Call It Like It Is: Judea and Samaria
You should not have used the expression “West Bank settlements” in your Dec. 22 editorial “Trump’s Man in Jerusalem.”
Calling them “Judea and Samaria,” which is what they were called for thousands of years, including by the United Nations in 1947, and not “the West Bank” actually strengthens the case of those Jews who advocate a two-state solution by making the territorial concessions they’re willing to make mean something.
As Yoram Ettinger pointed out five years ago in Israel Hayom, Jordan invented the “West Bank” in 1950 “to assert Jordanian rule and to expunge Jewish connection to the cradle of Jewish history.” Until then, even Ottoman and British official records referred to Judea and Samaria. Jordan’s action is exactly what the Romans did 1,800 years earlier when it renamed defeated Judea as Palestine.
“Settlements,” though, is a dirty word. It is both self-disrespecting and counterproductive.
Jerome R. Verlin | Elkins Park
Land Names Are Anti-Israel
I regret the use of the terms “West Bank” and “settlements” (“Trump’s Man in Jerusalem,” Dec. 22).
Judea and Samaria were the 3,000-year-old names for the eastern part of the Land of Israel, until the Kingdom of Jordan illegally conquered and annexed the area in 1948. Jordan called it the West Bank to emphasize that it was now part of Jordan.
The term “settlements” is the pejorative term for Jewish communities.
Please stop using these anti-Israel terms.
Henry Frank | Southwest Philadelphia
American Jews Clinging to the Past
In the lead-up to the presidential election, attorney Lynne Kessler Lechter cogently argued against voting for Hillary Clinton (“This Jewish Grandmother Is Riding on the Trump Train,” Oct. 27). Coincident to that, a letter to the editor appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, written by a self-identifying Jewish man. In it, he railed against Donald Trump as a narcissist and liar, going so far as to employ a frayed metaphor relating Trump’s political ascendancy to Germany in the 1930s.
It is my belief that many Jewish Americans cling to a post-FDR anachronism of a Democratic Party that no longer exists, replaced by one that demands intellectual conformity and embraces leftist political philosophies, which include overt anti-Israel and barely concealed anti-Semitic views. I would advise a reread of Lechter’s fact-filled opinion piece.
Steve Cohen | Richboro
