Today, Explained - Why Israel won’t stop

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Trump and Netanyahu are beefing over Israel's continued attacks on Lebanon. Israel has seized land there, in Gaza, and in Syria. And in service of something called "Greater Israel," it may not be done yet. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Danielle Hewitt, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arriving for a press conference at the White House. Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Israel and Lebanon agreed to a U.S.-backed ceasefire last night. A ceasefire. That part of the world ceasefire is when you're shooting in a more moderate manner. This morning, Israel admitted it is still targeting Hezbollah and Lebanon, so point for Donald Trump maybe. Though Trump said yesterday, Hezbollah had agreed to stop shooting at Israel. We actually spoke with Hezbollah for the first time ever. We didn't know they spoke. Trump is growing frustrated with Benjamin Netanyahu.

cop to cussing him out in a phone call on Monday. Congress is growing frustrated with Trump. The House voted yesterday to demand that the president withdraw U.S. forces from the region or get congressional approval. The ayes are 215 and the days are 208. Underpinning all of this, the question of what Israel is actually trying to do here. Today and today explained from Fox, the Greater Israel Project, what it is and why it means Israel doesn't want to stop. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WNBA.

All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Megan Rapino here. This week is our last regular episode of A Touchmore before I kick off a limited series, A Touchmore, The Beautiful Game, a special series. for the World Cup featuring in-depth interviews with some of soccer's biggest stars.

But for this week, we are closing out The Arrow with a special compilation episode featuring our absolute favorite moments and themes from our last 90 episodes of A Touchmore. Check out the latest episode of A Touchmore wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. This is Today Explained. Mark Caputo. I'm a senior political writer and White House correspondent for Axios. And you've been writing about something that happened between, President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, what happened exactly? What went down? Over the weekend, President Trump was hopeful that he was close to a deal, a peace deal with Iran.

Truth Social. Talks are continuing at a rapid pace with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President Donald J. Trump. And behind the scenes, according to some of our administration sources, Benjamin Netanyahu, Netanyahu, Prime Minister Netanyahu, had been advocating to have Lebanon as sort of part of the peace deal, but President Trump thought that that was sort of too many moving parts. Next thing everyone knows, on Sunday, Netanyahu unleashes a pretty ferocious attack on Hezbollah and Lebanon. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister announced that they had ordered the military to strike Beirut. The Israeli military said it launched its heaviest ever strike.

strikes across Lebanon, hitting 100 targets in just 10 minutes alone. It's unclear what the goal of this expansion is going to be, but attacks have certainly increased since a nominal ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon went to effect in April 17. And Iran then says, we're done talking about a peace deal. You know, it's sort of a little bit of kabuki that they do. And Trump got very angry, picked up the phone. And according to our sources, really lit in to Prime Minister Nanyahu. He says, you know, what the fuck are you doing?

We were told Trump said to Netanyahu, you're fucking crazy. You'd be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this. And Trump also had told Netanyahu that you just got to stop. You've got to stop. After that call, Netanyahu did signal he was going to scale it back a little, but not completely.

And now there's allegedly some sort of detente. All right. So President Trump was asked about this in a. New York Post podcast on Wednesday. Did you say it? He says, yeah, I did. How exactly did the president characterize what happened in that meeting? Well, he said he wasn't angry, but he was a little bit perturbed.

I wouldn't say angry. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon. You know, at some point, I said, maybe we've got to stop this. So to the degree he was disputing our reporting, it was the description. of how mad he was. Understand that Trump and Netanyahu, as I like to say, they have sort of a brotherly relationship between the two of them, but sometimes brothers fight.

And periodically, they've had these clashes. Usually it's Trump laying in a Netanyahu because he thinks Netanyahu is just too aggressive, a little too often, and pushes the envelope too much. Now, Netanyahu and his people think the prime minister has to advocate and defend and attack enemies vociferously on behalf of Israel, because if he doesn't, then no one will.

Why has the relationship between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu deteriorated? I don't want to say it's deteriorated overall. We don't know because there have been times where this has happened in the past. For instance, last year Netanyahu unleashed an assault on Syria. And Trump, you know, sort of lit into him over that. We wrote about that at Axios. And then when Trump was close to getting the Gaza peace deal, which he eventually did do, he had also sort of chastised Netanyahu for standing in the way of a good agreement,

letting sort of the perfect be the enemy of the good. But underlying all of this is a belief by a number of people in U.S. government in the administration writ large that there are convergences of interests, there are, there's an alignment of interests, between America and Israel on some things, and there are divergences. There are times when the interests of the two nations start to come apart. And there are some in the administration who believe that Netanyahu ultimately either doesn't want peace or doesn't want peace enough and therefore has sort of a perverse incentive to keep the conflict going. And to be clear, Hasbullah is a terrorist group. It is financed by Iran. It doesn't

have a lot of interest in keeping the peace. It's all very sort of spy versus spy and dysfunction. I think I'd said somewhere else that this is, it's sort of like a chess board where the two players are also shooting at each other with high-powered weaponry, missiles, drones, and other sorts of explosives and high-impact ordinance. Polling shows us that American are frustrated with this war in Iran and with the administration's support of Israel, both of those things. That could have consequences in the midterms. Do we think that at this point, that is motivating President Trump? It would be motivating an ordinary president, I think, but President Trump can be different sometimes. You know, President Trump is not always a reliable

narrator. Let's charitably describe it that way. But there are times where he is just brutally honest in a way that no politician is. And when he was asked a variant of the question that you just posed about whether the political considerations of looming midterms are starting to impact his talks at Iran, he said, no, I'm not thinking about that. They thought they were going to outweigh me, you know,

we'll outweigh him. He's got the midterms. I don't care about the midterms. And if you look at everything he's done, that's probably true. Now, as a result of him not doing that, things are much rougher on the Republicans, and it doesn't appear as if things are going to markedly improve between now, you know, early June and November. So, yes, this is a drag on Republicans.

Gas prices don't show much signs of decreasing. If you look at sort of the more, the granular, you zoom in a bit more in different places in the nation. Iowa is going to have a more contested U.S. Senate race perhaps than otherwise thought. Iowa are red state, but it's a farm state. Not only are they grappling with the costs of higher fuel, but higher fertilizer prices and trade policies, restrictions trade policies by President Trump that have also made farming and selling farming products more complicated. So there are these very real effects of both the war and Donald Trump's policies writ large that appear to be a drag on the government. the president's party. It's impossible to know if President Trump is actually at a breaking point

with Benjamin Netanyahu. But if he were, it would be a very big deal. What would it look like if President Trump simply said enough, enough of this? I'll admit I would find that difficult to see because one of the myths I think about President Trump going into this war that is said by some people, some anti-Semites and some not anti-Semites, is that Trump was basically tricked into it by a crafty Netanyahu. That's not the case. Trump went into this of his own accord and of his own beliefs. Now, did Netanyahu and the Israeli intelligence services play a role in that?

Sure, were they part of the discussions? Absolutely. But just as Trump went in there of his own accord and based on his own beliefs and the intelligence that is produced by the U.S. intel agencies, Trump is not pulling out because of Netanyahu. The relationship between the two of them is close and it's pretty strong. strong and pretty deep. At the same time, Trump does not hesitate to let loose on Netanyahu periodically when he feels that the Israeli prime minister has gone too far. And that's just sort of what you saw over this weekend.

Mark Caputo of Axios, coming up, why Israel won't stop? We're going to explain something called the Greater Israel Project. Support for the show today comes from What Not. And they provided me a pronunciation key that says, what not. That's how it's pronounced. What Not, but it's one word and whatnot. If you sell products online

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rhymes. You can try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash explained. That's QUO.com slash explained. Support for today. Explain comes from built rewards. How do you like your awards? I like mine built. Housing is probably one of, if not the biggest expense you're paying every month. So why not make that expense work for you? That's where built comes in. Built is a membership program for where you live. That rewards you with points on every housing payment. Built started out rewarding members on their rent. Now as of 2026, built members can also earn points on mortgage payments. Mortgage points, hello. Every housing payment earns you points you can use towards flights with top travel partners like United and Hyatt. My

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Daniel was an Israeli negotiator during the Oslo Accords in the 90s and early aughts. And as such, he spent a lot of time thinking about Israel's borders. First of all, unusually, Israel does not have defined borders. It has peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan. So those borders are actually defined, the Egyptian and the Jordanian border within. Israel. But when it comes to Syria, for instance, Israel annexed illegally, Syrian territory after the 1973 war, after the 67 war later on. It annexed the Golan. So that border is in dispute with Lebanon. Israel is right now, as people will know, deep inside Lebanese territory. But it normally focuses on

Greater Israel, so that's everything that is recognized as Israel today, plus the West Bank, plus Gaza. But greater Israel means different things to different people. So right from the early days of the Zionist project, there were those who said, well, if we're going to Zion, then this is the biblical land of Israel. So that stretches from, you may have heard the term, the Nile to the Euphrates. Not only does that cover all of Israeli and what putatively has been designated as a Palestinian state territory, but parts of present-day Egypt, Jordan, Syria. Sometimes you'll have Israeli leaders saying we can extend even further. But from the early days of the Zionist movement, there was a part of that, the revisionist Zionist movement.

And in fact, their slogan was both banks of the Jordan. So that includes all of modern-day Jordan. Though my country may be poor and small, it is mine from head to foot, stretching from the sea to the desert, and the Jordan in the middle. Zav Jabotinsky, founder of the Revitin. visionist Zionist movement. The creation of Israel derived from a UN partition plan. We're in an era of decolonization. This is the late 1940s.

Britain is the colonial power. It said it wants out. It hands it to the UN. The UN sets up a special commission. It votes to partition the land between a Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state. The Jewish state is supposed to get about 55%. The Palestinian Arab state, 45%. When Israel is established, Israel then expands its territory immediately from 55 to 78%.

It ticks out most of the Palestinian population. That's known as the Nakhba, the Palestinian catastrophe. In 1967, Israel then takes that whole 100% of territory. The Palestinians in the late 1980s saying, you know what, after everything that's happened, we'll accept a mini-state on just 22% of the land. And that's supposed to be the premise of Oslo, of the peace process, of this idea of a West Bank, Gaza, Palestinian state, but those borders have never been fixed. So greater Israel to most people is about all the land that Palestinians still currently reside on.

To some it expands much further. Okay, so some people say greater Israel is a desire to have a map of Israel that is larger than it is today. and there are historical reasons for wanting that, and there are historical reasons that make the borders of Israel ostensibly easier to expand. Is there somewhere in an Israeli government office a folder that says, this is the Greater Israel Project, this is what we plan to do? And who has that folder?

Whose plan is this within Israel? Every single Israeli government, since Israel took the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, since the settlement project began moving Israeli citizens against international law into those Palestinian territories that are under Israeli occupation and administration, every government, Labour, all they could, centre right or centre left, has built and expanded those settlements. And today's Israeli governing coalition, in the coalition agreement,

which guides the government policies, has a line that says the Jewish people have the exclusive and inalienable right to all of the land of Israel. That's the official guidelines of the government. Now, there are some in the government who say to Damascus openly. Who says that? Well, people may have heard of two ministers who are part of a further right party that Prime Minister Netanyahu helped create.

Betzal El Smotrich, finance minister, head of the National Religious Party, Itamal Ben-Gviel, police internal security minister, head of the Jewish Power Party. They openly say, Greater Israel, resettle Gaza, settle Lebanon, expand the presence into Syria. Smotrich says right to Damascus. Okay, bit by bit, it is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus. So you've got a government that says we want this.

It does make me wonder, though, ordinary Israelis, people who live in Israel, is this something that they want, that they support? If you ask the Israeli broad populace, do you identify with the settlements and greater Israel? You wouldn't get a consensus there. But if you ask them, should Israel evacuate that territory for a Palestinian state, you would get significantly more than 50% opposition. So the reality is that the settlement project, the greater Israel project, is, the lived reality. That's what gets budgets. That's where the military is positioned. That's how Israel lives on a day-to-day basis. The U.S. has a tricky relationship with Israel right now,

and we'll get into President Trump in just a second. But before we get to him, are there Americans in leadership that are advocating for this? Are there Americans that are saying, yes, let's have a bigger, a larger Israel, an Israel with a larger map? So the U.S. ambassador in Israel, Huckabee, he has talked about a greater Israel in the more expansive definition of the term. Does Israel have the right to that land? Because you're appealing to Genesis. You're saying that's the original deed. It would be fine if they took it all. He represents there a brand of dispensationist evangelical Zionism. Let's not, though, let everyone else off the hook because no U.S. administration really ever clamped down on the

settlements or held Israel to account for expanding into additional Palestinian territory in that way. There is a world in which the war in Iran ends today. There's a world in which the war in Iran ended three weeks ago. Can I move to that world? Yes. Yeah, I'll go with you. There is, what we see is that the war in Iran is continuing, and we hear it's in part because Israel has aims in Iran in Lebanon that are preventing the end of this war. How much of not ending the war on Israel's side has to do with the greater Israel project, with expanding the borders of Israel? What's important to understand when one zooms out and beyond Israel's relentless displacement of Palestinians, seizing a Palestinian land, everything that we see, is to,

understand the Greater Israel project from an additional angle. Because we've been focused on the territorial dimension. But there's another way of understanding greater Israel. And that, I think, is most relevant in the context of bringing the US into this war against Iran and wanting it to continue, which Israel very transparent, he wants to be the case. And that is thinking about where Israel can project power. thinking of Israel as trying to maximally dominate this region of the world. And to do that, Israel needs to have an Iran that is domesticated,

ideally a collapsing chaotic state. And if, by the way, in the process of doing that, some of the Gulf states are exposed as more vulnerable, which is exactly what was predictable and what has happened, And then the Israeli hope is they will move more into Israel's orbit. Trump spoke about this the other day and said they should join the Abraham Accords. Spoiler alert, Saudi and the others aren't about to do that. But if you can demonstrate that because you can bring American power uniquely into the equation

and use that power, that you are the unassailable military hegemon, then you begin to assert a greater Israel dominion in a different way. Natanyahu talks about this. Our threats come and go, but when we become a regional superpower, and in many respects a global superpower, we have the power to push away threats and ensure our future. He talks about the answer to Hormuz, building pipelines to Israel's Mediterranean ports.

Just have oil pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula, right up to Israel, right up to our Mediterranean ports, and you've just done away. with the choke points for forever. So he openly teases out this idea in many of his statements and actions. Personally, I think that's overreach. I don't think they can achieve that.

Yes, I wonder about the question of overreach because many of Israel's allies have become deeply frustrated with Israel in the past, you know, two and a half years. We talked in the first half of the show about how President, Trump apparently got into a fight with Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone. And I wonder where this could lead if Netanyahu continues to push this agenda. Could it lead to such alienation from Israel's allies that it ends up reducing Israel's power and influence because Israel is abandoned by its allies? What is the potential downside here for Netanyahu and those who pursue this? Potential downside is devastating, potentially. Ha. Israel is already looking at a reality in which regional actors who were taking very seriously the idea of Israel. It's there.

It's not going away. It needs to be integrated. We'll play footsie. If only they weren't so in your face about how they treat the Palestinians. Maybe they can get past that. Those countries today look around and they say, yes, we had the problem with Iran. But who started this war? Who managed to get America to do this against our interests?

That's a widely held position in the Gulf. And they look and they say, our publics have been watching these images coming out of Gaza for two and a half years. That is deeply radicalizing. Public opinion. They hear what Israeli leaders say, that openly expansionist but also racist.

And they say this country needs to be contained. Now, do they have the wherewithal to do it? And they cooperate sufficiently to do it. unclear. That's though the potential blowback that Israel is facing. Israel talks now about Turkey being the next Iran and enemy, taking on a very major military power and NATO state. That's not a war for tomorrow. But that's where some of this intended power projection bumps up against the realities that Israel is a small country. So many people are saying ideologically, this expansionist vision, and practically speaking, a small country with a limited population being able to carry it out,

the anger that it is generating, all of that could blow up in our face in quite devastating ways. I wish I could tell you that if we see the back of Natanyahu and, as I mentioned, Smotrich, Ben-Gavir, then all this is out the window. But you still don't today have an alternative vision for actual existing Zionism that's non-expansionist, and that gets you right back to the story if this is a country without borders. Daniel Levy of the U.S. Middle East project. Daniel Hewitt and Avishai Artsy produced today's show. Jolie Myers edited.

Patrick Boyd was our engineer and Gabriel Duntov check the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.