“Walk through the lands of Abraham, David and the prophets – where ancient cities like Hebron, Bethel, and Shiloh still pulse with life today,” the website promoting the War Room states, referring to the West Bank, not the war in Gaza. “Experience the reality of life in Judea and Samaria – from the personal stories of brave Israeli settlers to the strategic importance of these biblical lands.”
The Christian Zionist move to refer to the land by its biblical names follows Israel’s long practice of renaming geographical areas in historic Palestine. The practice stretches back to when Israel first captured Arab villages and then changed their names to Hebrew names. That practice was sanctioned by Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who changed his own last name from Grün to Ben-Gurion to mask his Polish origin and give him a sense of historical belonging to that land.
Atalia Omer, a professor of religion, conflict and peace studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, said the process of laying claim to the land by endowing it with a biblical reference has accelerated in recent decades.
“There’s been so much of this use of biblical archaeology as a way of reclaiming the space,” Omer said.
However, it also obscures its present-day population, in this case the predominantly Palestinian residents of the West Bank.
“Those practices of using biblical archaeology transform the map and the material realities and completely erase Palestinian presence,” Omer said. “When you rename it, that’s a form of replacing the natives, which is one of the dimensions of colonialism.”
This article originally appeared here.
