Editor’s note: Shortly after this was written, on April 7 (April 8 Iran time) the U.S. announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran. Its durability is in question. Israel continued its assault on Lebanon, insisting, with U.S. support, that it is not covered by the ceasefire. Nothing else in this article was changed.
The ambition for Israel to swallow up large parts of nearby countries into a “Greater Israel” ethnonationalist Jewish state was once dismissed as a fringe lunacy. Now it is being put into practice and for four years has been loudly preached from the highest levels of Israel’s government as well as substantial parts of the media and military. This ideology has no concern for the lives torn apart or ended across the region.
It is supported not only by Israel’s government but also by opposition leader Yair Lapid, who exclaimed, “Our mandate over the land of Israel is biblical…the biblical borders of the land of Israel are clear.” U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee chimed in in February: “It would be fine if they took it all,” referring to the land between the Nile and the Euphrates, covering all of Lebanon and Jordan, most of Syria, and parts of Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Some version of “Greater Israel” is supported by a large part of the population but almost universally rejected by Palestinians.
The drive for annexation and ethnic cleansing started long before the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, but that horrible event provided an excuse and impetus to ramp it up, which was further intensified by the war that the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran on Feb. 28. The consequences around the Middle East are devastating.
PALESTINE: WEST BANK
Around 36,000 Palestinians have been driven away from the West Bank. Photo retrieved from Desinformémonos
With the world’s attention away from the West Bank, first due to the focus on Gaza and then on Iran, Israeli soldiers and settlers stepped up terrorist violence, mass arrests, and legal maneuvers to drive Palestinians out of their homes there. After the war on Iran began, Israel “imposed a near-total closure of municipal centers” in the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, 2023, settlers with army help have killed more than 30 Palestinians, wounded 1,500 more, expelled 76 Palestinian communities and established 152 new outposts (settlements that are formally illegal but almost always allowed to take root and grow). Outposts now control over 250,000 acres in the West Bank. They typically encircle Palestinian villages, blocking their access to farmland and open space. In the process, they assault villagers and Jewish and international human rights observers.
The genocidal Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put forth a “Sovereignty Plan” that aims to annex almost all of the West Bank, covering it with Israeli settlements and turning six remaining Palestinian enclaves into ghettos. He said in March: “We will erase the lines, the demarcations, and the letters [referring to Areas A, B, and C from the Oslo Accords]. We will settle our land in all its parts.” As Elisha Yered, a leader of the fanatical Hilltop Youth, bragged, “We have been acting more intensely…to establish outposts, settlement points with herds and everything, and with God’s help we are succeeding in capturing strategic strongholds.”
A Palestinian villager reported: “They have pepper-sprayed us, beat us, detained us, taken my children’s IDs, beaten women, and stolen our sheep. They threatened to kill me and my family recently and told me I have a couple of days to leave to Mecca or Jordan as these lands have been promised to them by God.”
Belief in biblical authority goes hand in hand with total dehumanization of the Other, which is at the heart of racism and genocide. “Greater Israel” fanaticism aims to expel Palestinians from the state of Israel and the territories it occupies now or in the future, if not from life on earth, and to destroy any idea of Palestinian self-determination. Fascist member of the Knesset (parliament) Yitzhak Kroizer put it this way: “In Jenin, there are no innocent civilians. In Jenin, there are no innocent children”—almost identical to language used by Israeli leaders at the beginning of the genocide in Gaza.
Life-and-death apartheid is the reality, and the Knesset wrote it into law in March by passing a death penalty bill that will only apply to Palestinians, while Jewish killers of Palestinians rarely even get prosecuted. In fact, the bill’s sponsor lied: “There is no such thing as a Jewish terrorist.”
PALESTINE: GAZA
Despite a “ceasefire,” more Gazans are killed by Israeli weapons daily. Photo retrieved from Desinformémonos.
Gaza lies in ruins, with 92% of homes damaged or destroyed. One million people are living in tents, some dying from the winter cold, and many suffering from flooding when it rains. The “ceasefire” slowed the genocide but did not end it. More Gazans are killed by Israeli weapons daily. In addition, Israeli-backed Palestinian militias operate there. One attacked a refugee camp on April 6. Supported by Israeli airstrikes, the attack killed at least 10 and wounded dozens.
An effective siege was intensified when the war on Iran began. Food prices spiked and last year’s famine could return. Reconstruction would be a huge project, beginning with clearing 60 million tons of toxic rubble. Instead, Trump and Netanyahu dream of expelling all the Palestinians and building a combination luxury resort, colonial settlement, and military bunker. Israel is building permanent military structures and razed wide swaths to create buffer zones. They are carrying out the intention Israeli leaders announced in October 2023: to drive out the Palestinians by making the territory uninhabitable.
PALESTINE: PRISONERS AND DETAINEES
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports that Israel stepped up mass arrests in Gaza and the West Bank since the Oct. 7 attacks, and about half of the Palestinian detainees have not been charged or tried. They document that Israel “turned its incarceration system for Palestinians into a network of torture camps.” More than 80 Palestinians died in detention during that period.
LEBANON
Israel launched a long-planned war on Lebanon on March 2 when Hezbollah gave it the excuse with a missile and drone attack on an Israeli military installation. By April 6, 1,461 Lebanese people had been killed. That includes more than 120 children. More than 1.1 million people have been driven out of their homes—that is over one-sixth of the population. Israel ordered evacuations in about 15% of the country’s land area, with specific orders to villages not to accept displaced Shiites. That is ethnic cleansing, which the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon endorsed. The army openly announced that it plans to occupy 10% of the country even after the ground invasion ends, and that entire towns would be demolished to support the plan. Already they destroyed civilian infrastructure, including most of the bridges across the Litani River, virtually cutting the south off from the rest of the country.
“The return of over 600,000 residents of the area south of the Litani River will be completely prohibited until the safety and security of residents of the north [of Israel] is ensured, similar to the model of Rafah and Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip,” said Defense Minister Israel Katz.
Israel also killed journalists and targeted healthcare workers and facilities.
SYRIA
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 war and annexed it in 1981. The U.S., since the first Trump administration but continued under Biden, is the only country to recognize the annexation. Israel expanded its occupation after the overthrow of the genocidal dictator Bashar al-Assad, who cooperated with Israel and the U.S. as long as they did not interfere with his bloody counterrevolution. Israel continues to try to stir up ethnic and sectarian divisions in Syria.
IRAN
More than 3,500 people have been killed in the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, including more than 240 children. They have both attacked civilian infrastructure, which in general is a war crime. It is also a prominent practice in today’s wars, such as Russia’s attack on Ukraine. U.S. President Trump is issuing genocidal calls (“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”), which should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric, as history shows that kind of rhetoric is an essential step on the path to genocidal action. Gaza-level destruction of Iran would be compatible with the Greater Israel project. Danny Citrinowicz of Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies explains: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future…[or] the stability of Iran….” The freedom movement that was resurging in Iran the very day before Israel and the U.S. started bombing means nothing to them, other than an excuse for war.
WITHIN ISRAEL
The level of support within Israel for the wars on Iran and Lebanon and the genocide in Palestine reveals a great sickness, which has been nurtured by its decades of brutal imperialist occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. A brave minority within Israel is resisting. Protests against the Iran war are growing, and Israeli police are violently suppressing them. Protesters are up against the genocidal mentality that pervades the power structure in government, media, military, police, and other institutions and holds a large chunk, perhaps the majority, of the population in sway.
The rulers exploit the people’s fears and dangle promises of “security” before them, to be established on the ruins of the whole region and the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Yet every attempt to ensure security through violent domination has ended up sapping security. True security is not achievable in a capitalist world, and not behind the barbed-wire borders of a nation-state, but must include well-being across borders. It depends on establishing a world without war and tackling the ever-worsening impacts of the climate and ecological crisis, which are only multiplied by these wars.
From the No Kings 3 demonstration in Clark Park, Detroit, Mich., March 28, 2026. Photo by Susan Van Gelder for News & Letters.
Needed is confrontation with the way today’s situation grew out of the deep contradictions at Israel’s birth, where the flight from persecution, the quest for freedom, and socialism stood alongside racism and colonial ambitions, so that the birth of Israel as a state involved not only rebellion against British imperialism but the Nakba, a horrific, violent ethnic cleansing that expelled 700,000 Palestinians. That confrontation with the reality of history has been happening in recent decades, always as debates and protests involving a minority of the population. Today’s horrifying situation calls for the recognition that what is imperative is nothing less than a new revolution with a total break from the existing state that is rotten to its core, and with the explicit aim of totally new human relations. Humanity cannot afford yet another halfway house that leaves the door open for retrogression.
THE USA
The Trump administration gives full-throated support to almost everything the Netanyahu administration is doing. The Democratic Party leadership has been maneuvering ambiguously. But a large majority of the people in the U.S. opposes the war on Iran, and that was expressed in the recent massive No Kings protests. However, the direction of the far right movement that has seized the reins of the federal and many state governments is the tumble toward racism, genocide, and a new world war—in both domestic and international policy and practice. Israel’s wars, with U.S. support, speak loudly about where the U.S. and the world are heading if we don’t stop it. It must be stopped!