For Israel, It’s ‘Judea And Samaria’ And Not The West Bank

Sabastiyah, Occupied West Bank (AP)

Associated Press

For Israel, It’s ‘Judea And Samaria’ And Not The West Bank — The Evening Sun, 18 November 1977 — The Evening Sun · Baltimore, Maryland · 18 November 1977

Transcribed from the clipping

“Ruins lie upon ruins at Sabastiyah, a Palestinian Arab town with a Greek name honoring a Roman emperor and now administered by Israelis… There are three ways of referring to this disputed area of 2,270 square miles, and each has a different political significance… ‘Don’t call it ‘the West Bank’,’ Prime Minister Menahem Begin admonished reporters after his nationalistic Likud party won last May’s election. ‘It’s ‘Judea and Samaria’…’ ‘This was Palestine until 1948, then it became the West bank,’ a young Arab teacher said in Ramallah. ‘Now we want it to be Palestine again.’ … The 700,000 Arabs of the West Bank have no terms corresponding to Judea and Samaria. They are more likely to divide the area into ‘the Hills of Hebron’ or the ‘Hills of Nablus’… ‘We love to call our places by their biblical names,’ said Dr. Zeev Vilnay, of Jerusalem, a guidebook author, former soldier and member of the Israeli government place-names committee.”

Context added by this archive

A whole wire article about what to call the territory, datelined from the town the archive tracks as Sebustiye (1929), Sebastia (2013) and Sebastia/Shomron (2023). It enumerates the three names and what each one means, quotes a prime minister instructing American reporters, quotes the Israeli government’s place-names committee, and quotes a Palestinian teacher. It is the only clipping here that records what Palestinians called the region around them.

Cite this item

"For Israel, It’s ‘Judea And Samaria’ And Not The West Bank," The Evening Sun, 18 November 1977. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1977-010. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1977-010