On December 6, 2024, Senator Tom Cotton (Republican of Arkansas) introduced a bill in the Senate to replace “West Bank” in all federal documents with “Judea and Samaria,” noting, “The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria go back thousands of years. The US should stop using the politically charged term West Bank to refer to the biblical heartland of Israel.” His bill matches a House bill introduced earlier this year by Representatives Claudia Tenney, Randy Weber, and Anthony D’Esposito.

Yes, they are the Jewish names but also the world’s. In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted for Resolution 181, a.k.a. the Partition Plan, a document that referred to “Samaria and Judea.” There was no reference in it to any territory called “West Bank.”

Fast forward two decades to the Six-Day War of 1967, and Israel’s capturing the Golan Heights in the north from Syria, the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip in the north from Egypt, and the in-between land taken from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. When the New York Times referred to Israel’s rout of the Jordanian army by capturing the “western bank of the Jordan River,” it was referring to land that Jordan occupied in 1948 and annexed in 1950. Jordan never had a name for its conquest. For two decades, it was just the cumbersome “western bank of the Jordan River.”

Image: 1895 Map of Palestine. Library of Congress.

So, in 1968, the Times’s correspondents in Israel and editors in New York were still wrestling with the new fashion of shortening the name and its correct orthography: Was it proper to use “western bank”? Or “West-Bank”? Or “west-bank”? Sometimes in the same dispatches different spellings were used.

In 1969, using a previous map, the new edition of the Rand McNally International Atlas imprinted cross-hatch lines over the areas “occupied by Israel since June 1967,” with the principal names still being “Samaria/Shomron” in the north and “Judaea” in the south, the names on all maps for millennia. Again, “West Bank” was not there.

When the “Arab Legion” (a.k.a. the Jordanian Amy) crossed over the Jordan in 1948, the 30 million Arabs in the world had no names for lands that, for thousands of years, were known as “Samaria and Judaea.” The Arabs, of course, would not call it Judaea for obvious reasons, but even after two decades, they still had no name for “the western bank of the Jordan River.”

In this way, “West Bank” inadvertently became indisputable evidence of the fraud that is “Palestinian nationalism.” Authentically indigenous peoples commonly give names to their country’s natural features (e.g., mountains, rivers, lakes, and forests). The phrase “West Bank” has no national association. It is a no-name name, a sterile, topographical description. There are countless rivers and streams running north-south on the planet, and each has a west bank. The very name is an admission that there never was an indigenous “Palestinian people” living there.

Tragically for Israelis, there is something in their defective character, a legacy of the state’s anti-religious founders, that means that they lack Tom Cotton’s moral and historical clarity. They have never protested the use of “West Bank.” Indeed, it is the preferred nomenclature among Israel’s smart set, the post-religious Jewish elite in newspapers like Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post and Yediot, and three of the four public affairs TV channels.

Official Israel has also never in its public diplomacy rebutted the hysterical, hate-filled mobs chanting, “From the river to the sea!” by telling the world that it was the United Nations Charter of 1945, incorporating 1922’s Palestine Mandate of the League of Nations, that assigned all the land “from the river to sea” to the Jews. That same document described the Palestine the UN was creating to be the Jews’ “historic homeland.”

Therefore, in international law, Israel is the legal owner of not only Judea and Samaria but the Gaza Strip. And as the legitimate landlord, Israel has the right to evict unwanted squatters, especially when they have proven themselves over a century to be antisemitic homicidal maniacs.

The current Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly envisioned a born-again Gaza Strip after the fighting ends. The Muslim population will return, only now under Israeli security control, rather than no longer government by Hamas.

The fallacy in this dangerous thinking is that there is a presumed difference between the ghouls in Hamas, who perpetrated satanic cruelty on October 7, 2023, along with years of other terrorist atrocities. and the allegedly “innocent Palestinian civilians.” In fact, these civilians are the people in 2006 who voted for Hamas to be their government, just as the German people democratically elected Adolf Hitler to be their Reichskanzler. Even the late anti-Jew Jimmy Carter said that the election was legitimate, and in every opinion poll since then, Hamas remains the people’s choice.

Indeed, according to the IDF soldiers who have fought in Gaza for the last year, every house they have entered is full of evidence of how the people in Gaza cooperate with and support Hamas. It is no exaggeration to see the entirety of the 25-mile-long Gaza rectangle as one large terrorist base.

At Auschwitz, the Nazis burnt serial numbers into the forearms of their Jewish victims, like diseased cattle being registered for slaughter. They effaced their human names. In the same way, the phrase “West Bank” strips Judea and Samaria of their Jewish names and replaces them with a no-name name, accompanied by the historical fairy tale that the territory belongs to a putatively primeval, indigenous “Palestinian people” at home on what was their ancestral sod until the larcenous Zionists stole it from them.

Palestinian Nationalism is nothing but the latest fashion in millennia of lies told about Jews. Senator Cotton and Representatives Tenney, Weber, and D’Esposito are spot on.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.