On December 6, 2024, Senator Tom Cotton (Republican of Arkansas) introduced a bill in the Senate to replace “West Bank” in all federal documents with “Judea and Samaria,” noting, “The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria go back thousands of years. The US should stop using the politically charged term West Bank to refer to the biblical heartland of Israel.” His bill matches a House bill introduced earlier this year by Representatives Claudia Tenney, Randy Weber, and Anthony D’Esposito.

Yes, they are the Jewish names but also the world’s. In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted for Resolution 181, a.k.a. the Partition Plan, a document that referred to “Samaria and Judea.” There was no reference in it to any territory called “West Bank.”

Fast forward two decades to the Six-Day War of 1967, and Israel’s capturing the Golan Heights in the north from Syria, the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip in the north from Egypt, and the in-between land taken from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. When the New York Times referred to Israel’s rout of the Jordanian army by capturing the “western bank of the Jordan River,” it was referring to land that Jordan occupied in 1948 and annexed in 1950. Jordan never had a name for its conquest. For two decades, it was just the cumbersome “western bank of the Jordan River.”

Image: 1895 Map of Palestine. Library of Congress.

So, in 1968, the Times’s correspondents in Israel and editors in New York were still wrestling with the new........

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