Ahmadinejad says Israel will soon disappear

I am not sure what you are getting at here. We have at least the one example of a human being using the term and not intending to have it be taken literally. This establishes that the word, as a word (no matter who is using it), need not be taken literally.

In any event, this all traces back to the issue of whether a certain chunk of land was promised to Jews forever. I am asserting that it really does not mean what it seems to mean - it is really a promise for "Israel according to the Spirit" and the thing promised is really the totality of redeemed creation, not the land of Palestine.

If one accuses me of "revisionism", then I stand in good company. Paul in Romans makes it clear that promises that seem targeted at "ethnic Israel" are in fact, targeted at "Israel according to the Spirit" - a set of persons that includes Gentiles as well.

So we have this in Romans 9:

What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? 23What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— 24even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles? 25As he says in Hosea:
"I will call them 'my people' who are not my people;
and I will call her 'my loved one' who is not my loved one,"[i] 26and,
"It will happen that in the very place where it was said to them,
'You are not my people,'
they will be called 'sons of the living God.'

Paul is clearly invoking Hosea here to make the point that things are not as they seem - the heirs of the promises are not the Jews only. And obviously, this undercuts the arguably simplistic claim that Genesis 13:15 is a promise for the Jew, so for the Jew it must be.

Paul, in Romans, is systematically arguing that the promises of the Old Testament never were for the Jews after all, but rather were for this "second Israel" - hence this statement from Romans 9:

6It is not as though God's word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.

People who see Genesis 13:15 as a promise of Palestine for the Jews forever are, I suggest, not taking Paul's arguments in Romans (if not elsewhere) seriously.