Who Owns Judea and Samaria?

Peloni:  These are Jewish lands, settled by the Jews in antiquity, and the Jewish presence has been maintained here til the British led Arab land grab took place in 1948.  Our indigenous right to these lands is documented in ancient texts, archaeological evidence and has been acknowledged by the international community during the San Remo Conference.  Furthermore, the depiction of our history sewn across these lands is described in the Bible, the most published text in the world.  We Jews, alone, have any right to these lands, and we will not be parted from them for reasons of security, ancestry, and legality, take your pick.  It is well past time for Israel to address the error made in 1967 as described by Fitzgerald below, by extending sovereignty over these lands, to develop them, and rule them under the rule of Israeli law, thus eliminating the last vestige of the notion that the term ‘West Bank’ was anything more than a fable sold as Arab propaganda in a continued effort to erase the Jewish entity, even as this nullifying term has been nearly universal in its adoption throughout the West.

By Hugh Fitzgerald | Feb 22, 2025

In 1919, the mandates system was established by Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. This was a way to put European powers in temporary control of various territories that had once been part of the now-defunct Ottoman Empire, that had been on the losing side in World War I. Those holders of the Mandates, Great Britain and France, were entrusted with bringing the people in the various mandates to self-rule. The Arabs in the mandates of Iraq and Lebanon-Syria would in time become three independent Arab states. The League also created a single mandate for the Jewish people, the Palestine Mandate, that under British control would be made ready to become the first independent Jewish state, in the historic homeland of the Jews, in more than two millennia.

The territory of the Palestine Mandate consisted of a northern border just beyond Mount Hermon in the north and a southern border at the Red Sea, and from the river Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west. Originally it had been expected that all of historic Palestine on both sides of the Jordan would be included in the Mandate, but for reasons of realpolitik, the British decided to remove 78% of that originally contemplated territory, on the east side of the Jordan River, from inclusion in the Palestine Mandate. This was done over the objections of the Zionists. The British decided unilaterally to make all of that territory east of the Jordan into a new state, the Emirate of Transjordan, which would be ruled by the Hashemite Emir Abdullah, who wanted to be given a state of his own. Abdullah had been greatly put out because his younger brother Feisal had been put on the throne of Iraq in 1921 by the British. In order to head him off from trying to conquer Syria, which would create a crisis with the French, the British simply lopped off all of eastern Palestine, originally meant to be part of a future Jewish state, and turned it into the Emirate of Transjordan, with Abdullah as its emir, so that he would not attempt to wrest Syria from French control, which could damage British-French relations. The Zionists watched helplessly as 78% of the territory which had been originally intended to be included in the Mandate for Palestine was removed from the Mandate’s provisions.

But there was never any doubt that the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine was meant to include all of the territory “from the river to the sea.” It was only because the Arab Legion of Jordan, led by British officers and with a British commander, John Bagot Glubb, known as Glubb Pasha, managed in the 1948 war to seize and hold onto Judea and Samaria, that the Jews were unable to make it part of their new state, the State of Israel. In 1950, the Jordanians renamed Judea and Samaria as “the West Bank” in order to efface the Jewish link to the land made obvious in the toponyms “Judea”and “Samaria.” This was a modern updating of the Roman attempt to efface the Jewish connection revealed in the place name “Judea” by renaming it “Syria Palestina” or “Syria of the Philistines,” which was then shortened to “Palestine.” The Jordanians held onto what they called the “West Bank” for 19 years, from 1948 to 1967. In all that time, only two countries, Great Britain and Pakistan, recognized Jordanian sovereignty over that territory. In 1967, as a result of the Six-Day War, the Jews recaptured Judea and Samaria. At that point, Israel could have simply annexed that territory outright, for that land was part of the Mandate — Israel already possessed the right to that land, but it was only then, after the Six-Day War, that it had the ability to enforce that pre-existing right. Had it immediately annexed Judea and Samaria in 1967, by now the world would have gotten used to it and, however begrudgingly, accepted it.

Instead, Israel chose not to annex the territory, for the peace camp in Israel was strong, and it believed in that will-o’-the-wisp, invoked so often that its constituent parts are usually uttered as one long word: “twostatesfortwopeopleslivinginpeacesidebyside.” Some Israelis thought of Judea and Samaria not as the places where Jewish history was made, central to Jewish identity, but as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Palestinians, perhaps even for most of Judea and Samaria to be given up to attain a “peace.” But the Palestinian Arabs have shown that they want all of Judea and Samaria — hence the rejection by Yassir Arafat of Ehud Barak’s generous offer in 2000, and the rejection by Mahmoud Abbas of the even more generous offer in 2008 by Ehud Olmert. The Israelis did, however, begin after the Six-Day War to build Jewish towns and cities throughout Judea and Samaria, on state and waste lands, and on land bought from, or abandoned in 1967 by, the local Arabs. Now there are 540,000 Israeli Jews living in Judea and Samaria. They are not living in “settlements,” a word which smacks of small-scale and impermanent living quarters, but in towns and cities.