Monday, May 29, 2017
Elder of ZiyonThe Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip began 50 years ago in June.When did Judea and Samaria become known as "Palestinian territories?"
Certainly not in 1967. News articles routinely referred (erroneously) to the West Bank as "Israeli-occupied Jordan" through at least 1968.
The New York Times continued to refer to Judea and Samaria as "occupied Jordan" into the 1970s:
And here in 1976:
TEL AVIV, Aug. 2—Israeli forces blocked an attempt by more than 50 Jewish militants to set up an unauthorized settlement near Jericho in occupied Jordanian territory today,Slowly, Judea and Samaria morphed from Jordanian into simply the "West Bank," a new political entity that never existed before, as in this 1977 article - which still had to spell out "West Bank of the Jordan" because the phrase "West Bank" was even then not ubiquitous enough to be understood:
The widespread use of the word "Palestinian territories" took many more years to take root. That was mostly because the UN started using that term in the late 1970s in anti-Israel resolutions - the phrase "Palestinian territories" is the only reason Jimmy Carter's government abstained from an anti-Israel resolution in 1977 rather than vote for it:
The United States was known to have tried strenously without success to induce Egypt to drop a reference in the resolution to the “Palestinian” territories, which the Americans objected would prejudge the decisions to be taken in Geneva.Either way, very few people outside the UN and Palestinian Arabs themselves referred to the territories as "Palestinian" until decades after 1967 and that is simply the results of a huge, extended propaganda campaign to change the territories from "Arab" to "Palestinian" - to convert Israel from David to Goliath.
The United States was said to have ‘told Arab countries two days ago that without such a change it could not vote for the text even though it had supported the language of the resolution in a number of other texts.
Privately, Arab representatives complained that the United States had delayed asking for the changes until was too late, and they suggested that the Americans had yielded to pressure from the pro‐Israeli lobby in deciding not to support the text but rather to abstain.
Jordan did not officially claim not to have jurisdiction over the West Bank until 1988.
So how can it be that "Palestinian territories" have been "occupied" for 50 years when you cannot find a single person in 1967 referring to them as such? And, more importantly: what was the exact date that these territories, promised to the Jewish people by the League of Nations and illegally seized by Jordan in 1948, become "Palestinian?"
It seems that such a date must exist, perhaps somewhere between 1977 and 1992. But no one can point to such a date.
The term "Palestinian territories" is not factual - it is propaganda that has taken root as fact.
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