Once Upon a Time There Was No West Bank: Then Jordan Drew a Line and History Forgot

Victor Satya | Aug 22, 2026

A few geographical problems in the world are so magnificently overworked as the one called the “West Bank.”

Every week, the international community assembles to discuss it. The United Nations discusses it. European governments discuss it. Human-rights organizations discuss it. Newspapers discuss it. Diplomats discuss it. The Vatican, which one might reasonably expect to remember the Bible, discusses it.

There are resolutions about it, condemnations about it, conferences about it, and occasionally, when everyone has exhausted the vocabulary of condemnation, strongly worded statements about it.

Settlements must stop.
Settlers must stop.
Settlement expansion must stop.
The occupation must end.

The “West Bank” must become a Palestinian state.

And naturally, Israel must somehow be made to understand that the land on which its ancient history was written is now, by the miracle of international terminology, somewhere else. Perhaps, therefore, it is time for a modest proposal.

I suggest that we abolish the West Bank.

Not the land, of course. That would be rather difficult. I mean the peculiar international invention by which Judea and Samaria have been made to disappear beneath a label. The proposal is modest because it requires no armies, no peace conference, no Security Council resolution and no 47-page European Union document.

We need only stop pretending that a name has the power to erase a history.

The “West Bank” is, strictly speaking, a geographical description: the land west of the Jordan River. The name became internationally entrenched during the period of Jordanian rule after 1948, when Jordan annexed the territory and distinguished it from the kingdom’s territory east of the river.

The phrase is now spoken with such solemnity that one might imagine Moses received the tablets and was immediately handed a map labelled “West Bank.”

He did not.

Joshua did not conquer the West Bank.
David did not rule the West Bank.
The prophets did not preach in the West Bank.
Jesus was not born in the West Bank.

Those names are not Zionist inventions designed by the Israeli public-relations department. They are ancient names embedded in Jewish Scripture, Christian Scripture and the historical record of the region.

Judea was the heartland of the ancient Jewish kingdom. Jerusalem stood at its center. David ruled there. Hebron was there. Bethlehem was there. Samaria was the center of the northern kingdom of Israel. Shiloh, associated with the ancient sanctuary and the Ark of the Covenant, was there. Shechem—modern Nablus—was there.

Imagine discovering a people’s ancient homeland, changing its name centuries later, and then becoming indignant when those people continue to remember the original name. It would be rather like renaming Rome “The Western Side of the Tiber” and then informing Italians that references to the Roman Empire are colonial propaganda.

Yet this is essentially the intellectual trick that has been performed on Judea and Samaria.

First comes the label.
Then the label becomes the territory.
Then the territory becomes the legal category.
Then the legal category becomes the moral argument.

And finally the moral argument is used to explain why the people whose civilization was formed there are somehow the foreigners. The Jewish connection to Judea and Samaria is not based on a nineteenth-century tourist brochure. It stretches back thousands of years.

In the Tanakh, God appears to Abraham at Shechem and declares: “To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 12:7).

Bethlehem is identified as a Judean town in the prophecy of Micah:

“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah… from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel.”

And Matthew identifies the birthplace of Jesus precisely as “Bethlehem of Judea.”

This produces an interesting problem for Christian institutions that enthusiastically use the expression “West Bank.”

Christianity did not begin in the West Bank.

It began in Judea.
The Messiah was born in Judea.
Jerusalem was in Judea.
The Temple stood in Jerusalem.

One might therefore expect the Vatican, of all institutions, to be particularly resistant to this historical amnesia. After all, the Vatican has spent roughly two millennia reminding humanity that what happened in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth and the surrounding biblical landscape matters.

Apparently, however, the memory becomes somewhat selective when the subject is Israeli sovereignty. From Pope Benedict XVI to Pope Leo XIV, Vatican statements have routinely employed the contemporary terminology of the “West Bank.”

There is something intellectually revealing about the ease with which a modern political vocabulary can replace the ancient vocabulary of the Bible—and about how quickly the replacement becomes morally loaded.

The words “Judea and Samaria” remind us that Jews were here.

The words “West Bank” encourage us to think instead about a disputed modern territory.

That distinction matters.

Because once Judea and Samaria become merely “the West Bank,” the next linguistic step becomes remarkably easy.

Jews living there become “settlers.”
Jewish communities become “settlements.”
Jewish historical claims become “expansionism.”
Jewish presence becomes “occupation.”

And eventually the absurdity reaches its logical conclusion: the indigenous people are accused of settling on their own history. Perhaps the UN should establish a committee to determine which ancient peoples are permitted to return home.

The absurdity becomes even greater when one remembers that Jordan itself ruled the territory between 1948 and 1967 and called it the West Bank precisely because it was the western portion of the Jordanian kingdom.

Jordan merely governed the territory for a time and popularized a geographic designation that subsequently became embedded in international diplomacy. And yet the modern world has somehow elevated that temporary political terminology into a historical ontology.

The Jordanian period ended.

The West Bank did not cease to exist as a useful geographical expression, of course. The phrase remains convenient and widely understood.

But convenience is not history.
A map label does not repeal antiquity.

And a diplomatic vocabulary does not possess the power to make Judea stop being Judea. That is why the real debate is not ultimately about whether the words “West Bank” may be uttered.

Of course they may.

The debate is about what happens when the name becomes an argument.

If “West Bank” is simply a geographical description, fine.

But if the term is deployed as though it establishes who belongs there, who does not, what constitutes occupation, and whose historical claims are legitimate, then we have moved from geography into ideology.

So let us return to the modest proposal.

Let us abolish the West Bank.
Not by changing a border.
Not by expelling anyone.
Not by annexing anything.

Let us abolish it in the only place where it has become truly dangerous: in the imagination. Let us remember that beneath the diplomatic label is Judea and Samaria. Let us remember that these are not empty hills awaiting their first historical occupants. Let us remember that Jewish history did not begin in 1948, and that Israeli history did not begin with the Six-Day War.

And perhaps, before another government issues another statement demanding that Israel “end the occupation of the West Bank,” someone in the room might pause long enough to ask an embarrassingly simple question:

Which West Bank?

Because if by “West Bank” you mean the western bank of the Jordan River, then yes, we know where you are talking about. But if you mean that the word itself settles the history, the sovereignty, the identity and the ancient claims of the people who came from Judea and Samaria, then you have mistaken a label for a verdict.

The international community may continue calling it the West Bank.
It may hold conferences about the West Bank.
It may pass resolutions about the West Bank.

But history remains stubbornly unimpressed.

Judea and Samaria did not disappear merely because diplomats discovered a more fashionable name for them.

And perhaps that is the real problem.

Not that Israel refuses to forget.

But that the rest of the world keeps insisting that it should.