What's in a name?

(JNS) — Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has drawn some fire as a result of his legislative initiative in proposing the “Retiring the Egregious Confusion Over the Genuine Name of Israel’s Zone of Influence by Necessitating Government-Use of Judea and Samaria Act”—for short, the Recognizing Judea and Samaria Bill. In essence, it requires all official U.S. documents and materials to use the historically accurate term “Judea and Samaria” instead of the “West Bank.” Moreover, it calls the term “West Bank” as language that is “politically charged.”

Writing last month in the New Republic, Hafiz Rashid, a journalism graduate at the University of Maryland, noted that Cotton is soon to assume the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairmanship and pushed speculation theories that Republicans will be supporting Jerusalem’s plans “to annex the West Bank” with American backing. Rashid added that this and other steps are part of a plot “to ignore Palestinians.”

What the bill actually does is to put a halt to the ongoing attempts to ignore the purposefully mistaken geopolitical names and in addition, almost all of the actual history of the Jews in their national homeland over the past 3,000 years, as well as Zionism not being the recent phenomenon it is erroneously claimed. After all, as but one example, when President John Quincy Adams wrote to Mordechai Noah on March 15, 1819, and informed him:

“I could find it in my heart to wish that you had been at the head of a hundred thousand Israelites … marching with them into Judea & making a conquest of that country & restoring your nation to the dominion of it—For I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation … restored to an independent. … I am Sir with respect & esteem/your obliged humble servant.”

It was to Judea and not Palestine that Adams wished the Jews to be restored. It was Judea, not some “West Bank” territory.

Much earlier, on Oct. 23, 1765, Ezra Stiles could find no better comparison to an unruly political situation than writing to Benjamin Franklin that there existed no “more deplorable situation than Judea which in the Time of Christ was a Province under a heavy Tribute to the Roman Senate.” The term “West Bank” made its appearance in political lexicons only on April 24, 1950, when Jordan’s Parliament decided to approve King Abdullah’s assertion of some mythical right of self-determination that there be the “complete unity between the two banks of the Jordan, the Eastern and Western, and their amalgamation in one single state.”

Unfortunately, Israel’s media from 1967 to 1968 contributed to the settling of the “West Bank” into the public mind. On Feb. 5, 1968, Knesset member Eliezer Shostak of the “Free Center” faction tabled a parliamentary question in which he protested the use of the term “West Bank” and not “Judea and Samaria” by government ministers and spokesmen. Then-Israeli Prime Minister Levy Eshkol replied: “The official name used by government ministries and the IDF is Judea and Samaria. It is difficult for me to enter into historical research … or to enter into gyneology [sic]—how the name ‘West Bank’ was born.” Then-Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan stated the next day: “I do not imagine that it is possible to remove from the sphere of connection of the Jewish people in their homeland the same areas of Judea and Samaria that were the cradle of the Jewish people.”

Returning to “West Bank,” the 1946 Palestine Survey does not include that term but uses Judea and Samaria in multiple instances. One of the six administrative districts of the Mandate area was Samaria. In 1880, the Palestine Exploration Fund published a map of “Western Palestine” but there’s no “West Bank” to be found. In the U.N. 1947 Partition Plan, in the B section that delineates the borders of the projected two states, we can read:

“… The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River … at a point on the district boundary between Haifa and Samaria. … From here it follows the northern and eastern boundaries of the village of Ar’ara, rejoining the Haifa-Samaria district boundary at Wadi’Ara …”

Multiple official documents from the British Mandate period and U.N. deliberations all employ “Judea” and “Samaria,” as well as those in the British Parliament debates from 1923 and even in 1982. Throughout the centuries, maps of Palestine included the names “Judea” and “Samaria” with “West Bank” quite lacking.

It is not just that the term “West Bank” has become de rigueur, but that many times, when someone uses “Judea and Samaria,” it is qualified. Here is an example from 2005 when, in The New York Times, Greg Myre quoted Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as saying that “not all the settlements of today in Judea and Samaria will remain,” adding that Sharon was “referring to the West Bank by its biblical name.”

Cotton’s initiative, along with an earlier parallel bill introduced to the House by Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), is a welcome move to champion the truth and readjust objectivity in politics. Will Israel’s Knesset follow suit and adopt MK Simcha Rothman’s suggestion to change all mentions of “West Bank” in Israeli law to “Judea and Samaria?”