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Arab World Condemns Netanyahu's Support for 'Expansionist Colonial' Vision of 'Greater Israel'
In supporting the notion of "Greater Israel," the prime minister suggested he supported efforts to expand Israel's borders by conquering large parts of several of its neighboring countries.
Aug 15, 2025
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing condemnation after he endorsed the goal of establishing "Greater Israel."
Many interpreted that as a promise to further expand Israel's borders into other parts of the Arab world.
As the Times of Israel explains:
The term Greater Israel refers to Israel in expanded borders in accordance with biblical or historical descriptions, and has many versions, some of which include parts of today's Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia...
It is still adopted by some far-right figures in Israel who express a desire to annex or eventually control many of those territories.
In an interview Tuesday on Israel's i24 TV network, interviewer Sharon Gal—a former right-wing member of the Knesset—handed Netanyahu an amulet depicting what he said was "the Promised Land."
"This is my vision," said Gal, before asking Netanyahu, "Do you connect to the vision?"
Netanyahu responded, "Very much."
Gal then stressed that the map "is Greater Israel."
"If you ask me, we are here," Netanyahu responded. "You know I often mention my father. My parents' generation had to establish the state. And our generation, my generation, has to guarantee its continued existence. And I see that as a great mission."
Though the pendant itself was not visible onscreen, it was likely the one sold by Gal's company, which the Times of Israel says depicts a "relatively maximalist" map containing territory stretching from the Nile River to the Euphrates—an area encompassing swathes of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.
i24 has cut this provocative exchange from the video of the interview on its Hebrew or English language YouTube channels. However, it can still be viewed on i24's Hebrew-language website.
The idea of colonizing other parts of the Arab world according to historic Jewish texts is popular among the far-right portion of Netanyahu's governing coalition.
Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's minister of finance, has said he wants a Jewish State "according to the books of our sages" that will "extend to Damascus," the capital of Syria, and suggested Israel will "slowly" conquer the other side of the Jordan River.
At a conference in March 2023, before Israel's current military assault on the Gaza Strip began, Smotrich spoke at a conference behind a podium depicting a map of "Greater Israel," which encompassed parts of Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
Earlier this week, Smotrich unveiled a new 3,000-person settlement in the illegally-occupied West Bank known as E1, which he said "buries the idea of a Palestinian state" because "there is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize."
Netanyahu has long sought to downplay the idea that Israel has waged the destruction of Gaza or its attacks on Syria and Lebanon with the goal of expansion. Even as his government talks openly of permanently exiling the people of Gaza to make room for Jewish settlers, the prime minister has maintained that his goals are purely defensive.
Mustafa Barghouti—the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, a liberal party in the West Bank's legislature—said Netanyahu's endorsement of "Greater Israel" means "he is on a mission to violate all international laws, commit crimes against humanity, and annex Palestinian and other Arab countries' territories." The Palestinian Authority likewise said Netanyahu's comments were an expression of Israel's "expansionist colonial policies."
That outrage has echoed across the Arab world.
Saudi Arabia expressed its "complete rejection of the settlement and expansionist ideas." Egypt said the remarks had "implications of provoking instability and reflecting a rejection of the pursuit of peace in the region, as well as an insistence on escalation."
Qatar, which has often tried to mediate a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, called the comments "an extension of the occupation's approach based on arrogance, fueling crises, and conflicts."
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'Immoral and Indefensible': Study Reveals Deadly Consequences of US Sanctions
"It is well past time that the U.S., E.U., and other powerful actors in the international community seriously reconsider this cruel and often counterproductive mechanism," said one of the study's authors.
Jul 23, 2025
A study published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet Global Health revealed that unilateral economic sanctions cause more than 500,000 excess deaths annually, prompting renewed calls for the United States to end its use of a form of collective punishment that claims roughly as many lives as all the world's current wars combined.
The study, authored by Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), is the first to examine the "effects of sanctions on age-specific mortality rates in cross-country panel data using methods designed to address causal identification in observational data."
Studying the effects of sanctions on 152 countries between 1971 and 2022, the researchers "showed a significant causal association between sanctions and increased mortality," with "the strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and U.S. sanctions."
"We estimated that unilateral sanctions were associated with an annual toll of 564,258 deaths," the study's authors noted, "similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict."
🚨 NEW REPORT: The myth that sanctions are a humane alternative to war is shattered. Sanctions imposed by single countries cause massive civilian deaths, with children under 5 hit hardest. bit.ly/Sanctions_Study
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— Center for Economic and Policy Research (@ceprdc.bsky.social) July 23, 2025 at 6:14 AM
Weisbrot, CEPR's co-director, said in a statement: "It is immoral and indefensible that such a lethal form of collective punishment continues to be used, let alone that it has been steadily expanded over the years. And sanctions are widely misunderstood as being a less lethal, almost nonviolent, policy alternative to military force."
The researchers found that children younger than 5 years old made up 51% of all sanctions deaths during the three-decade study period. More than three-quarters of all sanctions deaths between 1971-2022 were of children under age 15 and people over 60.
The study also noted the repeated failure of U.S. sanctions to deliver policy goals like regime change. However, such measures have caused economies to collapse, harming everyday people far more than ostensibly targeted leaders, who have the power and resources to shield themselves from the worst effects of sanctions.
"Sanctions often fail to achieve their stated objectives and instead only punish the civilian populations of the targeted countries," said Rodríguez. "It is well past time that the U.S., [European Union], and other powerful actors in the international community seriously reconsider this cruel and often counterproductive mechanism."
For six decades, the U.S. has imposed a crippling economic embargo on Cuba that has adversely affected all sectors of the socialist island's economy and severely limited Cubans' access to basic necessities including food, fuel, and medicines. The Cuban government claims the blockade cost the country's economy nearly $5 billion in just one 11-month period in 2022-23 alone. United Nations member states have perennially—and overwhelmingly—condemned the embargo.
In Venezuela, as many as 40,000 people died in 2017-18 due to U.S. sanctions, CEPR researchers found.
Some critics have noted that civilian suffering appears to be more than an incidental cost of U.S. sanctions—it is apparently often their very intent. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—a confidant of former President John F. Kennedy—claimed that JFK sought to unleash "the terrors of the Earth" on Cuba following Fidel Castro's successful overthrow of a U.S.-backed dictatorship, because "Castro was high on his list of emotions."
While the new study "found no statistical evidence of an effect" for United Nations sanctions, Mary Smith Fawzi and Sarah Zaidi conducted research for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization that was published in The Lancet in 1995 and revealed that as many as 576,000 Iraqi children died prematurely as a result of sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council—whose sanctioning capacity was heavily influenced by the United States—to target the regime of longtime Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"Discussions in the 1990s on the effects on child mortality of sanctions on Iraq strongly influenced policy debates and were one of the main drivers of the subsequent redesign of sanctions on the government of Saddam Hussein," the authors of the new study wrote, citing Fawzi and Zaidi's research.
With Hussein's regime unmoved by the sanctions, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, was asked if the human cost was too high. Albright infamously replied that "the price is worth it."
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After Trump's Bombing, Sanders Condemns 'Lies' Over Iran Nuclear Threat
"We cannot allow ourselves to be dragged into another Middle East war based on lies."
Jun 22, 2025
While a number of statements by members of Congress in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities focused largely on the fact that the White House acted without congressional authorization—a constitutional violation—U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders expressed anger over another aspect of the unilateral military action: the "lies" that the Trump administration is telling the public to justify the bombing.
The White House's act of war against Iran, said the Vermont independent senator, was just the latest in a long line of military boondoggles that followed lies powerful politicians told about the threats posed by foreign countries—before taking action that ultimately killed millions of people while doing nothing to protect U.S. security.
"In the 1960s the United States government lied to the American people and took us into a terrible war in Vietnam," said Sanders. "The result of that war was that over 58,000 young Americans died and many more came back wounded both in mind and in spirit. Millions of Vietnamese were also killed."
Decades later, Americans were told by then-President George W. Bush that the U.S. must act quickly to stop Iraq from building "weapons of mass destruction"—with U.S. officials following the guidance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"The United States invaded Iraq and became embroiled in a long civil war there. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. That war was based on a lie—a lie which cost us 4,492 young Americans, 32,000 wounded, over half a million Iraqis and trillions of dollars," said Sanders.
"The American people are being lied to again today," he added. "We cannot allow history to repeat itself."
U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran is not attempting to build a nuclear weapon with its enriched uranium stockpile, backing up repeated statements from Iranian officials who have said the country's nuclear program is used only for peaceful civilian purposes.
Sanders' statement came several hours after he learned while speaking at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma that Trump had bombed Iran, authorizing strikes on three nuclear facilities, which Iranian officials condemned as a violation of international law.
At the rally, supporters erupted in a chant of "No more war!" after Sanders read Trump's statement on the attack.
The spontaneous display of outrage over the latest U.S. attack on the Middle East underscored the reality of the moment, said The Nation writer Jeet Heer, as one poll released Thursday showed that just 8% of Americans favored the U.S. becoming directly involved in Israel's attacks on Iran that began earlier this month.
"There is only one off-ramp from Trump's mad rush to war: the quick mobilization of an anti-war opposition," said Heer. "The people are ready."
As the Trump administration boasted about the "severe damage" the strikes had done to Iran's nuclear program, progressive strategist Waleed Shahid called on Democratic lawmakers to tap into voters' palpable outrage—not about Trump's failure to seek congressional authorization for the strikes, but about the fact that the U.S. is pursuing a war in Iran at all while repeating Netanyahu's unsubstantiated claims about the Iranians' ability to produce a nuclear bomb.
"No one ever won a fight yelling, 'Congressional authorization.' Voters need clarity amid the chaos," said Shahid. "Lead with this: No more blank checks for corrupt and endless foreign wars, we're here to focus on fighting for working Americans."
Shahid's comments echoed Sanders' statement decrying Trump's lies.
"The U.S. faces enormous problems here at home, which we must address," said Sanders. "We cannot allow ourselves to be dragged into another Middle East war based on lies."
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