Opinion | Greater Israel And The New West Asia Order: Analysing Netanyahu’s Strategic Playbook

Last Updated:March 13, 2026, 00:48 IST

Netanyahu has been repeatedly addressing the Iranians, reminding them of their ancient ties with the Jews and encouraging them to overthrow the Shia theocracy.

Make no mistake. Generally, the Jews are even more deeply steeped in their ancient history than their Abrahamic siblings, Christians or Muslims. The Old Testament has, for centuries, been their portable Fatherland, adherence to which, they believe, swept them back in 1948 into what we now call Israel, after some 2,000 years of wandering across continents.

So much so that, even now, some pious members of their ultraconservative Essenes sect refrain from defecation on Sabbath (Saturdays)! Why? Because, they believe, God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh—no devout should, therefore, work on the rest day. Any effort by human body, defecation included, is theologically prohibited on this day.

Few realise that the devout Jews do not even utter the full name of their God; the Hebrew name of God is a tetragrammaton, transliterated in four letters as YHWH/JHVH, and articulated as Yahweh/Yahu/Jehovah. The surname Netanyahu literally means “Gift of Yahu (God)."

Unless we understand this deep religiosity of the Jews, we cannot fathom what is happening in West Asia in our time. In the medieval era, God-loving Christians fought several Crusades against Muslims; Israel is now waging a ‘divine war:’

“On that day the Lord made a Covenant with Abram (Abraham) and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites." (Genesis 15: 18-21).

These are names of contemporary native communities (circa 1300 BC), now extinct, whose land their Lord the God gave the Jews in return for their belief/sacrifice/covenant: circumcision. After their Exodus, and Prophet Moses ked them out after Egyptian Captivity (1250 BC), they eliminated these communities, apart from Canaanites and Midianites, and established Israel (literally, the “Land of God’s People").

The extent of this God’s “Promised Land" or divine Jewish territory, according to the Old Testament, is from the Nile River (Wadi) in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia, or what is now Iraq.

Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael Hashlema), or the “Whole Land of Israel," is an expansion of this Promised Land, aiming to create a Jewish state extending significantly beyond current borders. It typically refers to land potentially including Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Egypt and even Saudi Arabia. It is seen as a revisionist Zionist ideology advocating for Israeli sovereignty over the entire biblical Land of Israel. It emerged post-1967 as a, often right-wing, movement to prevent territorial concessions.

Those who have read O Jerusalem, the 1971 masterpiece on history by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, can recall how the enterprising Jews, funded and protected by their Western counterparts, recrystallised Israel from what until 1948 was Palestine. According to the Hebrew Bible, Yahu promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants as an everlasting possession.

This promise, known as the Covenant of the Pieces, expands into a “Greater Israel." Its area is described in Old Testament books like Genesis and Numbers, and includes territory from the Negev to the Lebanon mountains, and the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea, besides, of course, the Palestinian territories (West Bank/Gaza). This, for the devout Jews, is an unconditional, eternal covenant; other Jews see it was contingent on obedience to the covenant.

The bilateral deal between their Lord and the Jews — ‘In return for your obedience, sealed by circumcision, I give you this land,’ — is a cornerstone of Jewish theology, representing the land as a divine inheritance.

Remember the resolve of Israel: 10 million Jews of the world are fighting against 1,800 million Muslims!

Others may forget. The Hebrews never.

Hexagon for Greater Israel

On February 22, 2026, ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Jerusalem (February 25-26), his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a “Hexagon of Alliances." Its member countries would collectively stand against what he called “radical" adversaries.

“In the vision I see before me, we will create an entire system, essentially a ‘hexagon’ of alliances around or within the Middle East," Netanyahu said.

“The intention here is to create an axis of nations that see eye to eye on the reality, challenges, and goals against the radical axes, both the radical Shia axis, which we have struck very hard, and the emerging radical Sunni axis."

“This includes India, Arab nations, African nations, Mediterranean nations (Greece and Cyprus), and nations in Asia that I won’t detail at the moment. I will present this in an organised manner," Netanyahu added.

All of these nations share a different perception, and our cooperation can yield great results and, of course, ensure our resilience and our future," he said.

He may have sought to pit this proposed Hexagon vis-a-vis the “Axis of Resistance," an Iran-led network of allied Shia terror groups (chiefly, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza) that oppose Israeli and Western influence in the Middle East. In Baghdad, Tehran maintained close ties with various Shia armed groups, including factions within the Popular Mobilisation Forces and groups such as Kataib Hezbollah.

Was/is there a ‘Sunni axis’ as well?

Not really as Israel attacked at least six Arab countries in the volatile region in 2025, including Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, besides Iran, and conducted attacks linked to Gaza in international waters in Tunisia and Greece. It also threatened Egypt, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan, according to media reports. In March 2026, however, Iran attacked most of the Sunni Arab nations around.

His call for a hexagon is significant because it formalises a shift already underway in West and South Asia.

Unlike the earlier buzz of an India-UAE-Israel-Greece understanding, this is a publicly articulated strategic doctrine. Netanyahu named the adversaries and signalled its intent. His pitch for the new alliances comes amid a visible churn triggered by the Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement, signed in September 2025, and often described by analysts as an “Islamic Nato". But Pakistan has, so far, failed to protect the Saudis from Iran!

There are also wheels-within-wheels; and Shia Iran’s attacks on the Sunni Arabs has muddied waters from which, Israel hopes, a Greater Israel would emerge in the 21st century the way the two European wars (World Wars I and II) recrystallised the Jewish state between 1914 and 1948.

Iran war

The US-Israel war against Iran, starting February 28, 2026, has multiple layers, dimensions, and frenemies. And former superpower Russia and wannabe superpower China are reduced to look at the war from the sidelines.

For the larger geopolitical aims of the US, for example, the conflict aims at total exclusion of China from the Middle East. The overall strategy of the US, under President Donald Trump, then and now, has been to cut China to size everywhere. According to The Wall Street Journal (March 2), Iran sold 90 per cent of its crude to China (1.6 million barrels per day) in 2025. By joining Israel in attacking Iran, therefore, the US aims to push out China, which, in 2023, made big inroads in the Middle East by brokering peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia—at the expense of the US, then under President Joe Biden.

In 2025, Trump turned the tables, again, on China. He wooed Pakistan back and, in September 2025, ensured Islamabad signed a defence pact with Riyadh—against Iran. Unable to do more than issuing a statement, when the US-Israel duo attacked Iran for a second time in a year, China kept off la affaire Iran, at least for now, so as not to burn it fingers again in the raging fire.

In 2024, the US had similarly ‘evicted’ Russia from the Middle East when Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow and a Washington-friendly Ahmed al-Shaara, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader, replaced him after the US sanitized him of terror charges.

Israel’s aims

Like Christians and Muslims, the Jews also have a long memory. Modernity only updates and upgrades their strategies and tactics to clear ancient backlogs.

Trying to obliterate Iran’s theocratic regime, Israel has its own objectives—civilisational, historical and religious.

Netanyahu has been repeatedly addressing the Iranians, directly and in Persian language, reminding them of their ancient ties with the Jews, and encouraging them to overthrow the Shia theocracy.

Reminding Iranians of their pre-Islamic bonds with the Jews, he highlighted the 2,500-year-old connection with the Achaemenid Empire’s founder, Cyrus the Great, a great Zoroastrian monarch, who freed the enslaved Jews from Babylon in 539 BC. Cyrus allowed the Jewish people to return to Israel, and rebuild their Jewish Temple and Jerusalem where they lived until 70 AD and returned in 1948. Netanyahu portrayed this history as a foundation for future peace with Iran.

He distinguishes between the Iranian people and their Islamic leadership, stating that both Israel and ordinary Iranians share a “common enemy" in the current theocratic regime, which he claims oppresses its own citizens.

In his messages, including those using AI to deliver speeches in Persian, he has been urging Iranians to take to the streets to overthrow the regime, promising that their “moment will come soon." When the regime falls, the “two ancient nations" of Israel and Iran will renew their bonds of friendship, leading to prosperity.

He also referenced a Torah command equating the current Iranian regime to an ancient biblical foe.

During a visit to a site struck by an Iranian missile on March 3, 2026, Netanyahu stated: “We read in this week’s Torah portion, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.’ We remember—and we act." The Amalekites are identified in the Hebrew Bible as a persistent adversary of the Israelites.

On October13, 2023, during the swearing-in of Israel’s emergency unity government, Netanyahu stated: “Today, against the enemy, with the ancient command ‘Remember what Amalek did to you’ ringing in our ears, today we are uniting forces to ensure the eternity of Israel."

As the ground invasion of Gaza began on October 28, 2023, he told soldiers: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember."

As George Santayana said in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The Jews learn from their history and want to make it anew now.

Others who don’t, will discuss and decry.

(The author is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.)

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