Responding to: ‘West Bank’ Is a Colonial Imposition — Masada Siegel · 2026-06-03

What the Piece Argues

Masada Siegel’s op‑ed uses the Retaking the Names Act (Sen. Cotton, Rep. Tenney) as its immediate peg to argue that “West Bank” is a colonial relic of Jordan’s 1948–1967 occupation and that “Judea and Samaria” is the only historically authentic, decolonizing name. She invokes Hadrian’s ancient renaming, her own name’s connection to Masada, and modern indigenous-name restorations to cast the legislative push as a long‑overdue reclamation of Jewish indigeneity. The piece concludes that restoring “Judea and Samaria” is a moral imperative that reconnects the land to its true history and makes peace possible.

Receipts

This is not a history lesson; it is a land grab dressed in a linguistic costume.

  • The framing wants you to believe
    • That “West Bank” is a colonial term imposed by outsiders, while “Judea and Samaria” is the authentic, decolonized name that restores justice to an indigenous Jewish connection to the land.
    • That replacing one label with another is a harmless, principled act of historical memory akin to renaming Swaziland or restoring Irish place‑names.
  • What’s really going on
    • The push to expunge “West Bank” from law and diplomacy is a deliberate political project of the Israeli settler movement and its supporters, designed to erase the existence of the Palestinian people—who have lived continuously on that land for centuries—and to legitimize the illegal annexation of occupied territory.
    • “Judea and Samaria” is the language of conquest, not of decolonization: Israel has used it to frame the land as eternally Jewish, to justify the construction of settlements that violate international law, and to pretend that the 3 million Palestinians who live there are temporary interlopers rather than a people with an equal claim to indigeneity.
    • Anchor: UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016) reaffirms that Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, have “no legal validity” and constitute “a flagrant violation under international law.” The International Court of Justice’s 2004 advisory opinion on the wall declared the West Bank to be occupied Palestinian territory.

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: with a persuadable moderate who genuinely believes this is about historical accuracy and indigenous rights, and you want to calmly show what the name change actually accomplishes.

Consider the village of Susiya, in the South Hebron Hills. It sits on land that Israel has designated “Area C”—part of what Ms. Siegel would call “Judea.” The residents, Palestinian families who have farmed there for generations, are under demolition orders. Their crime is not being Jewish in a territory the Bible calls Jewish; it is being Palestinian in a territory Israel wants to call Jewish.

The problem is not that we lack a historical name. The problem is that one group is using a historical name to dispossess another. The West Bank is the internationally recognized term for the territory Israel has occupied since 1967. It is not a colonial imposition; it is a legal description of a military occupation that has denied the people who live there basic rights for over half a century.

True respect for indigenous history means acknowledging every layer of that history. Palestinians have a 1,300‑year continuous presence in these hills. Their villages have names, and those names are being bulldozed along with their homes. We who believe in justice for indigenous peoples everywhere must insist on the names that reflect the reality of occupation and displacement, not the fantasy of an empire that has never stopped expanding. International law says those settlements have “no legal validity”—the UN Security Council reaffirmed it in 2016.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: with someone who sees the name change as a noble cultural revival, and you need to firmly show the political purpose behind the pretty words.

When a name change coincides perfectly with a program of land theft and ethnic cleansing, it is not a history lesson. It is propaganda.

The campaign to replace “West Bank” with “Judea and Samaria” is driven by the Israeli settler movement—an enterprise that has illegally transferred over 700,000 Israeli civilians into occupied territory since 1967—and by politicians like Sen. Tom Cotton, who introduced the bill to erase “West Bank” from federal law in 2024. The same political faction that demands “Judea and Samaria” is the one that openly advocates annexation and has declared that “there is no Palestinian people.”

Let us be clear: the people who benefit are not the ancient Judeans; they are the modern settlers, the real‑estate developers, and the security contractors who profit from occupation. The cost is borne by Palestinian families who lose their homes, their olive groves, and their right to exist.

We all agree that erasing a people’s name is wrong. That is exactly what the “Judea and Samaria” project does to Palestinians. It pretends that the villages of Masafer Yatta, Khan al‑Ahmar, and Lifta were never there, or that they are somehow less legitimate than a hilltop named in the Iron Age. The true moral superiority lies in using language that respects the living, not the dead empires that once ruled them.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: when someone shares this op‑ed in a smug, “actually, it’s not the West Bank” voice, and you want the bystanders to see the absurdity of the argument.

The headline puts “West Bank” in scare quotes, as if a pair of punctuation marks can make a million people disappear. Masada Siegel got her name from her parents’ fondness for an ancient fortress. The family that has lived in the Hebron hills since the 16th century got its name from the fact that it has lived in the Hebron hills since the 16th century. According to this op‑ed, Siegel’s vacation‑destination namesake carries more cultural weight than a living community’s continuous existence. That’s not history; that’s privilege with a thesaurus.

The Romans renamed the province 1,900 years ago. The Israeli Civil Administration renamed the very same spot “closed military zone (firing zone 918)” last month. One of those renamings is actually relevant to the people being forced from their homes.

What’s truly colonial about this whole debate is the assumption that you get to wave a Bible verse and make a million people disappear. “Judea and Samaria” is the name you use when you want to build a subdivision on somebody else’s grandfather’s orchard and tell the world it was always your backyard. We’ll keep using “West Bank,” because that word tells you what is happening: a military occupation of stolen land, not a biblical theme park.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: with someone who is actively pushing the “Judea and Samaria” line as cover for annexation, and you need to force them to see what they are complicit in.

You know who else used “historical names” to justify conquest? The Nazi regime renamed parts of Poland “Warthegau” to Germanize them. The Kremlin now insists that occupied Ukrainian territory is “Novorossiya.” You are doing the same thing: wrapping a land grab in the language of ancient heritage so you can pretend the people you are displacing never existed.

The institutions that gain from this linguistic fraud are the Israeli settler lobby, the American politicians who take AIPAC money, and the religious‑nationalist movement that views the entire territory as “liberated” Israeli land. The cost is paid by the 3 million Palestinians who live under a military regime that denies them citizenship, water rights, and building permits—and that has killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians in the West Bank alone since 2000, according to B’Tselem. The UN Security Council, in Resolution 2334, declared these settlements have “no legal validity”; you wrap your theft in a biblical costume and call it heritage.

You claim to honor Jewish history. The Jewish prophets would recognize this for what it is: theft. Amos cried out against those who “sell the righteous for silver.” Jeremiah condemned the leaders who “have built Jerusalem with blood.” You have taken a sacred history of suffering and turned it into a weapon for inflicting suffering on another people. The mirror you need to hold up is not to ancient Rome; it is to every empire that has ever used a false claim of indigeneity to justify colonization. You are the colonial imposition.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: with a bad‑faith actor who knows exactly what this renaming is doing and is counting on polite silence to let it pass, and you want to burn the frame to ash.

This op‑ed is a Ponzi scheme of the soul: steal the land, bulldoze the village, then rename the hilltop after your ancestor so you can point to the deed and say you were always there. It is history as performed by a ventriloquist dummy with a PhD in real‑estate speculation.

The argument is that calling the territory the West Bank is a colonial imposition—as if the 58‑year military occupation that has turned the place into an archipelago of fenced‑in Bantustans is simply an administrative detail. The true “colonial imposition” is a Jewish‑supremacist state that pretends a settlement built on stolen private land is a “neighborhood,” that calls a teenager shot in the back a “terrorist,” and that expects the rest of the world to nod along while it re‑names the crime scene to sound more biblical.

This is blood‑and‑soil nationalism dressed in religious drag, and it stinks of the same old European ethno‑state fantasies that got millions killed in the last century. If you believe this, you don’t need a history lesson; you need a moral CT scan to locate the part of your brain that has calcified into indifference to Palestinian life. The only thing “enduring” here is the occupation. The names that will endure are the ones the survivors carve into the rubble.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: when the reader needs to feel the moral weight of scripture and prophetic witness against this lie, delivered with the fire of the tradition Siegel claims to honor.

Hear the words of the prophet Amos: “They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth” (Amos 2:6‑7). This is the scripture you invoke when you speak of Judea. But you use it not to feed the hungry or lift up the oppressed; you use it to justify grinding the Palestinian people into the dust of their own land, to steal their silver, and to call the act a religious rite.

You have made an idol of the land, and your worship is soaked in the blood of the innocent. The prophet Jeremiah saw your like: “They have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush” (Jeremiah 8:12). You stand before the world and claim the mantle of an indigenous people while you cage another indigenous people behind concrete walls and call it security. You have taken the sacred history of a community that knew suffering and turned it into a curse. You have made the name of God a warrant for ethnic cleansing.

We who walk in the tradition of the prophets—of King and Heschel and Thurman—know that true justice will not be mocked. The stones of the West Bank cry out, and they do not cry “Judea and Samaria.” They cry the names of the children shot in Jenin, of the families burned out of Huwara, of the old women who watched their olive trees uprooted. You have made a golden cup full of abominations, and you have the gall to call it a chalice. To hell with your false piety. The reckoning is not a biblical metaphor; it is the day the world finally calls this occupation what it is and acts accordingly.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched‑Earth

When to use: for the cathartic release, the full‑throated, expletive‑laden rage against this propaganda, to be shared among those who already know the occupation is a crime and need the words to spit back.

This is the most intellectually dishonest, morally bankrupt, historically illiterate piece of shit masquerading as commentary that the Journal has printed all year. Masada Siegel wants to play name games while the IDF demolishes Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta and snipers pick off children in Jenin. You can take your fucking “indigenous naming” and shove it up your colonizing ass.

“Judea and Samaria” is not a decolonized name; it is a settler’s wet dream, a fantasy land where Palestinians are just background noise to be bulldozed so some Brooklyn real‑estate developer can put up a condo with a view of the desert. The only “colonial imposition” here is the goddamn occupation that has stolen land for 58 years and turned the West Bank into a prison archipelago. The International Court of Justice warned the wall was “tantamount to de facto annexation”—that’s legal‑speak for “you’re a thief, and everyone knows it.”

You are not restoring history; you are erasing a living people. You are not an indigenous rights activist; you are a propagandist for a regime that has killed thousands of Palestinians since the turn of the century. So spare me your fucking Masada nostalgia. The only thing that will not fall again is the Palestinian demand for freedom. The West Bank—yes, motherfucker, the West Bank—will be free, and all your biblical LARPing will not change that.

The Deeper Breakdown

Who benefits, and how. The campaign to eliminate the term “West Bank” and replace it with “Judea and Samaria” is not a grassroots linguistic revival. It is a top‑down political project led by the Israeli settler movement, the right‑wing Israeli government, and their allies in the U.S. Congress. Its function is to erase the Palestinian presence from official discourse and to normalize the permanent Israeli annexation of occupied territory that international law considers illegal. The concrete beneficiaries are the settlement enterprise—which has access to state‑subsidized housing, infrastructure, and land—and a political class that uses the biblical framing to mobilize religious and nationalist support. The Palestinian population, which is the indigenous majority in the territory, loses its very name and is recast as a temporary intruder on “Jewish land.”

The receipts.

  • International law: The UN Security Council, in Resolution 2334 (2016), declared that Israeli settlements in “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” have no legal validity and constitute the most serious violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice described the West Bank as occupied Palestinian territory and found the separation barrier and associated settlement regime to be contrary to international law.
  • Demographics and indigeneity: Palestinians have formed the majority population in the West Bank for centuries. Historical records, including Ottoman tax registers and British Mandate surveys, document continuous Palestinian habitation of towns and villages across the territory. The claim that “Judea and Samaria” is an unused indigenous name ignores the fact that the area has been known as “the West Bank” (of the Jordan River) since 1948, and earlier as part of the district of Nablus, Jerusalem, and Hebron under Ottoman and British rule.
  • The political push: The Retaking the Names Act, introduced by Sen. Cotton and Rep. Tenney, would require all federal documents to use “Judea and Samaria” and ban “West Bank.” It was praised by the settler lobby and is part of a broader legislative effort to legitimize annexation.