Donald J. Trump’s return to power as president has bolstered right-wing lawmakers in Israel and the United States who support Israeli annexation of the West Bank, an occupied territory long seen by Palestinians and the international community as part of an eventual Palestinian state.
On Friday, Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced bills that would bar the use of the term “West Bank” in United States government documents and materials, replacing the phrase with “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical names for the region that are widely used in Israel and the administrative name used by the state to describe the area.
The linguistic proposition is aimed at strengthening and supporting Israel’s historical claim to territory that it captured from Jordan in the 1967 war and has occupied militarily ever since. And it comes as the Israeli military has been conducting intense raids in the area, which it says are intended to eradicate terrorism.
“The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria goes back thousands of years,” Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said in a statement about the legislation. He called for the United States to “stop using the politically charged term West Bank”; opponents of annexation say it is the term Judea and Samaria that reflects a political agenda.
Representative Claudia Tenney, Republican of New York, another sponsor of the bill, also announced the recent creation of a congressional group — the Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus — to advance policies that support Israeli claims to that land. By introducing the bill and creating the caucus, “we are working to reaffirm Israel’s rightful claim to its territory,” she said in a statement.
The legislation, which Ms. Tenney first introduced last year, is being proposed again amid drastically changed dynamics in Washington, where Mr. Trump has made his strong support for Israel explicit. Republicans now control Congress, with slim majorities in the House and Senate. The president has indicated support for expansionist Israeli policies, and in his first term proposed Israeli annexation of a large part of the West Bank.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Washington, Mr. Trump’s first visit with a foreign leader since returning to the White House last month. Asked on Monday at a news briefing, in anticipation of that meeting, whether he supported annexing parts of the West Bank, the president declined to respond directly, but he did not dismiss the idea altogether either.
“It certainly is a small country in terms of land,” he said in reference to Israel. Mr. Trump used an analogy to illustrate his point: “My desk is the Middle East. And this pen, the top of the pen, that’s Israel. That’s not good, right? It’s a pretty big difference.”
Since Israel seized control of the West Bank, hundreds of thousands Israeli civilians have settled there with both tacit and explicit government approval, living under civil law while their Palestinian neighbors, kept stateless, are subject to military law and have fewer rights.
The growing number and size of the settlements have steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians. Expanding Israel’s hold over the West Bank is a stated goal of many lawmakers in Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right governing coalition, and many settlers hope Mr. Trump will support the project.
The international community largely views the Israeli settlements as illegal, and Palestinians have long argued that they are a creeping annexation, turning land needed for an independent state into an unmanageable patchwork.
In 2019, the previous Trump administration declared that the United States did not consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal, reversing longstanding American policy under both Democrats and Republicans, and removing what had been seen as an important barrier to annexation. Last year, Antony J. Blinken, then secretary of state, said that Israeli settlements were inconsistent with international law and that the Biden administration opposed them.
Brad Brooks-Rubin, formerly a senior adviser in the State Department’s Office of Sanctions Coordination, argued in a recent post on Just Security, an online law forum, that the Trump administration’s revocation “provides a psychological and rhetorical victory” for the settlement movement and its allies, “especially in the United States.”
The move also heartened expansionist Israeli lawmakers. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself and a vocal opponent of a Palestinian state, welcomed Mr. Trump’s reversal as an expression of the president’s “deep connection to the Jewish people and our historical right to our land.” On Sunday, as Mr. Netanyahu was headed to Washington, Mr. Smotrich called Mr. Trump “a lover of Israel” on social media and said, “We must strengthen our grip and sovereignty over the homeland in Judea and Samaria.”
Still, Republican support for the settler movement and changes to the language of the discussion surrounding their effort have some pro-Israel lobbyists in Washington worried about Israel’s long-term prospects for peace and improved relations with regional neighbors.
“What’s dangerous about this proposal isn’t what they want to call the land; it’s the proposal to affirm Israeli sovereignty over it,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the Jewish pro-peace advocacy group J Street. “That’s called annexation, which is not just illegal under international law, but the death knell for any hope of Israel normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Arab world.”
