory stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, grounded in biblical texts and reinterpreted across more than a century of Zionist political thought. At its contemporary and politically operative level, it refers to permanent Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights and, in the thinking of its most ambitious proponents, influence over a significantly wider arc of the Arab and Muslim world.
The concept has never been a purely fringe aspiration. It has been quoted, debated, and operationalised by governing political parties, religious nationalist movements, settler organisations, and senior military planners. It has animated Israeli settlement policy for over five decades and informed the strategic logic behind repeated military campaigns from Lebanon to Gaza to Iran. However, surveyed against the hard realities of April 2026, the concept has never looked more theoretically overreaching, more strategically hollow, or more practically impossible. This analysis examines the critical factors driving that collapse: from mounting international legal pressure and irreversible demographic constraints to the technological diffusion reshaping Middle Eastern warfare and the two devastating Iran wars of 2025 and 2026 that have exposed the fundamental limits of Israeli and American military power in a multipolar world.
The Ideological Architecture: Jabotinsky, Herzl, and the Revisionist Blueprint
The intellectual roots of Greater Israel lie in the divergence within early Zionism between pragmatic and maximalist currents. Theodore Herzl, the movement’s founding theorist, referenced the Tanakh in his thinking on borders and, in his private diaries, described a Jewish state stretching from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates. His vision, however fluid and negotiable in practice, provided the sacred geography that later movements would crystallise into political programme. The Israeli historian H.S. Haddad has observed that, although biblical delineations of the Promised Land varied across texts, “Jerusalem is the centre around which these circles of varying size are drawn.”
It was Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism in the early 1920s, who furnished Greater Israel with its ideological steel. Jabotinsky believed the Jewish state should encompass all of Mandatory Palestine, including both banks of the Jordan River, and that no external power or negotiation should limit Jewish territorial aspirations. His famous 1923 essay The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs) argued that Arab opposition to Jewish settlement was innate and that peace could only be achieved from a position of overwhelming military strength, never through territorial concession. This doctrine, rooted simultaneously in historical entitlement and strategic calculation, became the intellectual foundation of what eventually evolved into the Likud party, first brought to power under Menachem Begin in the landmark 1977 elections.
The Movement for Greater Israel, formed in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights, formalised this aspiration as a practical political programme. It called on the government to retain the captured territories and settle them with Jewish populations, a policy that successive Israeli governments have pursued with varying intensity ever since. Today, with over 700,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the settlement enterprise represents the most visible operationalisation of the Greater Israel concept, a slow and systematic demographic transformation of occupied territories designed to render a contiguous Palestinian state physically impossible.
The Shield of Washington and Its Accelerating Costs
Israel’s ability to pursue aggressive territorial policies since 1948 has rested critically on American diplomatic protection. Washington’s unconditional support has served as the central enabler of Israeli exceptionalism. This protection has been most visibly exercised at the United Nations Security Council, where the United States has cast its veto 49 times against draft resolutions pertaining to Israel since 1970, blocking measures on illegal settlements, excessive use of force against civilians, and Palestinian statehood alike. During the post-October 2023 Gaza war alone, Washington vetoed four ceasefire resolutions in a single year and, in April 2024, cast the lone vote against granting Palestine full United Nations membership, with twelve Security Council members voting in favour and only the United Kingdom and Switzerland abstaining.
The strategic paradox of this arrangement is that American vetoes are now producing the opposite of their intended diplomatic effect. Rather than containing the political fallout from Israeli operations, each exercise of the veto amplifies global outrage and accelerates the process of Israel’s international delegitimisation. Countries that would once have abstained or remained silent on Israeli-Palestinian matters are now taking active positions in international legal forums, voting publicly in the General Assembly, and adjusting their bilateral relationships accordingly. The United States, for its part, has borne significant reputational costs, with its stated commitment to international law and human rights increasingly dismissed across the Global South as geopolitical performance rather than principle.
The ICJ and the Internationalisation of Opposition
The most consequential legal rupture in Israel’s international standing came in December 2023, when South Africa filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice under the 1948 Genocide Convention, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and referencing what it described as 75 years of apartheid, 56 years of occupation, and 16 years of blockade. The ICJ’s January 2024 ruling found it plausible that Palestinian rights under the Convention had been violated and ordered provisional measures. In May 2024, by a vote of 13 to 2, the Court ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. Israel rejected this interpretation and continued operations regardless.
What followed was an unprecedented wave of international legal and diplomatic solidarity. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, representing 57 states, backed the South African case. Bolivia, Colombia, Brazil, Malaysia, the Maldives, Namibia, and the Arab League all formally expressed support. Subsequently, more than 14 countries filed declarations of intervention in the proceedings, including Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Turkey, Chile, Nicaragua, and Palestine. The Netherlands, Iceland, and Namibia argued in formal submissions that Israel’s conduct may constitute evidence of genocidal intent. The ICJ also issued a landmark advisory opinion in July 2024 ruling that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal under international law, a finding with profound long-term implications for the legal architecture of any Greater Israel project.
These are not fringe positions. They represent the legal opinions of multiple democratic governments, filed before the highest international court in the world, and they are permanent parts of the international legal record. The Greater Israel project requires not merely military dominance but sustainable international legitimacy. That legitimacy has collapsed across the Global South and is fracturing across Europe. No territorial project can survive indefinitely without the acquiescence, however reluctant, of the international community.
The Twelve-Day War, June 2025: The First Strategic Warning
The limits of Israeli coercive strategy received their first serious stress test in June 2025. On 13 June 2025, Israel launched Operation Red Wedding, a surprise multi-wave assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities, ballistic missile infrastructure, and military command structure, deploying over 200 fighter jets and striking approximately 100 targets in the opening hours. Thirty senior Iranian commanders were eliminated in near-simultaneous strikes. Nine nuclear scientists were killed in what the IDF called Operation Narnia. The assault was tactically impressive, and the IAEA Board of Governors had, two days earlier, for the first time since 2005, declared Iran non-compliant with its nuclear obligations, with IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi reporting that Iran had acquired enough enriched uranium for up to nine nuclear warheads.
Iran retaliated with waves of ballistic missiles and over 1,100 drones, the vast majority of which were intercepted. Iranian strikes nonetheless killed 28 people in Israel, injured hundreds, and left thousands homeless. The United States joined the conflict on 21 June 2025, striking the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz. A ceasefire brokered by Oman came into effect on 24 June. Despite Israeli and American claims of transformative damage, the UK House of Commons Library assessed that the UN nuclear watchdog concluded the strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear programme by a matter of months, not years, a conclusion vigorously disputed by the Trump administration.
The Twelve-Day War was therefore a tactical success and a strategic failure. Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was damaged but not destroyed. Its missile-production capacity was degraded but not eliminated. Its determination to resist was, if anything, hardened. And critically, the war demonstrated that Israel could not achieve its maximalist objective, namely the permanent elimination of Iranian deterrence, through military action alone. Worse, it created the conditions for a far more dangerous escalation less than nine months later.
Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026: The War That Buried the Dream
If the Twelve-Day War was a warning, the 2026 Iran war is the catastrophe. On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, with nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours targeting Iranian military infrastructure, command-and-control networks, and the Iranian political leadership directly. The opening salvo assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior officials in simultaneous strikes on three separate gatherings at his residential compound. The assassination was confirmed by Iranian state media on 1 March 2026. The strikes were launched, extraordinarily, while nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran were still technically active. The Omani foreign minister had, just days earlier, described significant progress, with Iran reportedly willing to make concessions on enrichment.
Iran’s response was swift, expansive, and strategically calculated. Iranian missile and drone strikes hit US embassies, military installations, and oil infrastructure across nine countries, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, driving Brent crude oil past 100 dollars a barrel and threatening a global energy crisis. Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG facility sustained significant damage, reducing Qatar’s liquid natural gas export capacity by 17 per cent. Hezbollah re-entered the conflict, launching strikes on northern Israel. A new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was selected by the IRGC within days, pledged continued resistance, and warned that adversaries would not be safe anywhere in the world.
The House of Commons Library noted that analysts broadly assessed Iran’s strategy as a conflict of endurance, pursuing a drone-and-missile war of attrition designed to exhaust interceptor stockpiles and impose unsustainable economic costs until the United States and Israel were forced to negotiate. CSIS analysts noted that while American missile inventories remained sufficient for the current conflict, the depletion of stockpiles posed serious risks to US credibility and capacity in any future confrontation with a peer competitor such as China. As of April 2026, the conflict remains ongoing with no end in sight, no defined end-state, and no diplomatic framework capable of halting it.
This is the environment in which the Greater Israel project is supposed to advance. The premise that Israel can project power across an expanding regional arc, neutralise adversaries through surgical campaigns, and establish permanent dominance from the Jordan to the Euphrates has been definitively disproved by events. A state of approximately nine million people has drawn itself and its principal patron into an open-ended war of attrition against a nation of 90 million that has survived four decades of crippling sanctions, two proxy wars, and now two direct military campaigns and has not surrendered its will to resist. The empire of sand does not hold.
The Demographic Impossibility
Beyond the immediate military context lies a structural demographic reality that no Israeli government has successfully confronted. Israel’s Jewish population stands at approximately seven million. The combined Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza exceeds five million. There are approximately two million Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the Palestinian diaspora numbers over six million. The broader Arab world contains approximately 400 million people; the Muslim world, 1.9 billion.
The historian Alistair Horne, in his landmark 1977 study A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, documented comprehensively what the French experience in Algeria demonstrated: no occupying power with a large technological and military advantage has ever succeeded in permanently suppressing a population-scale resistance movement motivated by national identity and territorial grievance. France, at the height of its counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria, deployed 400,000 troops in a country with a Muslim population of roughly nine million and still failed. The arithmetic is even less favourable for a state with Israel’s population attempting to control a far larger and more geographically dispersed Arab population across an expanded territorial zone.
Mossad’s targeted killing campaigns have been tactically impressive: the elimination of nuclear scientists, Hamas leaders, Hezbollah commanders, and Iranian generals represents a level of covert operational sophistication that few intelligence services can match. But as the post-October 2023 experience has confirmed, the killing of individual leaders does not eliminate organisations, does not reduce the will to resist, and does not resolve the political questions that drive conflict. Hamas has functioned and adapted under extreme pressure; Hezbollah has survived the killing of Hassan Nasrallah and reconstituted; Iran has replaced Khamenei within days and continued fighting. Decapitation, even when successful, is not a strategy. It is a tactic in service of a strategy that, in this case, does not exist.
China, Technology, and the Erosion of Israeli Military Supremacy
For decades, Israel’s regional dominance rested on a decisive qualitative military edge maintained through exclusive access to American platforms, intelligence systems, and electronic warfare capabilities. That edge is now being eroded by a structural shift in global military technology driven primarily by China’s rise as a defence technology exporter and the proliferation of low-cost precision-strike capabilities across the region.
China’s BeiDou-3 satellite navigation system provides precision guidance independent of American GPS infrastructure, making US-supplied electronic countermeasures considerably less effective against Chinese-guided munitions. Chinese-manufactured UAVs and loitering munitions, including derivatives of platforms refined through extensive operational use in Ukraine and across the Middle East, have demonstrated an ability to overwhelm expensive missile-defence systems through volume and simultaneity. The mathematical logic of this shift is clear and has been noted extensively by RAND, IISS, and other leading defence research institutions: cheap offensive platforms now threaten costly defensive ones, and the economics increasingly favour the attacker over the defender.
Arab states and non-state actors have acquired these capabilities at scale, diversifying away from dependence on Western export-controlled technology. Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 platform demonstrated the potential of relatively low-cost combat drones across multiple theatres. Iran’s own UAV programme, which sustained over 1,100 drone launches against Israel during the Twelve-Day War alone, confirms the scale of this proliferation. The 2026 conflict has further demonstrated that Iran possesses sufficient drone and missile production capacity to sustain a war of attrition of significant duration, even against the combined air power of the United States and Israel. Against this backdrop, the notion that Israel can project power across a vast regional territory, controlling populations and maintaining permanent military dominance in a technological environment it no longer monopolises, is analytically untenable. The strategic calculus has shifted irreversibly.
The Structural Diagnosis: Why Greater Israel Cannot Succeed
The Greater Israel concept fails not on one dimension but on every dimension simultaneously. Demographically, the Jewish population is too small to settle, administer, and control the territory required. Legally, Israel faces mounting international liability, with genocide proceedings before the ICJ, ICC investigations, and the July 2024 advisory opinion ruling that its occupation is illegal under international law. Diplomatically, the global coalition of opposition is expanding rather than contracting. Militarily, the assumption of permanent Israeli air superiority and coercive dominance has been shattered by the Iran wars of 2025 and 2026. Technologically, Chinese-enabled military proliferation has eroded the qualitative edge on which Israeli deterrence depended. Economically, the costs of perpetual war, the depletion of American support, and the growing isolation of Israeli institutions in global markets, academia, and civil society are not sustainable.
The assessment published in April 2026 in Small Wars Journal is direct: the 2026 campaign against Iran was launched without clearly defined, mutually compatible, or operationally achievable objectives, premised on dangerously optimistic assumptions about Iranian fragility, and represents a war that presents no favourable exit. The same intellectual failure, the assumption that overwhelming military force produces political outcomes without a post-conflict political framework, has characterised every phase of the Greater Israel project. Force without political vision produces not empire but attrition. As CSIS analysts have observed, Iran’s strategy of horizontal escalation, widening the arena of conflict into the political and economic realms, is designed to impose costs until the conflict becomes too expensive for the United States and Israel to sustain. The evidence suggests it is working.
Conclusion: The Negotiated Peace as the Only Viable Strategy
There is a deeply ironic logic to the present moment. Every action taken in the name of Greater Israel, every settlement built, every veto cast, every surgical strike, every decapitation campaign, every war launched, has not brought the project closer to realisation. It has accelerated its delegitimisation, deepened Arab and Muslim resolve, expanded the international coalition against Israeli policy, drawn the United States into an unwinnable regional war, and produced two direct conflicts with Iran that have solved nothing while creating new crises everywhere.
The path that remains the only path with a realistic end-state, which runs through negotiation, requires political courage that has so far been absent. A state of seven million people cannot permanently subjugate a regional population of hundreds of millions. It cannot indefinitely resist the convergence of international legal accountability, demographic reality, Iranian deterrence, a multipolar military environment, and Chinese-enabled technological parity. What it can do, if its political leadership chooses to see it, is secure a permanent, internationally recognised existence within defined borders through a negotiated settlement addressing Palestinian self-determination and Israeli security simultaneously.
That is not idealism. Every independent strategic assessment, from RAND to IISS to CSIS, from the Council on Foreign Relations to the UK Parliament’s own research service, all point to the same conclusion: the regional environment is becoming less, not more, hospitable to Israeli unilateralism with every passing year. The empire of sand will not hold because sand does not hold. It shifts, and it collapses, and it buries those who built upon it.
Greater Israel is not a strategy. It is an epitaph.
Dr Tahir Mahmood Azad is Executive Director of London Dialogue, an independent UK-based research and policy institute. He can be reached at [email protected]
Tahir Azad
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