When We Assume Word Use Defines Politics  

One of the facets of life that continues to baffle me is how quickly people make assumptions about one’s politics based on the language that people use to describe a geographical location.

These days here in the Middle East for example, people who refer to Iran as Persia are assumed to be anti-regime even before engaging with the person and asking for clarification.

Similarly, those of us living in Israel who choose to call the West Bank by its biblical name of Judea and Samaria, are often assumed to have expansionist claims on the territory and in favor of annexation into the State of Israel itself.  I run up against that constantly and often find it odd that people want to virtually remove a piece of my heritage as a Jew living in Israel because the use of a biblical term makes them uncomfortable.

A review of the history may be helpful in establishing the validity of using the biblical names and thus having no connection to today’s regional politics.

Historically, from the 10th to 6th century BCE, two kingdoms existed in the central hill region of Canaan: The Kingdom of Judea, centered around Jerusalem and Hebron, and the Kingdom of Israel, centered around the city of Samaria and the Galilee. According to the biblical narrative, in the 11^th century BCE these two kingdoms diverged from a united monarchy under kings David and Solomon.  However, archaeologists disagree over whether the biblical narrative is to be accepted as history or perhaps simply national legends.  Nevertheless, for those of us who accept biblical narrative as the word of God and the prophets, those two terms are biblical in nature.

As for the delineation of the boundaries of the region itself, while “Judea and Samaria” draw upon the historical use of “Judea” and “Samaria,” the term, as defined by the Israeli government, does not align precisely with the geography of those regions.

The traditional regions of Judaea and Samaria extended well beyond the West Bank and also included localities, such as Beersheba in the south and Caesarea on the coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa, both of which lie outside today’s West Bank. This discrepancy exists because the West Bank’s borders were defined solely by an armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan in 1949 rather than being based on historical, geological, or demographic considerations.

Overlaying the modern political conception of the West Bank with terminology rooted in Jewish history emphasizes the importance of the West Bank to the Jewish people, even if Judea and Samaria, as historically understood, do not map neatly onto the 1949 borders.

Having said that use of the terms “Judea and Samaria” has, sadly, become controversial, some say because it unilaterally applies terms specific to Jewish history to a territory where most of the population today is not Jewish.  Yet it is part and parcel of the history of the Jewish people and we Jews should not be prohibited from using the term when making reference to that area.

For sure, some see it’s use as favored by people who assert that the Jewish people have a historical right to settle and annex the West Bank as the “heartland of the homeland” thus converting a biblical sourced reference into a modern-day term with political implications.  However, supporters of a two-state solution, in which the core of a negotiated Palestinian state would be located in the West Bank, continue to use “West Bank” as it is internationally defined.

The fact that it might make some people uncomfortable when I use the terms Judea and Samaria, it definitely does not represent my political position on any long-term framework in this region.  Peace remains the long-term objective, coexistence is still critical to our mutual survival here, and we still have not found the formula to make that happen.  But in the pursuit of these objectives nobody has the right to ask me to give up a piece of my heritage in order to make them more comfortable speaking with me.  Making that request represents an unnecessary bias of its own which makes the questioner’s motives suspect.