Greater Israel, an unfinished war and Pakistan's balancing act

As the US-Iran war refuses to settle into either peace or full collapse, three questions have come to dominate the conversation in Pakistan. One, will the fighting end or is it heading toward something wider? Two, why does a country running an IMF programme, with its own politics far from settled, keep being accepted as mediator? Is this evidence of dutiful diplomacy, or is Pakistan simply doing Washington's bidding for a fee? And three, does Israel's conduct in Gaza, and now increasingly in the West Bank, point toward an actual strategic project of territorial expansion - the so-called "Greater Israel" - one that other regional states have already been forced, through war, to accommodate? Each question deserves to be treated on its evidence, not on sentiment.

Will the war end?

The record so far argues against optimism, though it does not yet argue for full-scale war either. The Islamabad Memorandum, signed by Presidents Trump and Pezeshkian on June 17 after weeks of Pakistani shuttle diplomacy, opened a 60-day window meant to produce a lasting settlement. It survived barely three weeks. By July 8, Trump was publicly declaring the ceasefire "over" after Iran was accused of striking commercial vessels near the Strait of Hormuz, and Washington answered with strikes on Iranian coastal cities. What has followed is a pattern rather than an escalation curve: Washington strikes, then pauses to let negotiators work; Tehran retaliates against US assets in the Gulf while insisting it does not trust American intentions; both governments continue, despite everything, to say publicly that talks are not dead. Lebanon remains the unresolved variable.

In negotiation theory, this is what William Zartman calls a conflict that has not yet reached "ripeness" - neither side is in enough pain, nor sees enough to gain, to accept a durable settlement. Whether the war widens further depends on one narrow but consequential fact: whether the Strait of Hormuz stays open.

Now the question whether Pakistan is playing as mercenary, dutiful actor or textbook middle power.

This is the query that deserves the most rigorous answer, because the easy one - that Pakistan is simply for hire - is also the least accurate. It was Pakistani officials who carried Washington's 15-point proposal to Tehran in March; Pakistani and Chinese diplomats who tabled a five-point counter-initiative days later; and Pakistan that Reuters reported this month has been quietly mediating between Libya's rival eastern and western power centres, with a proposed 36-month reunification plan under discussion and Washington, Riyadh, Doha and Ankara all aware of Islamabad's involvement.

International relations theory has a reasonably settled answer to why this keeps happening, and it does not require assuming Pakistan is anyone's mercenary. Scholars of "middle power diplomacy" - a field built substantially on the work of Andrew Cooper, Richard Higgott and Kim Richard Nossal - argue that states without great-power resources acquire influence through what they call "niche diplomacy": positioning themselves as coalition-builders and honest brokers precisely because they lack the imperial stake that would make either side distrust them outright. Separately, negotiation scholars distinguish between mediators who bring leverage through power (the "stick"), inducement (the "carrot"), and those who bring leverage through trust and access alone. Pakistan is unmistakably the third kind. It has no capacity to compel either Washington or Tehran to do anything. What it has is geography - a 900 km border with Iran, a position astride the eastern Gulf - a nuclear-armed military establishment that both capitals will still take a call from, and the institutional memory of having opened the US-China channel in 1971. That is a textbook middle-power profile, not a mercenary one.

Is "Greater Israel" a strategy or a slogan?

Here the evidence is unusually explicit for something so often dismissed as speculation. In August 2025, Prime Minister Netanyahu was shown a map of the biblical "Promised Land" on Israeli TV and asked if he felt connected to the vision. He answered "very much" – a remark that drew formal objections from Egypt and Jordan and condemnation from the Arab League. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has spoken publicly of Jerusalem's future extending "to Damascus", proposed annexing 82% of the West Bank, and authored a document known as the "Decisive Plan" that calls explicitly for permanent Israeli sovereignty over all territory between the river and the sea. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has pushed for the depopulation of Gaza's roughly 2 million residents to enable Jewish resettlement. The East Jerusalem-severing E1 settlement project, long frozen under international pressure, was formally approved in 2025.

The pattern extends beyond rhetoric into precedent. The Golan Heights, seized from Syria in the 1967 war, was unilaterally recognised as Israeli territory by the US in 2019 - annexation, in other words, has already been normalised once and absorbed by the international system with only rhetorical resistance. Iraq's Osirak reactor was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in 1981 on the premise that no hostile Muslim state should be allowed a nuclear option, a precedent Israeli commentator invoke explicitly when discussing both Iran and, at times, Pakistan.

None of this proves a single, centrally coordinated master plan. Serious analysts, including some cited in Israeli media itself, caution that "Greater Israel" functions today as a live and increasingly mainstream ideological current within the ruling coalition rather than as declared, unified state doctrine binding every institution. That distinction matters intellectually. But the UNSC's own monthly record - Resolution 2334, the ICJ's July 2024 advisory opinion declaring the occupation unlawful, the Secretary-General's repeated statements that West Bank settlements have no legal validity, and the roughly six settler attacks recorded daily against Palestinians since the start of this year - leaves little room to treat the underlying trajectory as innocent drift rather than policy.

Taken together, the three answers point to the same underlying conclusion. The war has not ended because neither side has yet been forced to conclude it must. Pakistan mediates because it has built the one form of capital - access and trust rather than money or force - that this moment rewards. And the Greater Israel project is an ideological current that has moved from the margins into mainstream Israeli politics.