Yaron Dekel, commanding officer of Israel’s Army Radio, has issued a directive to his staff this week, to avoid using the term “West Bank,” or just “the bank” (HaGada in Hebrew), and to stick instead to the term “the territories,” Ha’aretz reported.
Dekel argued that the term had become the linguistic property of the left and the PA Arabs—a.k.a. Palestinians—and so his station must avoid its use.
Interestingly, Dekel, who in four months will conclude his term as head of the popular, two-channel radio station, did not suggest substituting “Judea and Samaria” for “West Bank,” probably because that term has become associated with the right.
The station on Thursday issued a statement saying the commanding officer prefers a neutral term, which “the territories” (HaShtachim) is. The US State Dept. used to use the term “disputed territories,” which, incidentally, does not have a popular colloquial equivalent in Hebrew (HaShtachim HaShruyim B’Machloket never caught on—too cumbersome). Spoken Hebrew qualifies the term only as HaShtachim Ha’Kvushim (occupied territories), or HaShtachim HaMshuchrarim (liberated territories), with the obvious political connotations.
The station’s statement also suggested the term “West Bank” has been acquired by the “Palestinian narrative,” and we don’t want to acquiesce to that, now, do we.
However, in the war of semantics, conceding a term to one’s opponent is a loss. We Jews have largely lost our claim on “Messiah,” for instance, at least in popular discussions, because a competing, monotheistic religion made such a big deal out of it. In fact, back in the early 1990s, many Jews coiled at the broad use Chabad made of this word. Indeed, in modern-day Jewish debate, “messianic” is used to connote delusional, or crazy, or both.
The West Bank used to be the sanctioned name of the area east of the 1949 armistice “green line” that separated Israel from Jordan. It remained a neutral part of everyday conversation in Israel for a few years after the 1967 Six Day War, and then was replaced by the Jewish right, which preferred Judea and Samaria, a reference to the two Israelite kingdoms that reigned there from roughly 1,000 BCE (King Saul) and 586 BCE (Babylonian exile).
It can be argued that the Jewish right has ceded the “West Bank” and thus turned it from a useful, quite accurate geographic term describing a concrete territory which is in dispute, into a loaded, anti-settlement enterprise term in the service of the left and the “Palestinian narrative.”
But the “West Bank” can easily be reclaimed as part of the Zionist narrative, as it describes a political reality both before and after 1967. The West Bank was invaded illegally in 1948 by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, violating the UN 1947 partition plan. The West Bank was then annexed illegally by Jordan, without recognition from any UN member other than the UK, which, at the time, was invested in training and running the Jordanian Legion.
And so the West Bank is an area that never belonged to anyone once the British Mandate ended on May 15, 1948, which means that when it was conquered in war by Israel in 1967 it was a no-man’s land and not an “occupied territory.” Which consequently means that none of the Geneva Convention laws regarding establishing enemy civilian settlements in an occupied territory apply there at all.
Sure, we could still make all those arguments using “Judea and Samaria,” but how liberating it is to embrace the “West Bank,” a sizeable portion of our ancestral homeland, like upper Galilee or the coastal flatlands.
It’s time to proclaim the West Bank, in name and in land, for the Jewish nation. Make the West Bank Jewish again.