(RNS) — President Donald Trump began his second term in the White House with a bit of political map-making, changing the official U.S. name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Now, Christian broadcasters and members of Congress hope Trump will do something similar for Israel by renaming the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” – a name for the region found in the Bible. That name is mentioned in a bill now before Congress and in a resolution from the National Religious Broadcasters association.
“NRB opposes the use of the erroneous term ‘West Bank’ to describe the biblical heartland of Israel and calls on its members to refer to the region by its historic name of Judea and Samaria,” the NRB, a group of mostly evangelical broadcasters and ministries, said last year in announcing what it called a “Biblical Heartland Resolution.”
The West Bank, a region encompassing about 2,185 square miles, was part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and was captured by Israel in 1967 during the Six-Day War. The region is home to 4 million people, of whom close to 3 million are Palestinians without legal rights.
In early February, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, both Republicans, reintroduced legislation to change how the U.S. government refers to the region. They first introduced the bill in December 2024.
If enacted as a law, the legislation would require U.S. documents to refer to the area as Judea and Samaria, biblical names for the ancient Israelite kingdoms of Judah, also known as the Southern Kingdom, and Samaria, a part of the Kingdom of Israel, also known as the Northern Kingdom.
“The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria goes back thousands of years,” Cotton said in a press release. “The U.S. should stop using the politically charged term West Bank to refer to the biblical heartland of Israel.”
Tenney added that the bill is part of her support for Israel’s rule over the region and her opposition to it as Palestinian state.
“I remain committed to defending the integrity of the Jewish state and fully supporting Israel’s sovereignty over Judea and Samaria,” she said in a statement.
Tenney also launched a “Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus” in mid-January with support from Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, a conservative evangelical advocacy group.
Next week, a group called American Christian Leaders for Israel — which includes the NRB, pastors and other groups — plans to issue a resolution that supports Israel’s claim to the region during the NRB’s annual convention in Dallas. The group’s statement is meant to show support for Cotton and Tenney’s legislation, and to send a message to the White House about evangelical support for Israel.
ACLI organizers believe Trump plans to make a major statement on Israel soon — and hope that a name change is part of that statement, said a spokesperson for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem’s U.S. branch, a pro-Israel organization that is part of the International Christian Leaders for Israel, a related group that will participate in the NRB convention.
