Dear Letter to the Editor:

Notwithstanding how often a newspaper may write or a television commentator may say that Israel “captured” the “West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” in June 1967, it is not so.

The Jewish people resided in the “West Bank” (Judea & Samaria) and the eastern part of Jerusalem for 4000 years until Jordan in 1948/1949 imposed an illegal racist antisemitic occupation on Judea and Samaria and the eastern part of Jerusalem. Jordan’s illegal occupation violated the League of Nations Resolution of 1922 (which incorporates the British Mandate which provided for “close settlement” of the Jewish people on the land of Eretz Israel), the San Remo Agreement of 1920 and Article 80 of the United Nations Charter (1945), an international treaty that all 193 members of the United Nations are required to obey and which fully incorporates by reference all of the above mentioned international agreements. 

The nightmare of Jordan’s illegal, racist and antisemitic occupation included: ethnically cleansing a Jewish population that had resided in the eastern part of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria for 4000 years, destroying a dozen historic synagogues just as the Nazis destroyed synagogues during Kristallnacht, vandalizing hundreds of historic Hebrew cemetery headstones and using them as latrines, and rebranding the eastern part of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria as “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank” respectively to support its illegal racist antisemitic actions and to thereby attempt to obliterate 4000 years of the Jewish people’s indigenous presence on the land.

In June 1967 the eastern part of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria were NOT captured. They were  LIBERATED and RECAPTURED by the Jewish people and returned to the status they had enjoyed for 4000 years before Jordan’s illegal racist and antisemitic 19-year occupation, allowing Jews who had been ethnically cleansed by Jordan nineteen years earlier to return to their homes.

For a newspaper or television network  to use language –“East” Jerusalem or “the West Bank” —  supporting Jordan’s racist antisemitic and illegal occupation of Judea, Samaria and the eastern part of Jerusalem is more than disappointing. It gives support to those anti-semites across the globe and in American media and academia that deny the reality of Jordan’s nineteen year illegal antisemitic and racist occupation as part of an overall antisemitic campaign to deny many thousands of years of the Jewish people’s indigenous history on the land.

Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida