Which Israeli political parties and movements have explicitly used the phrase Eretz Yisrael Ha‑Shlema (Greater Israel) and how has their influence changed over time?
Executive summary
The phrase Eretz Yisrael Ha‑Shlema ("the Whole/Greater Land of Israel") has been explicitly used by Revisionist Zionists and their political descendants — notably Menachem Begin’s Herut and today’s Likud — and by a discrete post‑1967 organization actually named the Movement for Greater Israel (Tnu'a Lema'an Eretz Yisrael HaSheleima) that pushed permanent retention and settlement of captured territory [1] [2] [3]. Its public force rose sharply after the 1967 war with settlement activism and political absorption into the right, receded into margins at moments when pragmatists and international constraints dominated, and survives now as both a rhetorical thread in parts of the right and as a platform of smaller far‑right and religious actors [4] [3] [5].
1. Origins: Revisionist Zionism and the rhetorical claim to the “whole land”
From the interwar years and into Israel’s founding, Revisionist Zionists articulated a political project that invoked Eretz Yisrael as a territorial ideal — a usage described in historical surveys linking that tendency to the modern Likud family — and leaders like Menachem Begin continued to speak of Eretz Yisrael as a way of signalling allegiance to the larger, historic/biblical land rather than the narrow Medinat Yisrael formulation championed by Ben‑Gurion [1] [2] [6].
2. Institutionalized movement: Tnu’a Lema’an Eretz Yisrael HaSheleima (Movement for Greater Israel)
After the Six‑Day War, activists and intellectuals formed a self‑identified Movement for Greater Israel that explicitly bore the Hebrew name Eretz Yisrael HaShelema and campaigned for retention and settlement of the newly occupied territories; it ran unsuccessfully in 1969 and then joined the Likud bloc before the 1973 elections, illustrating how the explicit “Greater Israel” project tried both independent and coalition routes into politics [3].
3. Peaks and diffusion: 1967–2000s — from settlement drive to ideological diffusion
Israel’s 1967 victory created the political opening for the Movement for Greater Israel and for settlement activism that embedded the “whole land” claim into practical politics and the map of the West Bank, and that diffusion extended beyond one party as elements across the right and religious Zionism adopted maximal or more limited versions of Eretz Yisrael rhetoric [4] [7].
4. Party evolution: Likud, Herut, and mainstreaming versus dilution
The Revisionist current evolved into Herut and later the Likud, which historically carried strands of the Eretz Yisrael idea in rhetoric and policy constituencies even as the party also pursued pragmatic statecraft; the Movement for Greater Israel’s absorption into Likud (one Knesset seat allocated to its representative in 1973) shows both ideological influence and political assimilation rather than independent electoral dominance [3] [8].
5. Margins and mutations: far‑right, religious, and contemporary permutations
Beyond mainstream parties, explicit or derivative names — such as Eretz Yisrael Shelanu among far‑right groupings — and extremist organizations have invoked territory in maximalist language, and scholars note a split between a post‑1967 pragmatic claim “between the sea and the Jordan” embedded in party platforms and a smaller biblical maximalism stretching to the Euphrates that tends to appear among religious ideologues and conspiratorial actors [5] [7].
6. Trajectory of influence: ebb, mainstream accommodation, and contested revival
The political force of explicit “Greater Israel” language peaked in the immediate post‑1967 settlement era and was institutionalized partly through absorption into the right (notably Likud), but subsequent decades saw public sentiment, religio‑political shifts and international constraints blunt the maximalist program — commentators recorded by 2005 a waning expectation that Eretz Yisrael HaShelema could be realized in a generation — even as the underlying claim remains rhetorically available and influential within certain parties and movements today [4] [3] [7].
7. Competing narratives, agendas and evidentiary limits
Sources converge that Revisionist/Herut/Likud lineages and the Movement for Greater Israel explicitly used the phrase and that the concept bifurcates into narrower post‑1967 and broader biblicist meanings, but available reporting does not provide a granular, year‑by‑year measure of electoral strength for every actor or of how often contemporary leaders publicly invoke the exact phrase today; assessment of influence therefore rests on organizational history, electoral footholds and observed policy outcomes such as settlement growth [1] [3] [4] [7].