Great Israel Begins Before the Border Moves

The most dangerous territorial projects do not begin with tanks. They begin when a larger map stops sounding ridiculous.

That is why texts like Jonah Lissner’s The Empire of Zion: The Messianic Middle East should not be dismissed as fringe eccentricity. Their scholarly weakness is obvious. Their political usefulness is the real issue. They do not need to persuade as history. They need to function as atmosphere. They widen the horizon of what can be imagined, then quietly teach readers to experience that widened horizon not as ambition, but as inheritance.

This is how maximalist politics prepares itself. First, language is stretched. “Israel” no longer names a state within disputed borders. It begins to name a transhistorical mandate. “Jew” becomes too narrow. “Hebrew” becomes a civilizational container. Then the map expands in the mind before it expands anywhere else. Borders, treaties, reciprocity, and limits begin to look provisional beside the vocabulary of destiny, restoration, return, and scope. By the time policy arrives, the imagination has already been trained to receive it.

That is why the language of Great Israel should not be treated as folklore. Folklore decorates. This language operates. It creates a zone in which propositions that once sounded delusional can circulate long enough to become discussable, then plausible, and finally administratively actionable. It performs one of the oldest tasks in politics: converting fantasy into horizon, and horizon into expectation.

In a country living under prolonged war, strategic anxiety, internal fracture, and moral exhaustion, this mechanism becomes even more potent. Large narratives promise coherence where reality offers attrition. They promise destiny where politics offers compromise. They promise chosenness where ordinary statecraft looks weak, procedural, and humiliating. They give suffering a grand architecture. They give fear a metaphysical frame. They tell a wounded society that history has not narrowed, but secretly widened.

Its appeal is not difficult to understand. In a society exhausted by war, insecurity, and eroded faith in ordinary politics, a larger civilizational map can seem to restore coherence, dignity, and historical meaning. That is precisely why the mechanism is powerful. But understanding its emotional force is not the same as accepting the political grammar it authorizes.

Too many outside observers still refuse to face what follows from this. In contemporary Israel, annexationist and maximalist ideas are not marginal in any serious sense. They have ministers, bureaucratic channels, legal vocabulary, coalition leverage, and procedural expression. The issue is no longer whether such language exists. The issue is how deeply it has already migrated into governance.

This is not just a story about ministers and maps. It is also a story about atmosphere. When belief in compromise collapses, when settlement is reframed as security, and when the political center loses confidence in any negotiated horizon, expansion no longer requires constant justification. It begins to feel like common sense. That is the real threshold shift. A project once presented as ideological becomes legible as administrative necessity.

Like other durable political formations, it matures slowly, often below the threshold of public alarm, until what once seemed symbolic begins to appear administrative.

None of this requires belief in a secret master plan, and none of it depends on treating every biblical reference as a direct policy blueprint. That would be a childish reading. Political projects of this kind rarely advance through one sovereign document stating the entire intention in advance. They advance through accumulation: a shift in language, a collapse of belief in compromise, a legal maneuver, an administrative adjustment, a settlement approval, a new normalization on the ground. Each move can be dismissed in isolation as limited, temporary, or misunderstood. The sequence cannot.

This is precisely why one should not separate the symbolic sphere from the governmental one. Spectacle is not a distraction from political work. It is part of political work. A society is rarely pushed into expansion by argument alone. It is prepared through repetition, atmosphere, emotional conditioning, and symbolic inflation. It is trained to feel the larger claim before it is asked to justify it.

That is also why apparently ridiculous imagery matters. When political leadership begins borrowing the vocabulary of providence, redemption, healing, or sacred exception, the leader is no longer being presented as an office-holder under law and limit. He is being staged as the embodiment of historical correction. That transition is not trivial. It is one of the ways democratic restraint is slowly replaced by civilizational charisma. The map enlarges, and so does the permitted scale of authority.

The essay, then, is not the cause of the program. It is one of its cultural instruments. It gives expansionist desire a metaphysical costume. It lends administrative encroachment the aura of revelation. It makes a strategic project appear older, deeper, and nobler than it is. Its value lies not in truth or rigor, but in symbolic preparation.

The sequence is usually clear once one decides to look at it coldly. First comes the inflated language. Then the civilizational frame. Then the slogan. Then the legal maneuver. Then the administrative adjustment. Then the new facts on the ground. Then, finally, the claim that reality has simply caught up with history. By that stage, the decisive labor has already been done. The outrageous has become discussable. The discussable has become practical. The practical has become policy.

To say this is not to indulge hysteria. Not every biblical reference is a blueprint. But the opposite error is now far more dangerous: treating maximalist rhetoric as decorative noise, embarrassing theater, or harmless folklore. That misreads its political function completely. What looks excessive is often preparatory. What looks absurd is often infrastructural.

This argument is not directed against Jewish self-determination, Jewish continuity, or Israel’s right to exist and defend itself. It is directed against a specific political grammar: the normalization of territorial maximalism through rhetoric, law, administration, and settlement. To confuse that criticism with antisemitism is not analytical seriousness. It is a way of placing a concrete state project beyond scrutiny.

Great Israel is not merely a dream. It is not just theological residue. It is not a colorful fantasy floating at the edge of serious politics. It is a working grammar. Sometimes it appears in messianic prose. Sometimes in settlement planning. Sometimes in legal language about sovereignty. Sometimes in security terminology. Sometimes in maps that pretend merely to describe. Its forms vary. Its direction does not.

A serious observer of Israel today must resist two temptations at once. The first is panic, which mistakes every symbol for an imminent blueprint. The second is complacency, which mistakes every maximalist formulation for empty rhetoric. Both fail. One loses proportion. The other loses reality.

What is needed instead is a colder recognition. The larger claim no longer requires a single manifesto. It advances modularly, through discourse, law, administration, settlement, and habituation. Like many dangerous things, it prefers to arrive in pieces.

That is why texts like The Empire of Zion matter. Not because they persuade intellectually. They do not. But because they reveal the atmosphere in which expansion learns to breathe. And once a society has learned to inhale a larger map as destiny, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to persuade it that it was only ever breathing myth.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)