The ‘West Bank’ Is a Colonial Name. It’s Time to Say So |
There is a particular irony – one that deserves to be stated plainly and without apology – in the fact that the same intellectual class most eager to interrogate colonial legacies, to dismantle imposed nomenclatures, and to restore indigenous voices to the cartographic record, has for decades repeated without scrutiny one of the most successful acts of colonial renaming in modern history.
The term “West Bank” is not a neutral geographical descriptor. It is a political artifact, coined by a foreign conqueror, designed to erase three millennia of continuous indigenous naming, and subsequently laundered into respectable usage by the sheer force of repetition. That it is now treated as the default label in international law, diplomacy, and journalism does not make it accurate. It makes it entrenched, which is a very different thing.
The facts are not in dispute, though they are routinely ignored. Prior to 1948, no cartographic tradition, no administrative record, no diplomatic instrument in any language referred to the highland territory running from Hebron through Jerusalem to Nablus as “the West Bank.”
The name did not exist. It was invented by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan after its army crossed the Jordan River during the 1948 war, seized the territory by force, expelled every Jewish resident, and annexed it in 1950 – an annexation so legally void that only Britain and Pakistan recognized it, while the rest of the international community, including every Arab League state, rejected it outright.
The term “West Bank” was Jordan’s contribution to the vocabulary of conquest: it defined the land not by what it was, not by who had lived there, not by its own millennia-deep identity, but by its position relative to Amman.
The territory became, linguistically, an appendage of the Hashemite kingdom – the western bank of Jordan’s river, the western margin of Jordan’s sovereignty. The French equivalent betrays this even more explicitly: Cisjordanie, literally “this side of the Jordan.” This is not description. It is subordination through nomenclature, and it follows a pattern as old as empire itself.
For over three thousand years before the Jordanian army arrived, the territory in question was known – in Jewish, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, early Islamic, Crusader, Ottoman, and British Mandate sources alike – as Judea and Samaria. These are not polemical inventions. They are among the oldest continuously attested toponyms in the eastern Mediterranean.
Judea derives from the Kingdom of Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem and whose people gave the world the very word “Jew.” Samaria takes its name from Shomron, the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel.
Flavius Josephus wrote about Judea and Samaria in the first century. The Mishnah legislated for them in the second. The Byzantines administered them under those names in the fifth. The British Mandate’s own partition plans in 1937 and 1947 used them. The United Nations Partition Resolution of November 1947 used them.
They are the indigenous names of the land, attested across every civilization that has governed it, and they were in continuous, unbroken use until a Hashemite king decided, in the aftermath of a war of aggression, that they were inconvenient.
What Jordan did in 1950 was not unprecedented. It was, in fact, a precise repetition of what the Roman Emperor Hadrian did in 135 CE, when, after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, he renamed the province of Judea “Syria Palaestina” – deliberately replacing a Jewish name with one derived from the Philistines, an Aegean people with no surviving descendants and no connection to the land beyond having once occupied its coastal plain.
Hadrian’s purpose was explicit and punitive: to sever the Jewish people from their homeland by erasing their name from the map. The Jordanian renaming served the same structural function. It replaced an indigenous toponym with a directional label that rendered the land anonymous, historically rootless, and defined entirely in relation to the occupying power’s geography.
That scholars who would never accept such erasure if it were performed against any other indigenous people accept it without comment when it is performed against Jews is not an oversight. It is a double standard so deeply internalized that it has become invisible and now passes as neutrality.
It also exposes a deeper contradiction within Palestinian nationalist discourse itself: if the land is claimed as inherently and immemorially Palestinian, what, then, is its indigenous Arabic name independent of Jordanian geography? If the dominant term remains tethered to the Jordan River – and to the Hashemite kingdom – the vocabulary itself quietly unsettles the claim it seeks to anchor.
The objection will be raised that “West Bank” has become standard usage, that it carries no ideological intent for most who employ it, and that insisting on “Judea and Samaria” is itself a political act. The first two claims are true but irrelevant. Colonial terminology frequently survives the empire that imposed it – Rhodesia was standard usage too, until it wasn’t.
The third claim is simply false. Using the indigenous, historically attested name of a territory is not a political act. It is a corrective one. It does not prejudge borders, deny Palestinian civil rights, or determine the outcome of negotiations. It simply refuses to let a Hashemite king’s act of cartographic vandalism pass for objective geography.
If the anti-colonial project means anything at all, it means restoring names that conquerors erased. It means insisting that land has memory, that toponyms carry the weight of civilizations, and that no army – not Hadrian’s legions, not Abdullah’s Arab Legion – has the right to rename another people’s homeland and expect history to comply.
Judea and Samaria are not rhetorical provocations. They are corrections. And the discomfort they provoke in those who claim to oppose colonialism while defending colonial vocabulary is not a reason to abandon them. It is the strongest possible argument for their restoration.