Two U.S. ambassadors argued, in different ways, that Israel is not bound by the borders of the Middle East. Inside Israel, the border question divides secular and religious Zionists and is turning domestic politics into an eschatological battle.

In August 2025, Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, told Mario Nawfal, host of The RoundTable on X: “In Israel’s mind these lines that were created by Sykes-Picot are meaningless.”[1] Britain and France concluded the Sykes-Picot Agreement in secret in 1916, dividing the Ottoman Empire’s Asian provinces into zones of influence. The borders of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan later followed those zones.

In February 2026, Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, was asked on Tucker Carlson’s podcast about the biblical promise of the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. He replied: “It would be fine if they took it all.” He immediately added that Israel was not asking for that and called his remark hyperbole. Fourteen Arab and Muslim states, the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation issued a joint condemnation.[2]

Barrack says Israel does not recognize the existing borders of the Middle East. Huckabee says Israel’s only borders are those of the land promised to the descendants of Abraham. Behind the two explanations stand two versions of chosenness, and the dispute between them can no longer be settled by politics.

Three Answers to One Question

What chosenness means

Haredim

For the Haredim, chosenness is an obligation to the Torah and the commandments. The coming of the Messiah and the redemption of the Jewish people, the geula, depend only on keeping the Torah. Religious Zionists see the state as the beginning of redemption, and the Haredim reject that view. The Haredim support the state when it funds yeshivas and fight it when it drafts yeshiva students into the IDF and so takes them away from the Torah.

Religious Zionists

For religious Zionists, chosenness confers a right to the land and to sovereignty over it. The state is holy to them but unfinished until Israeli sovereignty extends over the whole Land of Israel.

Secular Zionists

Secular Zionists translated chosenness into moral terms, from Ben-Gurion’s “light unto the nations” to slogans about the most moral army in the world, the only democracy in the Middle East, and the Start-Up Nation. The border question raised by the American ambassadors divides the last two versions. Secular Zionists need outside recognition and recognized borders. Religious Zionists need sovereignty extended over the whole Land of the Covenant.

The Haredim take no part in the dispute over borders. Neither borders nor international recognition settles anything for them, so the budget and the draft remain bargaining chips. They find it easier to bargain with the national-religious camp.

The End of History

In The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Francis Fukuyama described history as ending in the victory of liberal democracy, a state in which every citizen is recognized as free and equal. Secular Zionists see Israel the way Fukuyama saw the world. To them Israel is a democratic state with a strong economy and a moral reputation, recognized by the world, and that state has already been built. In Jewish tradition, conduct the nations can see either sanctifies God’s Name or desecrates it, and secular chosenness put the state where the Name had been. War, isolation, and boycotts therefore look like deviations to be corrected, and the formula of tikkun olam, “repairing the world,” comes into play.

On October 8, 2026, at the counterterrorism conference at Reichman University, opposition leader Yair Lapid listed the signs of Israel’s isolation: arrest warrants from The Hague, searches of Israelis’ luggage at Dutch airports, Eurovision boycotts, and delegations walking out of the UN General Assembly hall during Netanyahu’s speech.[4] He attributed it to years of effort by Hamas, Qatar, and Iran to cut Israel off from the world, but held the Netanyahu government responsible for failing to contain what earlier governments had kept in check.[5] After the election, he promised, a different government and different policies would restore Israel’s former standing.

Fukuyama’s end of history rests on universal recognition, so secular chosenness needs an arbiter. Its arbiter is the West: the UN, the courts in The Hague, European governments, and the Western public, with the United States as chief arbiter. For decades, the United States shielded Israel from any criticism and any threat. As long as the United States and Europe recognized Israel as a moral democracy, that recognition gave it weapons, markets, and protection in international institutions and secured its survival. The first losses came in the courts and in arms supplies. On November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu,[6] and on August 8, 2025, Germany halted military exports to Israel for use in Gaza.[7]

Huckabee, the chief arbiter’s ambassador, backed Israel but grounded its rights in the Book of Genesis. Secular chosenness needs the world to recognize Israel’s moral merit. Huckabee recognized Israel’s right to the land because God had promised it.

On to Damascus

Religious Zionists hold that the building of Israel is not finished and continues with every new settlement and every decision on sovereignty. Such an Israel has no final borders. In the Arte documentary In Israel: Ministers of Chaos, released in October 2024, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus.”[8] On August 28, 2025, he proposed annexing Gaza piece by piece, one sector a week, if Hamas did not surrender.[9] In early October 2026, in an interview with the Haredi platform Hashtiblach, he said of Egypt: “If they attack, there will be no Sinai.” He added that a captured peninsula should not be returned.[10] In this picture, Gaza, the buffer zone in Syria, the positions in Lebanon, and even Sinai are extensions of Judea and Samaria.

Steps taken by the Netanyahu government and its ministers since 2023:

  • on February 23, 2023, Smotrich received the Civil Administration’s planning and land powers in the settlements;[11]
  • on March 21, 2023, the Knesset repealed the Disengagement Law for northern Samaria;[12]
  • after the November 2024 ceasefire in Lebanon, the army stayed at five points inside the country;[13]
  • on December 8, 2024, Netanyahu declared the 1974 Disengagement Agreement with Syria void, and the army took over the buffer zone;[14]
  • on August 20, 2025, construction of 3,400 housing units in E1, between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim, was approved;[15]
  • on February 8, 2026, the security cabinet repealed the Jordanian ban on land purchases by non-Muslims in the West Bank;[16]
  • in late March 2026, the cabinet approved another 34 settlements, bringing the total under the current government to 103, against six in the 30 years before it,[17] and on July 2 it added 13.[18]

In 2025 alone, 27,941 housing units in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, were advanced in planning, 54 new settlements were approved, and 86 outposts were set up.[19] Such steps are hard to reverse and require no other state’s consent.

People, Money, and Posts

Secular chosenness protects a state already built, and in 2023 its supporters took to the streets for months to defend the Supreme Court against the judicial overhaul. The national-religious camp is building something new, and its gains are counted in settlements, housing units, and cabinet decisions. These steps need people, money, and posts, so the camp takes positions in the army, the ministries, and local government. By the count of Ariel University researchers Roi Naon and Uzi Ben-Shalom, 257 of the 851 service members killed on duty between October 7, 2023, and October 28, 2025, were national-religious, more than 30 percent, while that community makes up less than 10 percent of the population.[20] Hesder yeshivas and pre-army yeshivas train officers, the settlements’ regional councils secure budgets, and the ministries run by Smotrich and his partners approve new settlements.

Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness

As long as the camps argued over budgets, taxes, and powers, they bargained, and any Israeli coalition was possible. A dispute over the future and over borders cannot be settled by bargaining. The secular opposition goes into the election with anticlerical demands. Yair Golan names civil marriage and public transportation on Shabbat as his goals,[21] Lapid and Avigdor Liberman demand that yeshiva students be drafted, and Matan Kahana of Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party promises to bring into a coalition only those who support service for all.[22]

When joining a coalition means accepting the other side’s future, a dispute among citizens of one country turns into the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness described in the Qumran War Scroll. Each side has its own image of Israel’s future and sees the other as an obstacle on the way to it. Compromise reads as betrayal, an alliance with a rival as treason, and a dissenter as an outsider.

On October 25, two days before the vote, that logic was put in writing. Commanders for Israel’s Security wrote to Netanyahu, Defense Minister Israel Katz, and Shin Bet Director David Zini. The movement of some 600 retired generals, intelligence chiefs, police commanders, and diplomats demanded that the hilltop youth and the people of the hills, whom the letter calls “hilltop rioters,” be declared a terrorist organization under the 2016 Counter-Terrorism Law.[23] The signatories include former Defense Minister and Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon, former Mossad Director Tamir Pardo, former Shin Bet Director Ami Ayalon, and former Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi. They want the law applied to anyone who aids these groups, including residents of the settler farms, along with an end to state funding and the seizure of property used in the violence.[24] Failing to make that designation, they wrote, would be a dereliction of duty. The letter gives three reasons the violence goes on. Senior ministers back it politically. The prime minister, the defense minister, and the regional councils look the other way and at times encourage it. The state funds it, directly and indirectly.[23]

Back on July 28, the same movement asked President Trump to press Netanyahu over settler violence.[25] The next day Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Winer, chairman of the right-wing reservist movement Habithonistim, answered with a column called Ve-lamalshinim al tehi tikvah (“And for the informers, let there be no hope”). The words open the Amidah blessing that denies hope to informers. Twelfth in order but the last of the nineteen to be composed, Winer links its origins to Jews who denounced their brethren to Rome.[26] The Commanders brand their opponents terrorists under state law and complain about them to Washington. Habithonistim brands the Commanders informers in the words of a prayer.

The October 27 election will decide who controls the army, the budgets, the courts, and the ministries. The War Scroll divides the battle into seven lots, or rounds. The sons of light prevail in three, the sons of darkness in three, and the great hand of God decides the seventh.[27]

Igor Kaminnik is a researcher at the Dor Moriah Analytical Center, where he studies political polarization and Israeli public opinion.

Sources

  1. Kurdistan24, 29.08.2025: Sykes-Picot Borders ‘Meaningless’ to Israel, Says U.S. Envoy Tom Barrack kurdistan24.net ↗ ↩
  2. Malay Mail, 22.02.2026: Arab, Muslim countries condemn US envoy remarks on Israel’s biblical right to region malaymail.com ↗ ↩
  3. Dor Moriah, 11.2024: Social Divisions in Israel dor-moriah.org ↗ ↩
  4. UA.NEWS / Anadolu, 08.10.2026: Opposition leader Lapid says Israel is becoming isolated ua.news ↗ ↩
  5. Middle East Monitor, 09.10.2026: Lapid accuses Netanyahu government of driving Israel into isolation middleeastmonitor.com ↗ ↩
  6. Al-Monitor, 21.11.2024: ICC issues arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, Deif al-monitor.com ↗ ↩
Show all sources (27)Collapse sources
  1. NPR, 08.08.2025: Germany halts its military exports that Israel could use in Gaza npr.org ↗ ↩
  2. Middle East Eye, 11.10.2024: Smotrich calls for Israel’s borders to extend to Damascus middleeasteye.net ↗ ↩
  3. Al Jazeera, 28.08.2025: Smotrich calls for phased Gaza annexation aljazeera.com ↗ ↩
  4. Ynetnews, 10.2026: ‘If they attack, there will be no Sinai’: Sisi responds to Smotrich ynetnews.com ↗ ↩
  5. Algemeiner, 16.02.2023: Netanyahu to transfer full power over Civil Administration to Smotrich algemeiner.com ↗ · Division-of-powers agreement, February 23, 2023 ↩
  6. UPI, 21.03.2023: Knesset repeals disengagement law upi.com ↗ · Knesset statement, March 21, 2023 ↩
  7. JNS, 02.2025: IDF confirms it will remain in five Lebanon outposts after deadline jns.org ↗ ↩
  8. Al-Monitor, 08.12.2024: Israel PM says ordered military to seize Syria buffer zone al-monitor.com ↗ ↩
  9. J. The Jewish News, 21.08.2025: Israel approves vast West Bank settlement plan jweekly.com ↗ ↩
  10. Times of Israel, 08.02.2026: Security cabinet okays dramatic West Bank policy overhaul timesofisrael.com ↗ ↩
  11. Times of Israel, 09.04.2026: Government approves a record 34 new settlements timesofisrael.com ↗ ↩
  12. Al Jazeera, 03.07.2026: Israel approves plan to establish 13 new settlements aljazeera.com ↗ ↩
  13. EEAS: 2025 Report on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank eeas.europa.eu ↗ ↩
  14. Makor Rishon, 25.01.2026: Study finds religious fallen in the war four times their share of the population (Hebrew) makorrishon.co.il ↗ ↩
  15. Emess, 16.10.2026: Yair Golan on removing religion from the public sphere (Hebrew) emess.co.il ↗ ↩
  16. Arutz Sheva: Matan Kahana attacks Smotrich’s silence (Hebrew) inn.co.il ↗ ↩
  17. Zman Israel, 25.10.2026: Former security chiefs demand designation of “hilltop rioters” as a terrorist organization (Hebrew) zman.co.il ↗ ↩
  18. Israel Hayom, 25.10.2026: Former security chiefs demand applying the Counter-Terrorism Law to the hilltop youth (Hebrew) israelhayom.co.il ↗ ↩
  19. Al Jazeera, 28.07.2026: Israeli ex-generals urge Trump to push Netanyahu on ‘settler terror’ aljazeera.com ↗ ↩
  20. Habithonistim, 29.07.2026: Ve-lamalshinim al tehi tikvah (Hebrew) idsf.org.il ↗ ↩
  21. PBS Frontline: The War Scroll (1QM), col. I, 13–15 pbs.org ↗ ↩

AI-generated editorial illustration: a closed history and land beyond final borders.