How the Jordanians Erased 3,000 Years of History

Wars and revolutions and deaths of leaders often determine what place names will be retained, and which replaced. Sometimes the change in a place name is made is to honor a triumphant political leader, and sometimes to change a toponym that is deemed is too redolent of a recent enemy. Consider St. Petersburg. When Russia first began fighting Germany in the Great War, “Petersburg” was judged too Germanic, and was slavicized as “Petrograd” (“grad” being a version of “gorod” which means “city” in Russian) in 1914. Then, three days after Lenin’s death in 1924, Petrograd became “Leningrad.” In the case of Stalin, a place name change in his honor was made long before his death. In 1925, the city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad, to honor the man who was starting to accumulate power in his hands, and it remained with that name until 1961, when, as part of his de-stalinization campaign, Nikita Khrushchev changed its name to Volgograd.

Think, too, of how after the North Vietnamese won their war, they promptly changed the name of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City, to honor their leader and to declare their victory to the world.

Decolonization explains a great many changes in toponyms. In India, Bombay’s name was changed to Mumbai in 1996, to reflect the local Marathi heritage instead of the British-era colonial name. For the same “decolonizing” reason, Madras was changed to Chennai, to reflect Tamil identity, in 1996.

In Africa, the name of the empire-builder Cecil Rhodes was removed from many place names. Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, while Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. The names of other Englishmen, political leaders or explorers were replaced as well: Salisbury became Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, Stanleyville became Kisangani in the Congo. And other names, of other colonies, underwent name changes. Thus the city of  Lourenço Marques, named after a 16th century Portuguese explorer, became Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, in 1976.

Another name change is that of Constantinople, a name given to honor the Roman emperor who founded in the city in 330 A.D., and that toponym became Istanbul, the capital of Turkey, in 1930.

Peking was changed to Beijing, the capital of China. The name was modernized to reflect Mandarin pronunciation, rather than Europeanized romanization.

But let’s go back to the Jews, and their tiny state of Israel. When the Romans defeated the Jews and took over their homeland, then known as the Kingdom of Judea, they decided that name was too redolent of the Jews, too supportive of their territorial claims, and so they decided to call that area “Syria Palaestinorum” — Syria of the Philistines. after a long-extinct seafaring people from near Gaza — that then was reduced to “Syria Palestina” (“Palestinian Syria”) and finally, to “Palestine.”

Fast-forward to today. The ancient homeland of the Jews, the Land of Israel, is now called simply “Israel.” Most of the world, however, either mindlessly or with malice aforethought, continues to use the place name “Palestine” to designate the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and roughly, from Mount Hermon in the north to the Sinai in the south.

But the big change is the one the Kingdom of Jordan made in 1950. Having come into possession after the 1948 war of the territories known for the previous 3,000 years as Judea and Samaria, the Jordanians wanted to replace those names with something less redolent of the Jews and their claim to their ancient homeland. They did not find an Arab name to replace Judea and Samaria, but simply a geographic designation — the “West Bank.” As bland and neutral a place name as they come, with no hint of its 3,000 year history as “Judea and Samaria.”

Whenever you now turn on your Nightly News, you will often hear this: “The IDF has been conducting anti-terror operations in the occupied West Bank.” Imagine the effect that has, not on you, for you know better, but on hundreds of millions of people around the world, as they hear over and over again that damnable “Occupied West Bank.” Now imagine if you turn on a television talking head, or an NPR reporter on the radio, to hear someone report that “The IDF has been conducting anti-terror operations in Judea and Samaria.” Isn’t that better?