Greater Israel Movement

The movement arose amid what historian Omer Einav calls the "shock of victory" following Israel's decisive June 1967 victory and its capture of the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights.[2] During the first months after the war, Israeli public debate increasingly focused on whether the newly controlled territories should be retained or returned.[2]

The organized movement was distinguished by the breadth of its founding coalition. Unlike later territorial movements rooted primarily in religious-nationalist circles, it brought together secular intellectuals, Labor Zionists, kibbutz members, nationalist poets, reserve officers, business leaders, rabbis, and university teachers.[2][1] About half the signatories to its establishing declaration were authors or academics. Einav accordingly describes it as a heterogeneous group advancing a comparatively uniform message.[2]

Some sources prefer the translation "Complete Land of Israel" over "Greater Israel" for the Hebrew phrase Eretz Israel ha-Shelemah, arguing that the latter implies expansionist ambitions the formal movement did not hold.[5] The movement's stated territorial scope after 1967 encompassed areas brought under Israeli control during the Six-Day War, not Jordan as a whole or southern Syria.[5]

Organizing activity preceded the movement's formal establishment. The collection Everything: The Peace Borders of the Land of Israel, whose articles were written during the two months after the war, appeared before the movement's establishment and founding manifesto.[2] The movement was formally constituted toward the end of 1967, partly in response to concerns that the government might yield to calls for territorial withdrawal.[6]

In July 1967, Labor minister Yigal Allon presented Prime Minister Levi Eshkol with a plan proposing annexation of the West Bank's eastern strip along the Jordan River while returning its western section to Jordan or allowing Palestinians to establish an independent entity.[7] Labor members who opposed that territorial compromise joined public figures from the right to form the Greater Israel Movement. The movement called for settling all territories captured in the war, including Judea and Samaria, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights.[7]

The movement drew on an older Labor Zionist tradition. A clear majority of its founders came from the Labor movement, and the organization included a particularly strong contingent from the left-wing Ha-Kibbutz ha-Me'uhad, as well as most of the National Religious Party's Young Guard.[8][1] Identified participants included Yitzhak Tabenkin, poets Natan Alterman and Haim Guri, writer Moshe Shamir, intelligence veteran Isser Harel, and reserve general Avraham Yoffe.[3][9] Former Mapai member and journalist Eliezer Livneh was also identified as a co-founder.[10]

On September 22, 1967, the movement published its founding manifesto, signed by more than fifty Israeli public figures.[3] The signatories included writers S. Y. Agnon, Natan Alterman, Haim Hazaz, and Uri Zvi Greenberg, along with reserve army officers, business and industry leaders, university teachers, rabbis, and members of kibbutz movements.[3][1] The document called for a firm political stance against demands that Israel withdraw from territories captured in the war.

The manifesto argued that the Jewish people, by virtue of its history and responsibility to the future, had an obligation to retain the entire Land of Israel within the June 1967 ceasefire lines as the state's permanent borders.[1] Its language was categorical: "and just as we do not have the right to make concessions with respect to the State of Israel, so we are commanded to preserve what we have received from it: the Land of Israel."[2] Einav interprets the word "commanded" as giving the declaration a religious connotation. The manifesto added: "And no Israeli government has the right to relinquish this wholeness."[3]

The document also linked territorial retention to immigration and settlement. It asserted that the country's borders guaranteed peace and security, presented them as an opportunity for national strengthening, and stated that freedom and equality without discrimination should prevail within them.[3] Immigration from the Jewish diaspora and intensive settlement of the newly held areas were presented as essential tools for integrating them into Israeli life.[3][1]

Einav reports that the movement's broader discussions generally assumed that Palestinians in the territories would remain under Israeli rule, although participants differed over the arrangements. Proposals included equal civil rights, solutions for Palestinian refugees, Palestinian autonomy, mass Jewish immigration, and new settlements. He identifies the broadest consensus as support for mass aliyah, movement of population to the territories, and settlement construction.[2]

Einav groups the movement's prominent figures into several generational cohorts. Veterans of the Second and Third Aliyah included Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi, Yitzhak Tabenkin, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, and Shai Agnon. Figures he identifies as founders of modern Hebrew culture — Natan Alterman, Haim Hazaz, and Yaakov Orland — formed a second group, while the 1948 generation was represented by Moshe Shamir, Haim Guri, and Zerubavel Gilead.[2] Einav writes that they viewed the 1967 victory as a historic unification of the Jewish people with the Land of Israel and as heralding a new era.[2]

Despite its organizational cohesion around one core message, the movement's membership was ideologically varied. Secular intellectual Aharon Amir, Mapam member and Palmah veteran Moshe Shamir, religious-Zionist leader Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, and Free Center Party figure Shmuel Tamir appeared alongside one another.[2] Einav characterizes the movement as a heterogeneous group that nonetheless advanced a comparatively uniform call, contrasting it with the more diffuse Soldiers' Talk collection that emerged in the same period.[2]

The movement was almost entirely secular in its social composition, yet its texts incorporated messianic and spiritual language. Moshe Shamir described the Temple Mount in messianic imagery, while Ezer Weizman called the 1967 conflict "the war to establish the Third Temple."[2] Secular members drew heavily on Jewish historical sources and employed religiously inflected rhetoric in support of political and security arguments for retention. In the related collection Everything: The Peace Borders of the Land of Israel, Rabbi Kook and Rabbi Y. L. Rabinowitz were the only religious writers identified by Einav.[2]

After publishing the manifesto, movement leaders organized a petition submitted to the president, convened conferences, staged demonstrations, and held public assemblies.[11] They sought to connect political advocacy with practical work for settlement and immigration.[11] Supporters also pursued early settlement projects, with communities established at Kiryat Arba near Hebron, in the Etzion region, and on the Golan Heights.[4] A Jerusalem Post account identifies Merom Golan, founded by Tabenkin supporters in July 1967, as the first Israeli settlement beyond the Green Line.[12]

In April 1968, the movement launched its biweekly newspaper, Zot Ha'aretz, a name drawn from the biblical verse "This is the land which you shall divide by lot" (Numbers 34:13).[6] Its first editorial board consisted of Natan Alterman, Eliezer Livneh, and Moshe Shamir, with Israel Eldad among its contributors. The eight-page paper focused primarily on settlement, offered free subscriptions to soldiers and police officers, and, in Shamir's description, sought to preserve the Six-Day War's achievements and oppose calls to relinquish them.[6]

The movement was directly involved in the 1968 resettlement of Jews in Hebron and participated less directly in other settlement projects in Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights.[1] When Israel signaled adherence to the Rogers Plan in summer 1970, the movement spearheaded the National Committee to Oppose Withdrawal, drawing members from parties in both the government coalition and the opposition.[1]

In October 1969, some movement leaders entered electoral politics, running in the Seventh Knesset elections as the Land of Israel List.[11] The effort fared poorly, and the National Library describes this as the beginning of a period in which the movement's previously broad, cross-party public support gradually narrowed.[11][4]

The movement's political trajectory after 1969 moved increasingly toward the Israeli right. In 1973, leading figures including reserve General Avraham Yoffe and writer Moshe Shamir joined Menachem Begin's new Center Block within Likud; Yoffe was elected to the Eighth Knesset.[1] Likud was established ahead of the 1973 elections as an alliance encompassing Herut, the Liberal Party, the Free Center, the State List, and the Workers' Movement for Greater Israel. It first came to power in 1977 under Begin.[13]

In 1976, the movement's political group merged with the Independent Center and State List to form La'am, which became a component of Likud.[1] The original nonpartisan movement continued under Zvi Shiloah. In September 1977, it formed an association with Gush Emunim and the En Vered Circle, a group of Labor veterans from the moshavim, sharing a commitment to extending Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line, particularly in Judea and Samaria.[1]

The Camp David Accords of September 1978 provoked a break. The movement withdrew support from Begin's government and subsequently organized opposition through the Land of Israel Loyalists, established at the end of 1978.[1] It gradually lost appeal among younger activists as Tehiya achieved electoral success and Gush Emunim pursued a more assertive settlement program. From 1978, Zot Ha'aretz became a joint publication of the Greater Israel Movement and Gush Emunim; after Tehiya's establishment in 1979, the paper supported it and was eventually replaced by Nekuda, a publication serving the settlement communities of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.[1][6]

The Greater Israel Movement and Gush Emunim were related but distinct movements. The Land of Israel Movement formed in 1967; Gush Emunim was formally founded in February 1974, when several hundred yeshiva students, members of the armed forces, and activists gathered at Kfar Etzion, adopted the name, established a loose organizational structure, and severed links with the National Religious Party.[4]

Gush Emunim drew on two parallel currents: religious-nationalist activism rooted in the thought of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and the secular-nationalist tradition represented by the Land of Israel Movement.[4] Where the earlier movement kept secular and Labor figures at the forefront, Gush Emunim emerged after the 1973 Yom Kippur War with a focus on settlement in centers of Arab population framed as part of a messianic process.[14] One study assesses the Land of Israel Movement as at least partly a spiritual progenitor of Gush Emunim, while emphasizing that the organizations should not be treated as a single phenomenon.[4]

Einav argues that the movement, alongside the contrasting perspectives expressed in Soldiers' Talk, helped establish enduring lines of Israeli debate over whether to retain or return the territories captured in 1967.[2] Its manifesto offered an early, categorical case for permanent retention, while its mass meetings, lobbying, and involvement in settlement projects connected ideological advocacy with political and practical activity.[4][1]

The movement demonstrated that attachment to the Land of Israel in its fuller extent was not exclusive to the religious right. Its coalition included Labor Zionist figures, kibbutz veterans, secular Hebrew writers, religious nationalists, reserve officers, and representatives of both political Right and Left.[2][8] The movement's composition therefore reflected ideological currents with roots in Labor Zionism as well as religious nationalism.

Einav connects the movement's ideological certainty, reinforced by the religious connotations of its language, to the broader decline of the Labor movement and Israeli Left and the parallel rise of what he calls the "New Right."[2] This is his historical interpretation rather than an uncontested causal conclusion. The movement nevertheless left identifiable institutional and political legacies through its manifesto, newspaper, settlement involvement, relationship with Gush Emunim, and the participation of leading members in the Likud alliance.[2][1]

Sources differ on how to translate and characterize the movement's name. The Hebrew phrase ha-Shelemah, from Eretz Israel ha-Shelemah, translates most literally as "complete" or "whole." One commentator argues that "Complete Land of Israel" is the more accurate rendering and that "Greater Israel" carries expansionist connotations the movement did not formally embrace.[5] The formal movement's program after 1967 was framed around the June 1967 ceasefire lines rather than maximalist biblical boundaries extending east of the Jordan.[5][1]

Sources variously call the formal organization the "Movement for Greater Israel," the "Land of Israel Movement," and the "Complete Land of Israel movement."[1][15] The Jewish Virtual Library glossary defines the Land of Israel Movement as an ideological movement established in summer 1967 to promote annexation of the territories and oppose territorial compromise. The Encyclopedia Judaica account instead frames its manifesto around permanent retention within the June 1967 ceasefire lines, immigration, and settlement.[1][15] These formulations emphasize different aspects of the movement's platform.