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........