West Bank
The West Bank is on the western bank of the Jordan River and is the larger of the two Palestinian territories that make up the State of Palestine. A landlocked territory near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in West Asia's Levant region, it is bordered by Jordan and the Dead Sea to the east and by Israel to the south, west, and north. Since 1967, the territory has been under Israeli occupation, which has been regarded as illegal under the law of the international community.
The territory first emerged in the wake of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War as a region occupied and subsequently annexed by Jordan. Jordan ruled the territory until the 1967 Six-Day War, when it was occupied by Israel. Since then, Israel has administered the West Bank as the Judea and Samaria Area. Jordan continued to claim the territory as its own until 1988. The mid-1990s Oslo Accords split the West Bank into three regional levels of Palestinian sovereignty, via the Palestinian National Authority : Area A, Area B, and Area C. The PNA exercises total or partial civil administration over 165 Palestinian enclaves across the three areas.
The West Bank remains central to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians consider it the heart of their envisioned state, along with the Gaza Strip. Right-wing and ideological Israelis see it as their ancestral homeland, with numerous biblical sites. There is a push among some Israelis for partial or complete annexation of this land. Additionally, it is home to a rising number of Israeli settlers. Area C contains 230 Israeli settlements where Israeli law is applied. Under the Oslo Accords this area was to be mostly transferred to the PNA by 1997, but that did not occur. The international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be illegal under international law. Citing the 1980 law in which Israel claimed Jerusalem as its capital, the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty, and the Oslo Accords, a 2004 advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice concluded that the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, remains Israeli-occupied territory. In 2024 the ICJ again ruled that Israel's occupation of the West Bank is unlawful, adding that its conduct also violates the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid.
The West Bank has a land area of about. It has an estimated population of 2,747,943 Palestinians and over 670,000 Israeli settlers, of which approximately 220,000 live in East Jerusalem.
Etymology
West Bank
The name "West Bank" is a translation of the Arabic term , which designates the territory situated on the western side of the Jordan River that was occupied in 1948 and annexed in 1950 by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This annexation was widely considered to be illegal, and was recognized only by Iraq, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. This term is also used in Hebrew, although the territory is more often referred to in Israel as Judea and Samaria.Cisjordan
Variations on the neo-Latin name Cisiordania are the usual names for the territory in Romance languages, e.g.,,,, and, and in some others, e.g.,,,, and. The name of Cisjordan is also used by researchers and sometimes refers to the historical region of Palestine.The name West Bank, however, has become the standard usage for this geopolitical entity in English and some of the other Germanic languages since its inception following the 1948 Jordanian capture.
The analogous Transjordan was historically used to designate the region now roughly comprising the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which lies to the east of the Jordan River.
History
From 1517 to 1917, the area now known as the West Bank was under Turkish rule, as part of Ottoman Syria. In the early Ottoman period, much of the northern West Bank, including the area of Jenin, and the hill country north of Nablus, formed part of the Turabay Emirate, a semi-autonomous Bedouin polity centered at Lajjun. The Turabay clan administered wide territories on behalf of the Ottoman sultans from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, collecting taxes and overseeing security along key trade routes. Their authority reflected the empire's reliance on local Arab elites to govern frontier districts, and the town of Lajjun became a regional administrative hub before its decline in the late seventeenth century.In the late Ottoman period, the rural population of Palestine, including the West Bank hill country, expanded significantly. Villages grew in size, new hamlets were established, and peasants extended cultivation into previously marginal lands such as forests, marshes, and stony slopes. This process was part of a wider demographic recovery and agrarian commercialization in the region, which saw Palestinian peasants increasing grain production and integrating more fully into regional and international markets.
At the 1920 San Remo conference, the victorious Allies of World War I allocated the area to the British Mandate of Palestine. The San Remo Resolution, adopted on 25 April 1920, incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It and Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations were the basic documents upon which the British Mandate of Palestine was constructed. The United Kingdom proclaimed Abdullah I as emir of the Emirate of Transjordan on 11 April 1921. He declared it an independent Hashemite kingdom on 25 May 1946.
Under the United Nations in 1947, it was designated as part of a proposed Arab state by the Partition Plan for Palestine. UN Resolution 181 recommended the splitting of the British Mandate into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an internationally administered enclave of Jerusalem. A broader region of the modern-day West Bank was assigned to the Arab state. The resolution designated the territory described as "the hill country of Samaria and Judea", the area now known as the "West Bank", as part of the proposed Arab state. Following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, this area was captured by Transjordan.
1948–1967: Jordanian West Bank
During the 1948 war, Israel occupied parts of what was designated in the UN partition plan as "Palestine". The 1949 Armistice Agreements defined the interim boundary between Israel and Jordan, essentially reflecting the battlefield after the war. Following the December 1948 Jericho Conference, Transjordan annexed the area west of the Jordan River in 1950, naming it "West Bank" or "Cisjordan", and designated the area east of the river as "East Bank" or "Transjordan". Jordan, as it was now known, ruled over the West Bank from 1948 until 1967. Jordan's annexation was never formally recognized by the international community, with the exception of the United Kingdom and Iraq. King Abdullah of Jordan was crowned King of Jerusalem by the Coptic Bishop on 15 November 1948. Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were granted Jordanian citizenship and half of the Jordanian Parliament seats, thus enjoying equal opportunities in all sectors of the state.Many refugees continued to live in camps and relied on UNRWA assistance for sustenance. Palestinian refugees constituted more than a third of the kingdom's population of 1.5 million. The last Jordanian elections in which West Bank residents voted in were those of April 1967. Their parliamentary representatives continued in office until 1988, when West Bank seats were abolished. Palestinians enjoyed equal opportunities in all sectors of the state without discrimination. Agriculture remained the primary activity of the territory. The West Bank, despite its smaller area, contained half of Jordan's agricultural land.
In 1966, 43% of the labor force of 55,000 worked in agriculture, and 2,300 km2 were under cultivation. In 1965, 15,000 workers were employed in industry, producing 7% of the GNP. This number fell after the 1967 war and was not surpassed until 1983. The tourism industry played an important role. 26 branches of 8 Arab banks were present. The Jordanian dinar became legal tender and remains so until today. 80% of Jordan's fruit-growing land and 40% of its vegetables lay in the West Bank. With the onset of the occupation, the area could no longer produce export earnings.
On the eve of occupation, the West Bank accounted for 40% of Jordanian GNP, between 34% and 40% of its agricultural output and almost half of its manpower, though only a third of Jordanian investment was allocated to it and mainly to the private housing construction sector. Even though its per-capita product was 10 times greater than that of the West Bank, the Israeli economy on the eve of occupation had experienced two years of a sharp recession.
Immediately after the occupation, from 1967 to 1974, the economy boomed. In 1967, the Palestinian economy had a gross domestic product of $1,349 per capita for a million people. The West Bank's population was 585,500, of whom 18% were refugees, and was growing annually by 2%. West Bank growth, compared to Gaza, had lagged, due to the effect of mass emigration of West Bankers seeking employment in Jordan. As agriculture gave way to industrial development in Israel, in the West Bank the former still generated 37% of domestic product, and industry a mere 13%.
The growth rate of the West Bank economy in the period of the Jordanian rule of the West Bank, before Israeli occupation, had ticked along at an annual rate of 6–8%. This rate of growth was indispensable if the post-war West Bank were to achieve economic self-reliance.
1967–present: Israeli Military Governorate and Civil Administration
In June 1967, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were captured by Israel as a result of the Six-Day War. With the exception of East Jerusalem and the former Israeli–Jordanian no man's land, the West Bank was not annexed by Israel. It remained under Israeli military control until 1982.The 1974 Arab League summit resolution at Rabat designated the Palestine Liberation Organization as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people". Jordan did not officially relinquish its claim to the area until 1988, when it severed all administrative and legal ties with the West Bank and eventually stripped West Bank Palestinians of Jordanian citizenship.
In 1982, as a result of the Egypt–Israel peace treaty, the direct military rule was transformed into a semi-civil authority, operating directly under the Israeli Ministry of Defense, taking control of civil matters of Palestinians from the IDF to civil servants in the Ministry of Defense. The Israeli settlements were administered as Judea and Samaria Area, directly by Israel.
Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority officially controls a geographically non-contiguous territory comprising approximately 11% of the West Bank, known as Area A, which remains subject to Israeli incursions. Area B, approximately 28%, is subject to joint Israeli-Palestinian military and Palestinian civil control. Area C, approximately 61%, is under full Israeli control. Though 164 nations refer to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as "Occupied Palestinian Territory", the State of Israel quotes the UN that only territories captured in war from "an established and recognized sovereign" are considered occupied territories.
After the 2007 split between Fatah and Hamas, the West Bank areas under Palestinian control are an exclusive part of the Palestinian Authority. The Gaza Strip is ruled by Hamas.