When it comes to discourse surrounding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, fights over word choice can be as charged as fights over the facts themselves. Is it “occupied territories” or “disputed territories”? A “security fence” or an “apartheid wall”? “Terrorist” or “militant”?

These terms often signal a speaker’s allegiances — and which historical narrative they accept as true.

Now, that semantic divide is moving from rhetoric into law.

Tennessee passed a bill last week banning the use of “West Bank” in official state documents, instead favoring the biblical names, “Judea and Samaria.” Gov. Bill Lee is expected to sign the bill into law, applying the mandate to state educational materials including textbooks and course descriptions, according to state Sen. Mark Pody, a co-sponsor of the bill.

“The use of the term ‘West Bank’ is a deliberate attempt to erase the Jewish identity of Judea and Samaria,” the bill reads, “and to obscure the deep historical, religious, and legal connections of the Jewish people to the land.”

The measure is part of a broader push by Republicans to recognize Israel’s claim to land widely considered unlawfully occupied under international law. Last year, House Republicans launched the “Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus,” a group of Christian lawmakers who promote Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. Meanwhile, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton introduced a federal bill — with the unwieldy title “Retiring the Egregious Confusion Over the Genuine Name of Israel’s Zone of Influence by Necessitating Government-use of Judea and Samaria Act,” an acronym for “recognizing” — though the bill never made it out of committee.

Now, states are taking on the fight. Jason Rapert, founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and a former Arkansas state senator, has said he is working to pass similar bills nationwide, with 15 states expressing interest so far. Among the states that introduced such legislation this year: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia.

The flurry of bills comes as violence against Palestinians in the West Bank intensifies and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accelerated the expansion of settlements, entrenching Israeli control of the region and further dimming prospects for a future Palestinian state.

That reality is now colliding with U.S. state politics, as legislators argue over the legitimacy of Israeli and Palestinian claims to the land — and how far state law should go in shaping that debate.

Each term is “loaded with political context, loaded with real significance for a dispute where people are dying,” said state Senator Jeff Yarbro, a Democrat, who testified against the bill during the Tennessee legislature’s deliberations. “We are compelling [the] use of one of those political terms. That’s a choice. It is mandated political speech, effectively.”

The bill’s origins

Yossi Dagan, head of the Shomron Regional Council, which oversees Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has spent years building support among American evangelicals to formally recognize “Judea and Samaria.”

“The lie about the ‘West Bank’ or ‘occupied territory’ must end,” Dagan said at a conference of conservative state legislatures in Indianapolis last July. “We must put the truth on the table: Judea and Samaria are the heart of Israel.”

Dagan has close ties with U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and has hosted him for multiple visits to “Samaria” as part of a broader effort to bring American officials to the region.

Sen. Pody said he was inspired to cosponsor Tennessee’s bill after taking such a trip last year with Huckabee.

“They were talking about a bill that had passed that was very similar out of Arkansas, and how that was really inspiring to the people over there [in Israel],” Pody told the Forward. “And so after we left, we knew that we wanted to do something like that in Tennessee.”

The Tennessee bill mirrors model legislation promoted by the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and leans heavily on biblical justification, stating that “the return of the Jewish people to Judea and Samaria in modern times constitutes the fulfillment of numerous biblical prophecies” — referring to the Christian Zionist idea that the Jewish state is a precursor to Jesus’ return.

“Eighty percent of the Bible stories that we read occurred in Judea Samaria,” Rapert told the Tennessee legislature. “Can you imagine someone not wanting to call Tennessee, ‘Tennessee’?”

Rapert did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to biblical reasoning, advocates for the name “Judea and Samaria” often point out that the region was not known as the “West Bank” until relatively recently. The name was popularized after Jordan annexed the territory in 1950, a move the Arab League condemned as illegal at the time. Israel took control of the territory in the 1967 War and has administered it since, with varying degrees of Palestinian self-rule in some areas.

“The more traditional things that we’ve had, that have been around for centuries, is something that I think we’re going to be more comfortable with using,” Pody said. “The West Bank has been more recent terminology.”

Today, the U.S. State Department — which uses the term “West Bank” — estimates that roughly 3 million Palestinians live in the region, alongside an estimated 465,400 Israeli settlers, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, which does not include Israelis who live in East Jerusalem in their tally.

Many Palestinians view the West Bank as core to any future Palestinian state, while Netanyahu has said “Judea and Samaria” is part of Israel’s “ancestral homeland.”

‘Co-opting Judaism’

Asked by a state representative about who opposes his bill, Rapert said those who resist using the term “Judea and Samaria” are typically “folks that support Hamas.”

But efforts to ban the term “West Bank” in official documents have drawn pushback from a broad range of voices — including some Jewish leaders who say they were never consulted on the matter.

“This is not something that has been on the agenda of the Jewish community whatsoever,” Civia Tamarkin, president of the National Council of Jewish Women Arizona, told the Arizona Mirror. She added that Arizona’s resolution on the topic amounted to “co-opting Judaism and antisemitism for a Christian nationalist agenda.”

Maeera Shreiber, a rabbi and English professor at the University of Utah, voiced similar concerns about Utah’s bill, which did not make it out of committee. She said the effort appeared rooted in “a kind of sympathy for the Jewish community,” but failed to account for the diversity of views Jews hold. As a professor at a public university, she also worried about how such language mandates could shape course materials.

“If we replace it with Judea and Samaria, it really obscures the presence of Palestinian claims to the land as well,” Shreiber told the Forward. “These things happen out of misinformed, misguided goodwill, and people often don’t understand the long, dark reach.”

In Tennessee, critics raised similar concerns about erasing Palestinian identity. Anwar Irafat, an imam in Memphis who grew up in Gaza and the West Bank, said the bill ignored the millions of Palestinians who live on the land.

“I’m here because this bill tells me and my family that we do not exist,” Irafat told lawmakers during their deliberations.

State Sen. Charlane Oliver, a Democrat who voted against the measure, questioned why lawmakers were focused on the issue at all, raising concerns about the separation of church and state.

“This is not a congregation,” Oliver said on the Senate floor. “We are not here to debate scripture.”

The post These states want to ban the term ‘West Bank’ and replace it with ‘Judea and Samaria’ appeared first on The Forward.

Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of late Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, attends a meeting in Tehran, Iran, July 18, 2016. Photo: Amir Kholousi/ISNA/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Far too much attention has been given to President Donald Trump’s strategy in the current conflict, and far too little to that of the Islamic Republic.

It is an underestimation of Iran and an indictment of the West.

The common belief is that Iran’s original goal was nuclear capability, either to prevent the US from attacking it (the North Korea strategy) or to use it against the Great and the Little Satan. Perhaps.

But the mullahs had/have a second strategic goal — which appears to be working quite well: The undermining and elimination of political, military, economic, and social ties between the US and what has always been their alliance base: primarily NATO, the EU, and the UN, but also the Gulf Arab States and parts of South America.

October 7th

The horrors of Oct. 7 were not designed to destroy Israel — neither Iran nor Hamas believed the terror organization could do that, even if Hezbollah had helped. After years of relatively small-scale attacks and limited Israeli responses followed by ceasefires, this monstrosity was designed to ensure massive Israeli retaliation that would produce a significant political cost on the Jewish State.

With quick and organized PR, Palestinian civilian suffering became the central image of the conflict. The images and the lies they told were designed to isolate Israel diplomatically, erode its standing in Western societies, and reignite deeply rooted hostility across the Arab and Muslim worlds.

While Israel, in fact, conducted perhaps the most careful military campaign in history, both real and (mostly) false images and stories were used to cast Israel as a villain, which committed “genocide.” Even though casualty statistics by independent groups show that never happened, and ample proof that Israel never had a goal to kill civilians intentionally.

In many spheres, the Iranian and Hamas objective against Israel was achieved. France, the UK, Canada, Australia, Italy, the EU as a body, Denmark, and many more all pulled away from Jerusalem. (Norway, Spain, and Ireland were always hostile, so they don’t count. The UN doesn’t either.) This group extends to Democrats in our own Congress, leftists on campus, and the journalistic chattering class.

The damage calculation is not complete.

Fighting America  

The same principle exists for Iran’s 47-year war against the US. Iranian attacks against America have been carefully structured to do damage, but only enough to claim bragging rights — not enough to produce a backlash. Until now.

1. In 1979, Americans were held hostage for 444 days in the US Embassy in Tehran.
2. The Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut killed 241 US servicemembers and 58 French soldiers.
3. William Francis Buckley (1984), US Navy diver Robert Stethem (1985), and Colonel William R. Higgins (1988) were tortured and murdered. In 2007, Robert Levinson was presumed kidnapped by Iran and killed.
4. In 1996, the Khobar Towers attack occurred.
5. Iran was responsible for the construction, strategy, and use of IEDs during the Iraq war.
6. In 2011, Iranian plots in Washington, D.C, involved killing a Saudi diplomat and attacking the Israeli and Saudi embassies. That year, Iran also began taking steps to mine the Persian Gulf.
7. US Naval Intelligence shows Iranian warships in the Red Sea — where Iran has no border — since 2011 — as part of Iran’s support for the Houthi rebellion in Yemen.
8. In 2012, chairman of the Iranian chiefs of staff, Hassan Firuzabadi, said, “We do have the plan to close the Strait of Hormuz, since a member of the military must plan for all scenarios.”
9. Iranian war games in 2015 were designed against American forces and passed skills along to proxy forces. Beginning in 2016, swarms of Iranian fast boats harassed American ships and others in the Persian Gulf. Iran captured American sailors and released video footage of them — a violation of their rights under the Geneva Convention.
10. In 2018, US intelligence revealed that Iran was responsible for more than 600 American military deaths and thousands wounded by Iranian IEDs in Iraq.
11. In 2024, three military contractors working in Jordan as contractors were killed in a drone attack, and 40 others were injured.

Each damaging, most deadly. None, in isolation, enough to engender an American military response. But all of these — including many unlisted incidents — showed that Tehran had the US in its sights.

The Denouement

At the same time, Israeli and American intelligence were monitoring the enrichment of Iranian uranium beyond Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) limits and ballistic missile ranges beyond UN sanctions. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), as loud an opponent of President Trump and this war as there is, acknowledged that Iran had enough uranium to make nuclear bombs, but added there was no reason to do anything about it because Iran’s missiles couldn’t yet reach the United States.

This is not an uncommon view — if Iran couldn’t reach us with a nuclear weapon, it was not our war.

But as Iran’s capabilities grew, the margins narrowed. And the United States and Israel found themselves in a war they didn’t ask for, didn’t want, but have to win.

Unfortunately, the allied response in Europe and across the world produced the diplomatic response Iran wanted.

The mullah government doesn’t care how many of their people die — they killed 35,000+ civilians in the streets in January — they care about the ultimate “victory.” The more European countries and institutions, plus the UN, castigate and punish Israel and the US, the happier the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards Corp are. The histrionic anti-American and anti-Israel and antisemitic caterwauling has Iran claiming it is winning.

The Other World

To be fair, there is another world.

Venezuela’s presidential candidate, Maria Corina Machado, received a large welcome in Spain by an estimated 100,000 people after she refused to meet with Spain’s Prime Minister. And Israel’s relations with Latin American countries are on the upswing. Increasingly concerned about China, Japan and South Korea have signaled that they are ready to step in and purchase Israeli defense systems. India is a reliable ally.

Most importantly, the people of the Arab states themselves, and the people of Iran and Africa, have moved in the opposite direction from Europe, the UN, and American leftists. And, while it remains tentative, even the Lebanese government has banned Hezbollah and has announced itself ready to find peace with Israel.

Syria, while a very unfinished product, appears unwilling to antagonize Israel and has, apparently, ceased its attacks on the Druze areas in the south.

No country has left the Abraham Accords, and Kazakhstan joined in November 2025. Israel maintains trade and diplomatic relations with all Central Asian countries.

And finally, the Palestinians appear to have lost favor among the Arab states as Iran’s influence and money — and Qatar’s money — have crashed.

The American strategy has yet to play out. Depending on how the rest of the war goes, Iran could find itself even worse off than before the war started.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center.

Lebanese army members and residents inspect the damages in the southern village of Kfar Kila, Lebanon, Feb. 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Karamallah Daher

The direct talks and ceasefire announced last week between Israel and Lebanon present a historic opportunity for welcome de-escalation and a dramatically improved relationship between the two countries; however, as long as Hezbollah retains its weapons, along with the power to decide when war begins and ends, no agreement between the two governments will hold.

A truce that leaves that reality untouched is not a solution. It is a pause.

Importantly, the terms of the current arrangement reflect that reality. The ceasefire does not require Israel to withdraw from Lebanese territory, effectively allowing it to maintain a buffer zone along the border. It also reiterates Israel’s inherent right to self-defense. In the days since the ceasefire was announced, Israel has already conducted self-defense strikes in Lebanon against Hezbollah operatives following the deaths of two IDF soldiers killed in explosive attacks. Hezbollah also reportedly killed a French UNIFIL peacekeeper and wounded several others.

This reflects the usual pattern: Previous arrangements between Israel and Lebanon, mediated through third parties, reduced violence in the short term while leaving the primary driver of the conflict — Hezbollah (funded and armed by the Iranian regime) — in place. The central question now is whether this moment can break that pattern.

For decades, Hezbollah has operated as both a powerful military force and a dominant political actor inside Lebanon. It has positioned itself as Lebanon’s defender against Israel. That narrative has been central to its legitimacy, but it is also the source of Lebanon’s instability.

There is a potential path — narrow, but real — in which Israel can weaken Hezbollah not only through military pressure, but by bypassing it politically. By engaging, directly or indirectly, with the Lebanese state, Israel helps reestablish a distinction that Hezbollah has long sought to erase: the difference between Lebanon and the terror group that claims to act in its name. If that distinction begins to take hold, it has strategic implications.

A ceasefire that allows Israel to maintain a buffer zone while reducing active hostilities creates a more controlled security environment along the border. If that space is used to enable a more active role for the Lebanese Armed Forces in southern Lebanon, supported by international partners, it could begin to shift the balance, however gradually, toward state sovereignty.

A diplomatic pathway with real teeth that addresses border security, enforcement mechanisms, and accountability for Hezbollah violations would reinforce that shift.

Over time, these steps could do something that military force alone cannot: reduce Hezbollah’s relevance within Lebanon itself.

That is the theory of success, but it comes with significant constraints.

First, military pressure on Hezbollah cannot disappear prematurely. It is precisely that pressure that has helped create the current diplomatic opening. The fact that Israel retains both a physical presence in key areas and an explicitly recognized right to act in self-defense reflects a continued need for deterrence. If that posture weakens too quickly, Hezbollah will have both the time and the narrative space to regroup and reassert itself.

Second, diplomacy must lead somewhere tangible. A ceasefire that simply pauses hostilities without establishing mechanisms to prevent rearmament, cross-border attacks, or escalation will not hold. The details here really matter, and the absence of follow-on arrangements has been a defining weakness of past efforts.

Third, and most difficult, the issue of Hezbollah’s Iranian-backed military capability cannot be indefinitely deferred. Whether through formal disarmament, military defeat by Israel, or a gradual reassertion of state control by the Lebanese Armed Forces, this issue will ultimately determine whether stability is temporary or sustainable.

Hezbollah’s strategic alignment with Iran means that developments in Lebanon are closely tied to a wider regional dynamic. Iran’s model has long relied on projecting influence through armed non-state actors embedded within fragile states. To the extent that Lebanon moves — even incrementally — toward stronger state control and direct engagement with Israel, that model comes under pressure.

A successful diplomatic track between Israel and Lebanon would carry implications beyond the immediate conflict and would represent not just a stabilization of the border, but a significant strategic setback for Iran’s broader architecture of regional instability. However, that outcome is far from guaranteed.

Israel must maintain a difficult balance: continue to degrade Hezbollah’s military capabilities while avoiding the destruction of the Lebanese state, and — at the same time — opening space for that state to reassert itself, independent of Hezbollah and Iran. Each of these objectives is complex on its own. Pursued simultaneously, they create tensions that will be difficult to manage.

If this moment leads to a sustained reduction in violence, it could mark the culmination of a trajectory in which Hezbollah is weakened not only on the battlefield, but within the political system it has long dominated.

Alternately, if Hezbollah emerges from this ceasefire intact, with its arsenal replenished, the region will simply be resetting the clock.

A ceasefire can stop a war, but by itself it cannot end one. That requires a strategy, and the willingness to follow through while the window for action is still open.

Anne Dreazen is Vice President, Center for a New Middle East at American Jewish Committee.