✍🏽 What is The West Bank? An Ancient Palestinian Land Stolen in Pieces

Today is the first part in a new series where I try to explain to my readers the history and importance of people, places, words, and ideas that we use daily, but don't always explain.

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I am a historian by training. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in history. My first job out of college was as a high school history and civics teacher. And for the past 25 years, I’ve seen much of my job as teaching the world why things are the way they are - and how we can make them better.

Today begins the first part in a new regular series where I want to try to really explain to you the true stories behind places, people, words, phrases, and ideas you likely hear about all of the time, but don’t quite know what they are talking about.

This won’t take the place of you reading books or actually visiting a place, but I want you to at least be able to understand the world we live in better.

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🌍 Ancient Roots in Palestine

Sisters and brothers, let me take you back thousands of years. Long before the state of Israel, long before the British Mandate (I will explain this in another post), long before even the Ottoman Empire, the land we now call the West Bank was part of the heart of ancient Palestine. Over 3.2 million Palestinians live there today. This isn’t Gaza.

Palestinians are not “new” there. They are the descendants of ancient peoples who have lived continuously on this land for millennia — Canaanites, Philistines, Arab tribes, Muslim and Christian communities that never left. Many Palestinians also actually have Jewish ancestry that goes back generations. For centuries, they farmed the hills, harvested olives from trees older than America itself, and built towns and cities that still stand today — Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho.

This was not some empty wasteland waiting for a settler movement. It was, and remains, the homeland of a rooted people.

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🕰 The Colonial Carve-Up

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Zionist movement — backed by European powers — began to dream of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. At the time, this land was part of the Ottoman Empire, and then, after World War I, handed over to Britain under the so-called British Mandate.

Britain made an illegal promise — the Balfour Declaration of 1917 — to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, despite the fact that 90% of the population was Arab. Palestinians were not consulted. They were not asked. Their future was signed away by colonial powers. This was the very definition of colonial land theft.

By 1947, as tensions rose between the growing Jewish settler population and the indigenous Palestinians, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine. The plan gave more than half the land to the new Jewish state, even though Palestinians were the vast majority. Palestinians rejected it — not because they opposed Jewish life in Palestine, but because it was a naked act of dispossession.

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💔 The Nakba and the Birth of the West Bank

In 1948, Israel declared its independence. For Palestinians, this is the Nakba — the Catastrophe. Over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes. Entire villages were wiped off the map. Families were driven at gunpoint into exile.

Those who were not expelled from all of Palestine often ended up concentrated in two territories: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was occupied by Jordan after 1948. For Palestinians, it became a refuge — but also a prison. Families from Haifa, Jaffa, Lydd, and hundreds of destroyed villages suddenly found themselves crammed into this smaller land, cut off from their homes by new borders and armed checkpoints.

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⚔️ 1967: The Occupation That Never Ended

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel seized the West Bank (along with Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights). Since that moment, the West Bank has been under military occupation.

International law is crystal clear here. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population into occupied territory. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 demands Israel’s withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967.

But Israel ignored the law. Instead, it began to build settlements — illegal colonies for Israeli Jews only — right on top of Palestinian land.

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🏚 The Daily Reality of the West Bank

Today, the West Bank is carved into pieces. Israel has built a vast system of checkpoints, walls, bypass roads, and settlements that cut Palestinian cities and villages into isolated fragments.

• Over 700,000 Israeli settlers now live illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

• Settlements like Ariel, Ma’ale Adumim, and Hebron expand constantly, stealing Palestinian farmland and water.

• Palestinians need permits to travel between towns. They are often denied. Settlers, by contrast, move freely.

• Israel’s separation wall snakes across the West Bank, not on the border but deep inside, seizing Palestinian land while calling it “security.”

Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, is now surrounded by walls. Hebron is divided between settlers and Palestinians, with soldiers protecting illegal colonies right inside the city. Farmers are attacked by settlers when they try to harvest olives. Children are arrested in night raids.

This is not just occupation. It is apartheid.

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📜 What the Law Says

International law could not be clearer:

• Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

• UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016): Reaffirms that Israeli settlements “have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation under international law.”

• International Court of Justice (2004): Declared the wall and settlement policy illegal.

But law means nothing if it is not enforced. The U.S. vetoes almost every UN attempt to hold Israel accountable. Europe issues statements but does little. And Israel continues to seize more land, piece by piece.

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🧩 The Division of the West Bank

Under the 1990s Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B, and C:

• Area A: Small pockets of Palestinian Authority control (mostly cities).

• Area B: Shared control (in theory).

• Area C: Over 60% of the West Bank, under full Israeli control.

Israel was supposed to gradually withdraw. Instead, it tightened its grip. Today, Area C is where most settlements are, and Palestinians are denied building permits on their own land. Homes are demolished. Villages are declared “illegal.” Meanwhile, settlers are subsidized to move in.

The result is a fragmented land where Palestinians cannot move freely, cannot build freely, and cannot dream freely.

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🩸 A Slow-Motion Annexation

Israel no longer hides its intentions. Ministers openly call for annexing the West Bank. Settler leaders boast that the two-state solution is dead. On the ground, the reality is clear: the West Bank is being taken, one hilltop at a time.

Palestinians are left with shrinking enclaves — Bantustans — while the world debates “peace processes” that Israel has no intention of honoring.

This is why the term West Bank itself can be misleading. It sounds like a neutral geography. But in reality, it is a territory born of dispossession, sustained by occupation, and now being erased by colonization.

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✊🏽 Why This Matters

The West Bank is not an abstraction. It is where millions of Palestinians live today, under daily occupation. It is where international law is being shredded in broad daylight. And it is the frontline of a struggle for justice that is older than most of our nations.

When you hear American politicians speak about “disputed territories,” understand that this is code for land theft. When you hear about “settlements,” know that these are not just houses — they are weapons in a colonial project. When you hear the words “West Bank,” know that behind them lies a story of ancient rootedness, violent dispossession, and ongoing resistance.

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🩸 The Path Forward

Palestinians do not need to prove they belong here. Their olive trees, their stones, their mosques and churches, their families prove it every day.

What they need is freedom. What they need is justice. What they need is for the world — especially the United States — to stop funding and arming their oppressor.

The West Bank is not just a map on the news. It is a people’s home. And every new settlement, every demolished house, every uprooted olive tree is another wound on a land that has already bled too much.

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❤️ JOIN US!

Sisters and brothers, I hope this piece helped you see the West Bank with new eyes. Not just as a headline or a political bargaining chip, but as a land with ancient roots and living people, being stolen in plain sight.

If you value this kind of journalism — free for the masses, fearless, pro-truth, pro-justice — I need your help. The New York Times has 12 million subscribers. We have 2,440. And yet, millions read us each month. Help us get to 2,500 members!

👉🏽 Please become a paid subscriber today.

Together, we can keep telling these stories, keep breaking through the silence, and keep fighting for justice.

Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun King

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