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Inventing the ‘West Bank’: Its very existence of proves that the “Palestinian” people have no connection to the land
American Thinker ^ | 01/06/2025 | Sha'i ben-Tekoa

Posted on 01/06/2025 8:13:43 AM PST by SeekAndFind

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.

(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...


TOPICS: Egypt; Foreign Affairs; Gaza; Hamas; Hezbollah; Iran; Israel; Jordon; News/Current Events; US: Arkansas; US: New York; War on Terror; Yemen
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1 posted on 01/06/2025 8:13:43 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

Looks like Tom’s latest AIPAC check cleared.


2 posted on 01/06/2025 8:19:15 AM PST by mrmeyer (You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. Robert Heinlein)
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To: mrmeyer

Jesting aside....

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.


3 posted on 01/06/2025 8:20:31 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1922_census_of_Palestine

The reported population was 757,182, including the military and persons of foreign nationality.

The division into religious groups was
590,890 Muslims,
83,794 Jews,
73,024 Christians,
7,028 Druze,
408 Sikhs,
265 Baháʼís,
156 Metawalis,
163 Samaritans

https://archive.org/details/PalestineCensus1922


4 posted on 01/06/2025 8:33:04 AM PST by JSM_Liberty
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To: JSM_Liberty

RE: 590,890 Muslims

So, who are these Muslims? Were they called Palestinians then?


5 posted on 01/06/2025 8:41:01 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

What utter legalistic nonsense. Whether you call the territory the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, or just Palestine, there is an Arab population that lives there and they have as much claim to this land as the Jews. Israel has one of two choices, either annex the territory, granting the Arab population full and equal citizenship with the Jews, or grant them independence. Choose one but choose. The Arabs who are living there, no matter what you call the territory, are not going to leave any more that the Jews are.


6 posted on 01/06/2025 8:52:00 AM PST by Petrosius
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To: JSM_Liberty

3,500 years ago there was no such thing as a muslim....


7 posted on 01/06/2025 9:17:20 AM PST by wny
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To: SeekAndFind
"So, who are these Muslims? Were they called Palestinians then?"

"Palestinian" was not used to refer to an Arab group until after the 1967 war. It referred to Jews before that. When Mark Twain traveled the region in 1867, it was desolate. The Muslims of the 1922 census may have come as foreign workers after mass Zionist migration began in the 1880s, causing the desert to bloom.

8 posted on 01/06/2025 9:24:38 AM PST by UnwashedPeasant (I The pandemic we suffer from is not COVID. It is Marxist Democrat Leftism. )
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To: UnwashedPeasant
The Muslims of the 1922 census may have come as foreign workers after mass Zionist migration began in the 1880s, causing the desert to bloom.

Correct. Jews in Palestine were referred to as Palestinians before the 1967 war. Arafat stole the term Palestinian for his own use. It was a word for Jews prior to that.

Israel was a rocky desert, and the muslims did nothing to improve the land. The Jews worked hard and transformed areas into healthy farmland. The Jews also did this in Gaza before being forced to hand it over to muslims in 2005, and the muslims then destroyed the farmlands and equipment given them.

Israel used to be dry and thirsty, with ever diminishing sources of drinking water. Now, due to Jewish inventions and hard work, they have an abundance of drinking water which they share with their Arab neighbor countries. They are refilling dried-out lakes, including the Dead Sea, and sending water south to the Negev for new farmland in former desert areas. Jews work and improve the land. Muslims are lazy and spoil the land where they go.

9 posted on 01/06/2025 9:56:53 AM PST by roadcat ( )
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To: StayAt HomeMother; Ernest_at_the_Beach; 1ofmanyfree; 21twelve; 24Karet; 2ndDivisionVet; 31R1O; ...

10 posted on 01/07/2025 12:42:12 AM PST by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
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To: SeekAndFind

Judea is named after its original inhabitants: Jews.

Samaria is named after the Samaritans: The Northern Tribes of Israelites who follow their slightly different Torah.

Arabs belong in Arabia.


11 posted on 01/07/2025 5:58:18 AM PST by Uncle Miltie (muslims ARE INBRED IGNORAMUSES. See my "About" page for proof.)
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To: Petrosius

>> Israel has one of two choices, either annex the territory, granting the Arab population full and equal citizenship with the Jews, or grant them independence. <<

Have you heard of the two-state solution which has been offered so many times to the so-called Palestinians?


12 posted on 01/07/2025 9:19:06 AM PST by Chicory
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To: Chicory

Have you looked at the details of what the Israelis have offered as the so-called two state solution?


13 posted on 01/07/2025 10:06:47 AM PST by Petrosius
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To: Petrosius

“Israel has one of two choices, either annex the territory, granting the Arab population full and equal citizenship with the Jews, or grant them independence.”

Both of those would result, probably in a fairly short time, in the destruction of Israel. The “West Bank” was used by Iraq and Jordan to shell Tel Aviv in 1967. Then it was taken and it should belong to Israel forever.

As for full rights to the Arabs there: They have 50 years of hate taught to them. The answer should be, “Too damn bad!”

And please remember, in 1945, there were 900,000+ Jews living in Arab countries. They were forced to leave. There are now about 8,000 left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world

“In the 20th century, approximately 900,000 Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries throughout Africa and Asia, primarily as a consequence of the establishment of the State of Israel....

Prior to Israel’s independence in 1948, approximately 800,000 Jews were living on lands that now make up the Arab world. Of this figure, just under two-thirds lived in the French- and Italian-controlled regions of North Africa, 15–20% lived in the Kingdom of Iraq, approximately 10% lived in the Kingdom of Egypt, and approximately 7% lived in the Kingdom of Yemen. A further 200,000 Jews lived in the Imperial State of Iran and the Republic of Turkey.

The first large-scale exoduses took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. In these cases, over 90% of the Jewish population left, despite the necessity of leaving their assets and properties behind.[4] Between 1948 and 1951, 250,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from Arab countries.[5] In response, the Israeli government implemented policies to accommodate 600,000 immigrants over a period of four years, doubling the country’s Jewish population.”


14 posted on 01/07/2025 10:14:29 AM PST by Mr Rogers
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To: Petrosius

Yes, I have. And your point is...?


15 posted on 01/07/2025 11:36:31 AM PST by Chicory
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To: Chicory

The offer of a Palestinian state was not an honest offer. There were too many restrictions that the Arabs would not truly have had a viable state.


16 posted on 01/07/2025 11:50:57 AM PST by Petrosius
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To: Petrosius

Considering that all the Palestinians wanted was a better way to launch attacks against Israel, I’d say the Israelis were generous.

The Palestinians do not want a state anyway. Much better to attack Israel as oppressed people than to attack Israel as a state, which would be an act of war condemnable by all.


17 posted on 01/08/2025 7:00:59 PM PST by Chicory
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To: SeekAndFind

Judea and Samaria
no such thing as a palestinian.they just israeli arabs


18 posted on 07/27/2025 9:29:45 AM PDT by CarolinaReaganFan
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