AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Israel has extended beyond its borders in the last few years. It now controls big swaths of neighboring land in Gaza, Lebanon and even in Syria. By bombing and at times leveling towns and villages and displacing over 3 million people, according to U.N. figures, Israel has taken over areas its officials call security buffer zones. But some in Israel want to permanently extend their country's borders using the Bible as a map. From Jerusalem, NPR's Daniel Estrin reports.
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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing in Hebrew).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing in Hebrew).
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: About 10 Israeli activists film themselves singing and dancing in Syria. They just walked a few hundred feet across the Israeli border into the part of Syria the Israeli military has occupied since the fall of the Assad regime in late 2024.
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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing in Hebrew).
ESTRIN: The Israeli activists sing a Hebrew verse from the Bible, a rallying cry to the ancient Israelites to inherit the promised land, despite the inhabitants already living there. One Israeli activist says...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
ESTRIN: "Go Syria. Without settlement, there is no security."
This fringe group of ultranationalist Jewish activists wants to establish Israeli settlements in Syria. They say they managed to slip into Syria more than a dozen times over the past year. They were repeatedly apprehended by Israeli soldiers and taken back home. Earlier this year, an Israeli reporter filmed this scene in Lebanon.
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ESTRIN: Hundreds of devout Jews escorted by the Israeli military to a holy site just across the Israeli border. It's revered in Judaism as the tomb of a 4th-century rabbi. Lebanese Muslims say it's the tomb of a Shia cleric. Israeli soldiers occupied this Lebanese borderland during war with Hezbollah earlier this year, driving out most of the population.
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PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: (Speaking Hebrew).
ESTRIN: "In Lebanon, Syria and in Gaza," said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech, "we have created security zones deep beyond our borders."
In another speech, he said this was Israel's comeback after being attacked by Hamas and then by Hezbollah in October 2023.
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NETANYAHU: (Speaking Hebrew).
ESTRIN: "Instead of them surprising us, we are surprising them," Netanyahu said. "We have changed our security concept. We initiate, we attack, and we have created three security zones deep within enemy territory."
Some ultranationalist Israelis see this through the lens of the Bible. Take this Israeli TV interview.
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NETANYAHU: (Speaking Hebrew).
UNIDENTIFIED INTERVIEWER: (Speaking Hebrew).
ESTRIN: A right-wing talk show host gives Netanyahu a piece of jewelry shaped with the borders of what's called greater Israel, land stretching from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq, the land God promised Abraham in the Book of Genesis. He asks Netanyahu...
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UNIDENTIFIED INTERVIEWER: (Speaking Hebrew).
ESTRIN: ..."Do you connect to the vision?" Netanyahu replies...
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NETANYAHU: (Speaking Hebrew).
ESTRIN: "Very much."
The topic is frequently covered on TV broadcasts in the Mideast, like on Al Jazeera in English and Arabic.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Is Greater Israel already happening on the ground?
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: (Speaking Arabic).
ESTRIN: The Greater Israel project - an illusion or reality? This also came up when talk show host Tucker Carlson asked U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, if Israel had a biblical right to claim land in other Arab countries.
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TUCKER CARLSON: Because you're appealing to Genesis.
MIKE HUCKABEE: Yeah.
CARLSON: You're saying that's the original deed.
HUCKABEE: It would be fine if they took it all.
ESTRIN: That sparked anger from Arab governments. Israeli affairs expert Shira Efron, from the RAND think tank, says the religious Messianic vision of Israel conquering land all the way to Iraq is not representative of most Israelis or of Israeli policy.
SHIRA EFRON: The vast majority of Israelis, and even the most religious ones - they don't have territorial claims with Lebanon and with other countries. It's more an Israeli mindset that buffers on as sort of the new way to defend ourselves and to let our people who live in border communities have a sense of security and safety.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Non-English language spoken).
ESTRIN: At a right-wing Israeli demonstration in Tel Aviv, I meet activist Shai Rosengarten.
SHAI ROSENGARTEN: We didn't start this war. It's not like - that Israel wanted to expand, and then we just started a war to expand our borders. They attacked us. What we need after this brutal attack on the citizens of Israel is buffer zones.
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ESTRIN: But security is not what's animating young, religious Jewish Israelis who marched through East Jerusalem recently, celebrating Israel's capture of that territory nearly 60 years ago. We meet kindergarten assistant Hodaya Tam, who wears a necklace of the extended borders of Israel as outlined in the Book of Genesis.
HODAYA TAM: (Speaking Hebrew).
ESTRIN: "All of it, according to the Torah - it's ours," she says. She's with her friend, university student Yael Bahar, who dreams of living beyond Israel's borders.
YAEL BAHAR: (Speaking Hebrew).
ESTRIN: "Me," she says, "wow, give me Gaza, a house facing the sea on the beach. But, you know," she says, "there's desire, and then there's reality. All the people who are afraid that we will settle in Gaza or something like that, I don't think that it will really happen. The land of Israel will return to the people of Israel only when the Messiah comes."
BAHAR: (Speaking Hebrew).
ESTRIN: Bahar says, Israel won't put its citizens on the front lines in danger. And, she says, "if we settle Gaza and Southern Lebanon, the world will talk."
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
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ESTRIN: Far-right members of the Israeli government have called for Israel to annex and settle territories in Gaza and Southern Lebanon, not just hold them as indefinite military zones.
TOMER LEV: It's not in the really organized level right now, but it's in the fantasies.
ESTRIN: Israeli progressive activist Tomer Lev is a master's student in Jerusalem, researching what he calls political imagination and Messianism among far-right leaders in Israel.
LEV: I think the political work they are doing is taking this political imagination and popularizing it. Make the wide public believe that's what they need to have in order to be secured. And I think it's a matter of time, and that's what we're fighting.
ESTRIN: He says he's patrolling the streets to stop young ultranationalist Israelis from attacking Palestinians and to promote the reality of a land that's shared and not a dream of further conquest. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Jerusalem. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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