US, Israel are pushing to rename West Bank as 'Judea and Samaria'. Why now?

Lawmakers in Israel and the US have simultaneously introduced bills in the top law-making bodies in the two countries to replace the name ‘West Bank’ with biblical terms ‘Judea and Samaria’.

Home to about three million Palestinians, the occupied West Bank is the area stretching across the eastern border of Israel that Tel Aviv captured along with East Jerusalem and Gaza in the 1967 war.

Israel has always cited biblical references to justify its claim over Palestinian lands. In fact, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted religious references in his speeches to justify the genocidal war on Gaza, which killed at least 48,239 Palestinians over 15 months.

The two legislations proposed in both the Israeli Knesset and the US Senate also lean heavily on biblical references to justify the unilateral renaming of the area that – along with East Jerusalem and Gaza – will constitute the future independent state of Palestine.

The Israeli bill asserts that Judea and Samaria are an “inseparable part” of the homeland of the Jewish people because their “forefathers, prophets, sages and kings” established it as their capital.

In the same vein, the US bill also calls for ending the “egregious confusion over the genuine name of Israel’s zone of influence” by replacing the occupied West Bank with the “historically accurate” term of Judea and Samaria.

Experts say the latest renaming effort is part of the Israeli propaganda campaign to lend credence to its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

“The West Bank is an illegally occupied territory under international law, and however Israel chooses to name it… its continued occupation (is) in severe breach of international law,” says Omer Bartov, a Jewish professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University in the US.

As early as July 22, 1968, the Israeli government's “committee on names” determined that the occupied West Bank should be called Judea and Samaria, Bartov tells TRT World.

In 1977, the Israeli government determined that all official state documents, including military orders, must refer to the territory under that name.

“In other words, there is no need for the current legislation, and its nature is largely propagandistic,” says Bartov, adding that the biblical references to historical rights carry only “emotional and ideological weight”.

“More important is the fact that Palestinians were and are the indigenous population of Palestine and were largely displaced by the Zionist project of settlement and state building,” he says.

Though Gaza bore the brunt of Israeli aggression since October 7, 2023, the occupied West Bank has seen increased settler attacks and military incursions in recent months, leaving hundreds of people dead and injured.

The election of President Donald Trump in the US has also given a spur to Tel Aviv’s efforts to further consolidate its grip on the occupied Palestinian territories.

Trump’s nominee for the US envoy to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is “staunchly pro-Israel” and supports Israeli occupation in the West Bank.

This is despite the fact that on July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel must end its occupation of Palestinian territories, including the West Bank, dismantle its settlements, provide full reparations to Palestinian victims and facilitate the return of displaced people.

‘Incremental policy of ethnic cleansing’

Despite the on-again-off-again peace process over many years, successive Israeli governments have allowed for the expansion of settlements. The number of settlers in the occupied West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, increased from approximately 110,000 in 1993 to more than half a million in 2023.

Israel has used these settlements as an excuse to delay the establishment of a contiguous and viable Palestinian state. The Israeli military controls the occupied West Bank, with the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Fatah-controlled government body, exercising limited control in population centres.

The presence of Israeli settlements and the accompanying infrastructure, such as settler-only roads and military checkpoints, restricts the movement of Palestinians, thus reducing employment opportunities and hindering trade and commerce.

Bartov says Israel is beginning to apply the same techniques in the occupied West Bank that it used in Gaza over the past 15 months. The Israeli goal is to make life impossible for the Palestinian population by enforcing an “incremental policy of ethnic cleansing”, he adds.

Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, also tells TRT World that the internationalisation of the Zionist renaming of the West Bank is in stark opposition to the international consensus.

It is “indicative of the confrontation” that seems to be the shared intention of Netanyahu and Trump, he says.

“If implemented in a substantive manner, (the renaming effort) will further inflame the dire situation facing the Palestinian people,” he adds.

The use of biblical references like Judea and Samaria is a symbolic way for the Zionist project to convey its rejection of Palestinian statehood, Falk notes.

The Palestinian argument rests firmly on the Fourth Geneva Convention governing situations of belligerent occupation that commenced in the aftermath of the 1967 War, he says.

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that an occupying power must not transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

Therefore, Israel is not allowed under the Geneva Conventions to “settle” its citizens inside the Palestinian territories it occupies—something Tel Aviv has done rather systematically in the occupied West Bank since 1967.

The United Nations General Assembly, the United Nations Security Council and the International Court of Justice have all said that Israeli settlements on the West Bank violate the Fourth Geneva Convention.

“Governments and media should refuse to follow this Israeli (renaming) lead,” Falk says, adding that Israel never fulfilled stakeholder expectations that its occupation of the West Bank would be temporary – something that was “authoritatively assumed” in a Security Council Resolution 242 adopted unanimously on Nov 22, 1967.

Elise Stefanik, Trump’s envoy to the United Nations, recently said at her Senate confirmation hearing on January 21 that Israel has a “biblical right” to the “entire West Bank” – a position that puts the US at odds with the UN view of the occupied Palestinian territories.

“The idea that in 2025, Israel is still using the Bible to somehow justify its colonisation programme is absurd. This is completely unacceptable. It's illegal. It breaches international law,” Antony Loewenstein, the author of The Palestine Laboratory, tells TRT World.

“This just reveals yet again that Israel is increasingly moving to become a theocratic state,” he says.

“Arabs have been living there for many, many thousands of years. They have a spiritual connection but also a legal right to live in their own homeland.”