Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI).
A revealing dispute has erupted inside Israel’s left-wing Democrats Party over whether its leader, Yair Golan, should use the term “Judea and Samaria" or not. Gaby Lasky, a former radical left Meretz member who placed sixth in the party’s recent primary, reportedly demanded that Golan use the supposedly more acceptable term “West Bank." Golan rejected the premise, correctly responding that “Judea and Samaria" is not inherently a right-wing expression.
The controversy is not trivial, and it is not merely semantic. It demonstrates how thoroughly some Israelis have internalized the language of their adversaries. Before debating whether Jews may live in Judea and Samaria, they are being asked to concede that Jews may not even call these regions by their historical names.
That concession should be rejected.
“Judea and Samaria" is not partisan terminology. It is geographical, historical and civilizational terminology. The phrase “West Bank," by contrast, is a relatively modern political label created to describe territory conquered by Jordan during its invasion of the newly established State of Israel.
Those who insist that “West Bank" is neutral while “Judea and Samaria" is ideological have the matter precisely backward. They are treating the vocabulary produced by an Arab military conquest as objective, while dismissing names used for thousands of years as political propaganda.
The Politics Behind the Name
Language shapes political reality. Once Judea and Samaria are routinely described only as the “West Bank," the Jewish connection to the land begins to disappear from public consciousness. Jerusalem becomes an isolated city rather than the capital of an ancient Jewish civilization. Hebron is separated from Abraham and Sarah. Bethlehem is detached from King David. Shiloh is stripped of the Tabernacle, and Bethel of the patriarchs.
The land is transformed linguistically into an anonymous strip of territory whose history supposedly began when Israel took control of it in 1967.
That is not neutral geography. It is historical erasure.
For many years, diplomats, journalists and international organizations have focused obsessively on Judea, Samaria and Gaza-as if the disposition of these relatively small territories were the sole obstacle to peace throughout the Middle East. Political scientist and international jurist Paul S. Riebenfeld noted that these regions represented only a small part of the territory originally placed under the British Mandate for Palestine.
During the Mandate period, Samaria was used as an official administrative designation. British administrative arrangements changed over time, but a Samaria District appeared in the Mandatory system, and the geographical names Judea and Samaria were commonly understood and used long before Israel assumed control of the territories in 1967.
They are therefore neither invented Israeli terminology nor obscure biblical relics. They describe the historical regions in which much of the Jewish people’s national, religious and political history occurred.
The term “West Bank" emerged only after Jordan seized Judea and Samaria during the 1948 war. Jordan used the expression to distinguish the territory west of the Jordan River from the kingdom’s original territory on the river’s eastern side.
Jordan formally annexed the territory in April 1950. That annexation received almost no international recognition and was rejected even by most Arab states. Britain recognized it, while the precise positions attributed to Pakistan, Iraq and the United States have been described differently by historians and legal authorities. What is not seriously disputed is that Jordanian sovereignty over the territory was never broadly accepted.
Yet the geographical terminology produced by Jordan’s conquest survived. The conquest was not recognized, but its vocabulary was.
That is an extraordinary political achievement. Jordan’s military occupation lasted less than two decades, yet the name devised during that occupation is now presented as more authentic than Judea and Samaria-the names connected to the land for millennia.
Jewish Rights Were Recognized, Not Manufactured
The terminology debate also reflects a deeper misunderstanding about the legal foundations of Jewish national rights.
Israel’s adversaries frequently claim that the international community “gave" Palestine to the Jews and may therefore take it back. Under this theory, Jewish national rights exist only at the pleasure of foreign governments, international institutions or shifting diplomatic majorities.
Douglas Feith, an American lawyer who served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, has emphasized the crucial distinction between granting Jewish rights and recognizing them. The League of Nations Mandate did not purport to invent a Jewish relationship with Palestine. Its preamble stated that recognition had been given to “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" and to the grounds for “reconstituting their national home in that country."
The word “reconstituting" was deliberate.
One cannot reconstitute something that never previously existed. The Mandate recognized that the Jewish people had established a national civilization in the land, had been forcibly separated from political sovereignty there and retained a historical claim to national restoration.
The Allies possessed the military power to dispose of former Ottoman territories after World War I. Nevertheless, the legal instruments relating to Palestine did not assert that Jewish rights arose solely from Allied victory. Instead, they grounded the establishment of the Jewish national home in the Jewish people’s pre-existing historical connection to the land.
That connection cannot be erased by changing the vocabulary.
Nor can an international institution that recognized a pre-existing historical right plausibly claim that it invented the right and may revoke it whenever political fashion changes.
What the British Understood
The British commissions that examined Palestine understood the exceptional place of the land in Jewish history, even when British policy itself was inconsistent and frequently hostile to Zionist objectives.
After reviewing centuries of Jewish history, the Palestine Royal Commission wrote:
“The history of Jewish Palestine…had been enacted for the most part in a country about the size of Wales; but it constitutes one of the great chapters in the story of mankind."»
The Commission continued by identifying the development of ethical monotheism and the expression of Jewish religious, social and political ideals in enduring prose and poetry as contributions to civilization comparable to those of ancient Greece and Rome.
Christians, the Commission added, could not forget that Jesus “was a Jew who lived on Jewish soil and founded His gospel on a basis of Jewish life and thought."
The same Commission observed that in the many centuries following the Arab conquest, Palestine had largely ceased to exist as an independent center of political, economic, scientific or literary life:
«“In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab conquest, Palestine has virtually dropped out of history."»
This was not an assertion that Arabs lacked individual rights or attachments to the land. It was recognition of a historical reality: Palestine had not been an independent Arab state, and no sovereign Palestinian nation had ruled Judea and Samaria before Israel arrived in 1967.
The territory had passed from empire to empire-Roman, Byzantine, various Muslim dynasties, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and British. Jordan then conquered and annexed it after rejecting the establishment of Israel.
To describe Judea and Samaria exclusively as the “West Bank" conceals this history and encourages the false impression that Israel seized the territory of a previously existing Palestinian state.
It did not.
History Cannot Be Voted Away
Speaking in the House of Lords on June 27, 1923, Lord Alfred Milner made the point with unusual clarity. Milner supported a pro-Arab policy and looked forward to the creation of an Arab federation. Nevertheless, he rejected the demand that Palestine be treated as merely another Arab country:
«“Palestine can never be regarded as a country on the same footing as the other Arab countries. You cannot ignore all history and tradition in the matter."»
He continued:
«“It is a sacred land to the Arabs, but it is also a sacred land to the Jew and the Christian, and the future of Palestine cannot possibly be left to be determined by the temporary impressions and feelings of the Arab majority in the country of the present day."»
Milner’s warning remains relevant because the campaign against the terms Judea and Samaria is an attempt to do precisely what he cautioned against: ignore history and tradition in order to make the land conform to contemporary political demands.
People may legitimately disagree over Israel’s future borders, the appropriate political arrangement for the Arab population, the wisdom of extending Israeli sovereignty or the risks of establishing another Palestinian state.
But those disagreements do not require Jews to falsify their own history.
Using the names Judea and Samaria does not dictate a particular diplomatic solution. It simply refuses to begin the discussion by surrendering the historical record.
An Israeli political party-especially one claiming to be Zionist-should not require the approval of foreign diplomats or hostile international institutions before using the authentic names of the Jewish heartland. It should certainly not treat those names as embarrassing expressions that must be purged from respectable conversation.
The demand to replace “Judea and Samaria" with “West Bank" is not a demand for neutral language. It is a demand that Jews describe their country through the vocabulary of those who conquered it and sought to prevent Jewish sovereignty.
Before territory is surrendered, language is surrendered. Before history is denied, its names are erased.
Israelis should understand what is being demanded of them-and refuse.