Friday, November 30, 2007

"CISJORDANIA"

Cisjordania is Spanish for the "West Bank" (see here, for example, an interview with Moetzet Yesha Chairman Dani Dayan) which is funny to me because as a Jabotinskyite, we were taught that the Palestine Mandate stretching from the Mediterranean Sea in the West to the Iraqi Desert in the east was divided by British imperialism seeking to assuage the violent Arabs who, in 1920 and 1921, were already killing Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Petah Tiqva in a politically-motivated terror campaing directed at civilians and members of the Old Yishuv community who were in no way identified with "nationalist Zionism" which the Arabs claimed was their enemy and not specifically Jews per se. Of course, they lied then and have been lying ever since.

And that division was termed TransJordan east of the Jordan River and...CisJordan as the territory west of the Jordan River.

But, I would presume, today's Spanish probably refers only to Judea and Samaria as Cisjordania whereas then, it included all the territory, including modern-day Israel.

That, ladies and gentlemen, was today's lesson in political geographic semantics.

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