Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 34: Memory made map – Project Greater Israel exposed
An ominous emblem at a Paris gala lays bare the theology of empire animating Israel’s expansion – faith recast as frontier.
Imagine the following tableau, touched with Huysmansian fin-de-siècle grace and decadence: A German finance minister glides toward the lectern in a secluded Parisian salon somewhere off the Champs-Élysées – one of those polished chambers hired for charity dinners and discreet political soirées, where the champagne flows more easily than the truth.
Reich Redux: An arresting speech eclipsed by its emblem
The air is heavy with perfume and pretense. The chandeliers, still remembering empire, tremble faintly above the susurrus of silk and the faint clink of crystal; waiters pause mid-step as the music fades. All is elegance, all is expectation – until the light catches the emblem adorning the lectern, and what it reveals draws the chamber to a hush.
It is not the crest of a ministry, but a new map of Germany – not the modest contours of today’s republic, but the phantasmal silhouette of something mythical and vastly larger: a spectral Reich stretching from the Meuse in Belgium to the Neman in Lithuania, from the Adige in northern Italy to the Little Belt in Denmark.
The Teutonic minister, ostensibly unaware of the ghosts of the past, holds a fiery irredentist speech extolling Greater Germany. Mistaking amnesia for wisdom, he calls the momentous enterprise a “triumph of European integration,” as the audience politely applauds and diplomats pretend not to notice the borders bulging on the logo.
At the close of his impassioned address, the climactic conclusion reverberates like an echo from another century: “Poland,” the government official proclaims with the calm conviction of unveiling a solemn truth, “is a mere invention.”
The guests murmur politely, cameras click, and somewhere in the background, Madam History – weary as ever – raises her long, amber-mouthed cigarette holder, takes a drag in silence, and exhales with a sigh, « Plus ça change…» .
The river-drawn borders dreamed of in the opening stanza of the “Lied der Deutschen” (1841) – effectively unsingable in modern Germany since its National Socialist appropriation – now shimmer in memory like an incandescent mirage glimpsed through gilded smoke.
From the Maas to the Memel , the Etsch to the Belt , Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s cultural geography was never a map but a mood, immortalized in a civic ode, Horatian style – a mystic hymn to unity for a people divided.
What began as romantic verse became nationalist ambition, and ambition, predictably, sought to transform poetry into borders. Yet even at the Reich ’s imperial zenith, those reverie-laden lines remained a vision rather than a realm.
Set against the weight of history, one scarcely needs imagination to picture the fury such a speech in praise of Greater Germany would provoke.
Within hours, foreign ministries would summon German ambassadors; ritual statements – expressing “deep concern” – would proliferate across capitals, solemn and indignant.
Brussels would convene an emergency session, diplomats adjusting their cuffs as they affirm the sanctity of borders. Paris, ever theatrical, would weep and warn in the same breath, invoking the ghosts of treaties past. London would issue its grave assurances, Washington would voice deep regret.
In Berlin, the chancellor would appear before a wall of flags, his voice taut with disbelief, assuring the world that “these words do not represent the Germany we know.”
Panels of experts would dissect tone and timing; historians, a little pale, a little pleased, would crowd the airwaves to remind us that language draws blood before armies do.
Protesters would gather outside German chanceries with placards and candles, while social media – half fury, half lament – would light up the night. By dawn, headlines would, inevitably, blaze, “Europe’s Nightmare Map.”
And through it all, the map would remain: a relic reborn in rhetoric, image and indictment entwined.
Premeditated scandal: A neocolonial stunt in Paris
In stark contrast to such an imagined storm of outrage, the world barely stirred when the Parisian scene unfolded for real – not casting a German finance minister invoking specters, but an Israeli one etching new lines across inherited fault lines.
At a memorial, another portentous map unfurled, not of rivers and rhyme, but of promise and providence: borders distended beyond recognition, yet the insult precise. The protagonist: Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister.
On 19 March 2023, the fervent nationalist delivered a politically supercharged address behind a lectern emblazoned with an unofficial map of “ Greater Israel ” (see Figure 1). That imagery was no ornament; it embodied what I call the “Neo-Canaan Doctrine,” a postmodern theology of empire. This conception recasts the Promised Land in its entirety as territory to be rightfully claimed by Israel.
Figure 1
At the gala event, the ideological cartographer effaced Palestine from the palimpsest of history with a casual flourish, turning theology into cartography and covenant into claim and conquest – his lines of empire, his politics of erasure draped in scripture rather than song.
Yet Smotrich went beyond symbolism. To applause, he called Israel a miracle, claimed that the Holy One stands with it, and proclaimed the “biblical truth” that the Palestinian people is a mere “ invention ” of the preceding century.
Critics denounced the final claim as extremist and racist, echoing the Zionist-colonialist creed of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Yet no ambassadors were summoned; no capitals trembled.
The controversy was sharpened by Smotrich’s role: a West Bank settler who presides over civilian governance in the occupied territory, determined to use his position in the Defense Ministry to extend Israeli sovereignty there.
In denying the existence of the Palestinian people, the leader of the ultranationalist Religious Zionism party, remarkably, merely ascended to a new register of his own extremism. He spoke from the same impulse that, on 1 March 2023, drove his call to “wipe out” the Palestinian town of Huwara after settlers had already ravaged it. In 2021, he had gone so far as to opine that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, should have “ expelled all Arabs ” from newly founded Israel.
The deep unease lies in the eerie familiarity of the Parisian neocolonial gesture. Substitute the Middle East for Europe, swap Smotrich for a German statesman unveiling a map from the Meuse to the Neman, and the chimera becomes universal: the fantasy of endless expansion, cloaked in the language of responsibility.
The bureaucrat as imperial cartographer, the accountant as nationalist dreamer – the impetus is the same: to redraw the world in the image of a mythic past, to turn nostalgia and providence into a weapon, and memory into a map.
There could scarcely be a more bitterly symbolic stage than Paris, where Europe once dreamed of universal rights, only to see them trampled beneath the boots of empire and occupation.
The allure of Greater Israel: From covenant to conquest
The “Greater Israel” vision – which critics compare to the National Socialist lebensraum concept – is the most concrete embodiment of the Promised Land theology: the ancient covenant translated into modern cartography, in a careful marriage of faith and frontier, poetry and power. What began as a scriptural metaphor of divine promise evolved into a dynamic national narrative of entitlement – a land not merely inherited but continually to be enlarged.
From early Zionist debates over biblical borders to the post-1967 settlement movements, the idea that Israel’s destiny extends “from the Nile to the Euphrates” has persisted as a powerful undercurrent, shaping both ideology and policy. The “Movement for Greater Israel” of the 1970s turned this vision into a political project, sanctifying geography as proof of faith and victory.
Across decades, the Greater Israel idea has fused myth with mandate – transforming theology into strategy and territory. What began as the vision of covenant has hardened into the policy of permanence, redrawing not only borders but Israel’s understanding of itself.
By 2025, the idea once dismissed as messianic extravagance has seeped into the marrow of Israel’s governing coalition and the settler movement alike.
Cabinet ministers speak with operatic certainty of “burying” the two-state solution. Settlements creep like tendrils across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, draped in justifications steeped in biblical prophecy. IDF soldiers have been observed drifting through the dust with Greater Israel insignia glinting on their sleeves. Senior officials now demote Lebanon to a mere “ entity ,” stripped of sovereign dignity, and muse – coldly, almost surreally – about its annihilation .
Even Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has spoken of his profound attachment to the vision of the Promised Land and the dream of a Greater Israel. To grasp the magnitude of such a profession, imagine the political firestorm that would erupt were a German chancellor to avow a longing to restore Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, Bismarck’s German Empire, or – anathema to modern sensibility – Hitler’s Third Reich!
Israel, if left unchecked, will, on the near horizon of time, likely proceed to formally annex the West Bank and Gaza, transforming de facto control into de jure sovereignty. From there, the Jewish state will almost inevitably turn its covetous gaze toward the unconquered expanse between the Nile and the Euphrates, seeking the long-imagined consummation of Project Greater Israel.
Promise in chains: The sacred made savage
The rapacious, irredentist logic taking root in the political imagination almost inevitably congeals into violence on the ground, provoking condemnation even within parts of the Jewish community. At times, the unvarnished cruelty elicits comparisons that critics denounce as outlandish moral equivalences.
In a controversial interview , the Jewish actor Wallace Shawn went so far as to advance the following contentious claim:
Israelis are “doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did…(and) in some ways, it’s worse, because they kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret... the Israelis are almost proud of it, and it’s demonically evil.”
Such remarks, incendiary by any measure, arise against a backdrop in which the divine covenant is not merely invoked but weaponized by nationalist zealots – the scriptural inheritance contorted into an apparatus of domination rather than allowed to stand as a mandate for restraint. Amid such perilous abuses of the biblical promise, it is a providential grace that Scripture harbors, within its own depths, the antidote to its profanation.
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