Couldn't Have Said It Better

For at least 30 years and more, I have focused on semantics in my Hasbara seminars/lectures.

There are no "settlements" but communities, villages, towns and cities.

There are no "settlers" but either revenants (my creation) or simply residents.

If there is an "occupation", it is the occupation by Arabs of portions of the Jewish national homeland.

If there are "refugees", they also include Jewish refugees.

Now read
The Forward's Philologos:-

It’s obviously a losing battle, but I can’t help carrying on with the fight...

How long will the canard continue to be repeated by supposedly educated journalists that “Judea” and “Samaria” are territorially expansionist terms, resurrected from the time of the Bible by right-wing Jewish settlers and their supporters, for a geographical area whose rightful name is “the West Bank”? When will this idiocy finally stop?

One would like to ask the Diehls, the Cohens and all the others a simple question: In the long centuries after the final redaction of the Hebrew Bible, which took place sometime in the second or first century BCE, what, in their humble opinion, was the hill country south and north of Jerusalem called?

It certainly wasn’t “the West Bank,” a term that is barely 60 years old. A translation of the Arabic ad-difa’a al-gharbiya, “the West Bank” was a coinage introduced in the early 1950s to denote the area of Palestine west of the Jordan River that was annexed by Transjordan — its name now changed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan — following its conquest by King Abdullah’s Arab Legion in the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war. You won’t find it in a single book, atlas or newspaper article before that.

...long before the British Mandate, Judea was the standard English word for the hills around Bethlehem and Hebron, just as Samaria was for the hills farther north. Commercial European tourism to Palestine started in the mid-19th century, and from then on, England witnessed a spate of travel books reporting on visits there. All these books use similar terminology...Judea and Samaria, although they derive from the Hebrew biblical terms Yehuda and Shomron, have been part of the geographical vocabulary of Christian Europe since the time of Jesus. “The West Bank” has not been.

To refuse to refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria is, whether deliberately or not, to declare that Jews and Christians have no historical connection to these areas. To malign others for calling them that is even worse.

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