George Orwell once described political language as being designed to “make [...] murder respectable.” As the United States continues its complicity with the Israeli government’s barbaric extirpation of the Palestinian people in Gaza, this reality is increasingly becoming manifest in our day-to-day politics.
A perfect example can be seen in the recently passed “Recognizing Judea and Samaria Act” in Arkansas. Introduced by Arkansas State Rep. Mindy McAlindon and endorsed by Israel’s ruling Likud Party and the Religious Zionist Party, the bill would more accurately be called the ‘Palestine Erasure Act,’ as it mandates that all state agencies abandon the use of the term “West Bank” in favour of “Judea and Samaria,” the language promoted by illegal Israeli settlers and the genocidal cadre of Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is not merely a change in vocabulary. Apart from its obvious conflict with the First Amendment by imposing religious nationalist terminology on American government institutions, this bill is an insidious exercise in historical revisionism that erases the Palestinian people from their homeland. It also legitimises Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise and aligns Arkansas’s public policy with a foreign regime accused of apartheid and genocide.
By codifying the language of occupation, Arkansas has crossed a dangerous line — and every other state must reject this blueprint for complicity.
“Judea and Samaria” is not neutral vocabulary. It is the rhetorical scaffolding of an ideology that justifies home demolitions, settlement expansion, and the mass expulsion of Palestinians under biblical pretext. It is the language used by those who burn villages, seize farmland, and chant for the extermination of an indigenous population.
Arkansas has now given that language the weight of law.
This decision arrives amid one of the deadliest assaults on Palestinian life in modern history. Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed more than 55,000 Palestinians in Gaza — the overwhelming majority of them women and children. Over 123,000 have been wounded. Thousands more remain unaccounted for beneath rubble.
In the occupied West Bank, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced over the past year by Israeli military operations and illegal settler attacks.
In this context, Arkansas’s law is not just tone-deaf — it is morally indefensible.
By abandoning the term “West Bank,” Arkansas is abandoning truth, legality, and basic human decency. “West Bank” is not a fringe phrase. It is the official designation of the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, and the International Court of Justice. To strip it from state vocabulary is to deny the lived reality of Palestinians and endorse the violent rewriting of history.
This is why the other 49 states must draw a clear line: No copycat legislation. No erasure. No normalisation of apartheid.
Every state legislature in America must categorically reject any attempt to replicate the Palestine Erasure Act. Legislators must defend the right to speak truthfully about occupation, to recognise the internationally affirmed legal status of the West Bank, and to reject efforts to impose settler narratives through the force of law.
Arkansas lawmakers with a conscience must also fight to repeal this un-American law. It represents blind allegiance to a foreign regime that is actively violating international law and human rights at an industrial scale. No US state should be complicit in genocide — especially not under the guise of linguistic preference.
This kind of revisionism is nothing new in the history of genocide. The same kind of blood and soil-based claims that a particular land belongs for eternity to a particular people and must be cleansed of others have been made before. Some of the most evil regimes in history include the Second World War, the Serbian nationalist génocidaires in Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia, and the murderous Hutu militias of Rwanda.
When Vladimir Putin used this rhetoric to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he was rightly condemned for it. When the Israeli government does it, US lawmakers are willing to codify it.
When Arkansas chooses “Judea and Samaria,” it is walking in the footsteps of these regimes. It is choosing to erase a people, to legitimise their displacement, and to side with oppression. That choice must not be replicated.
Now is the time for conscience. Now is the time for moral clarity. Every state must reject the Palestine Erasure Act — and any effort to make complicity the law of the land.
People of conscience in Arkansas and anywhere else this legislation pops up should write their state lawmakers demanding they oppose it, and support organisations dedicated to defending Palestinian rights and fighting codification of religious nationalist propaganda into American law.
Ismail Allison serves as National Communications Manager at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation.
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.