"How Israel plans to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates"

We all know the Arab theory that the two blue lines on the Israeli flag stand for the Nile and Euphrates rivers, symbolizing Israel's dream to expand to a huge state as promised in the Bible.

Today, Arabs and antisemites are convinced that the "Greater Israel" plan is alive and well.

How does that jive with the fact that Israel has been doing nothing but giving land up since 1977?

Glad you asked. You see, it is all explained in this article in a Hezbollah-leaning website, but apparently it got the ideas from this recent Global Research article expanding on old bizarre theories by the late antisemite Israel Shahak.


You see, Shahak was obsessed with an obscure article written in an Israeli journal in 1982 by someone named Oded Yinon. Out of all the hundreds and thousands of articles written by Israelis, Shahak was convinced that this article, available for all to see, represented Israel's real strategy.

The Global Research article says:

When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria, not to mention the process of regime change in Egypt, must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli expansionist project.

“Greater Israel” consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates.

The Zionist project supports the Jewish settlement movement. More broadly it involves a policy of excluding Palestinians from Palestine leading to the eventual annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza to the State of Israel.

Greater Israel would create a number of proxy States. It would include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well as parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. (See map).

The funny thing is that Shahak's translation of Yinon's article has very little to say about Israel actively causing Arab regimes to fracture. In fact, most of the article (and possibly all, since Shahak cannot be trusted to translate accurately) talks about how this dissolution of the Arab world is inevitable, given the hatred between Sunnis and Shiites, different tribes in Syria, Iraq and Jordan, oil rich states run by a tiny elite but not sharing the wealth with the poor citizens, and so forth. In some ways Yinon's article has been vindicated; he pretty much predicted the Arab Spring in 1982. (Yinon does seem to say that Israel must re-acquire the Sinai from Egypt because the loss of its oil would send Israel into an economic tailspin otherwise. That seems a bit quaint nowadays that Israel is looking to be an energy exporter.)

If Israel's strategy in the 1980s was to cause the Arab world to collapse, it failed, as the current Arab Spring upheavals came over 20 years later.

But the beauty of the theory - especially for Shiites - is that the problems in Egypt, Syria, Libya and so forth can now be blamed on Israel, which is behind everything! Sunni leaders are Israel's puppets!

The Hezbollah article says:

The Zionists ruling Egypt want to turn Egypt gradually into a state of no states, as in Somalia, Iraq, as is happening now in Syria; to destroy Egypt to achieve the dream of a Zionist state from the Nile to the Euphrates.

So that explains everything! Israel is going to rule perhaps 150 million Arabs, because it just wants to. The Arab leaders are Israel's puppets. And the Protocols will be realized! Bwahahaha!

(See also this post from 2007 of a reasonable sounding Egyptian going off the rails when discussing this.)