33 Fall 2025 – that sovereign title over the West Bank has been in abeyance for over a century. This has been the legal position under international law since the close of the First World War, when Turkey (as the successor to the Ottoman Empire) ceded its sovereignty of the areas outside of its current borders. No agreement, instrument, judgment, opinion, or event with legal effect has changed this status since, as reflected – and explicitly stated – in agreements between the interested parties, and particularly agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. Under these agreements, the question of the final disposition of this area shall be determined by negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians. Until then, the sides have agreed on provisional arrangements, which continue to apply and govern the legal relationship between the sides today. Terminological Note: This paper refers to the legal rights over an area of different political and geographical borders over time, and which constituted part of different political and historical entities. The term ‘West Bank’ refers to the area east of the Jordan-Israel Armistice Lines of 1949 and west of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This term first came into use following the 1947-49 Israeli War of Independence, to denote Jordan’s control over the area west of the Jordan river. Geographically, the West Bank is part of the historical Land of Israel (which extended over both sides of the Jordan river; in Hebrew, ‘Eretz-Israel’) and is part of a mostly mountainous region which has been referred to, historically and presently, as the Judea and Samaria region. This region, and therein the area referred to today as the West Bank, formed part of ‘Mandatory Palestine’, the name given by the League of Nations to the territory administered by Great Britain that encompassed roughly the present State of Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and is the territory that was subsequently excised from the Mandate to establish the present Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The term ‘Palestine’ derives from the names used by the Roman and Byzantine empires following Rome’s conquests in the 2nd Century CE (including Syria Palaestina, and Palaestina Prima, Secunda and Salutaris), which in turn was derived from the Ancient Greek ‘Philistia’, used to refer to the area inhabited by the ancient Philistines in approximately the 12th century BCE.139 139. NABIH AMIN FARIS et al., Palestine, ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (Jan. 22, 2024), https://www.britannica.com/place/ Palestine. For a historical overview, see SHMUEL SAFRAI, The Era of the Mishnah and Talmud, in A HISTORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE 70, 307-334 (H.H. Ben-Sasson ed., 1976) (“In an effort to wipe out all memory of the bond between the Jews and the land, Hadrian changed the name of the province from Iudaea [Judea] to Syria-Palestina …”).
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