Who Owns the “West Bank”?

The ancient lands of Judea and Samaria, east of Jerusalem, have been part of the Jewish homeland for 3,000 years. Today Arabs demand all of it.

Paid advertisement placed by FLAME, Facts and Logic About the Middle East

Who Owns the “West Bank”? — The Record, 28 July 2015 — The Record · Hackensack, New Jersey · 28 July 2015

Transcribed from the clipping

“Judea and Samaria, the land where Jewish ancestors Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rachel, David and Solomon created Biblical history, was renamed the ‘West Bank’ during Jordan’s brief, illegal 19-year occupation. Today, some 380,000 Jews own land and live in the territory, yet their rights are denied by Palestinian Arabs… Jordan illegally seized the ‘West Bank’ and east Jerusalem, and expelled all Jews from these Biblical homelands… Until such negotiations are consummated, the ‘West Bank’ will remain in dispute—a no-man’s land in which claims of ownership remain cloudy and contested.” Set in a box in the middle of the page: “Israel has an irrefutable legal claim to these territories backed by the 93-year-old Mandate for Palestine.”

Context added by this archive

Not journalism, and marked PAID ADVERTISEMENT across the top by the paper. It is here because it is the naming argument conducted in the open and paid for. The advertisement puts West Bank in quotation marks every time it uses it, twelve times, and argues that West Bank is itself a renaming of Judea and Samaria. Whatever a reader makes of the claim, it settles one thing: the name of that territory was not drifting quietly in American newsprint. It was contested, by people who bought space to contest it.

Cite this item

"Who Owns the “West Bank”?," The Record, 28 July 2015. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2015-006. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2015-006