Tom Cotton’s Bill to Right a Toponymic Wrong
Peloni: It would be an enormous victory for the US, and by extension the world, to officially abandon the libel-borne terminology of the “West Bank” which was in fact imposed on these Jewish Lands after being stolen in 1948 and cleansed of its Jewish population. Continuing the naming of these lands based upon their presumed connection to Jordan is both dishonest and shameful.
By
Early in the second century A.D., the place name of the Roman province called “Judaea” was changed to “Syria Palaestina” (Syria of the Philistines), or “Palestine.” This was done in an obvious attempt to efface the Jewish connection to the land. “Palestine” stuck, but another change the Romans put in place — to rename the site where Jerusalem, by then razed to the ground, had stood — as “Aelia Capitolina,” did not.






