Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Ancient Names; Modern Parlance

Greg Myre quotes, in today's New York Times, Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as saying "not all the settlements of today in Judea and Samaria will remain" but adds that Sharon was "referring to the West Bank by its biblical name".

While Judea and Samaria appear extensively in the Bible as well as the New Testament (Acts 8:1, for example), they were terms used by the British during their Mandate period 1920-1948 and by the United Nations in its Partition Resolution 181 (Part II, Para. A).

There need be no antipathy to using names that originated in antiquity. In truth, the term 'West Bank' is that which is a recent semantic creation, intended to obliterate the Jewishness of the territory promised to become the Jewish national home.

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