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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   29562 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Another semi-relevant thought on country names: many are chosen halfheartedly. A few years ago I looked up why Israel isn't called Judea, and apparently this was indeed the expected name of the Jewish/Zionist state pretty much until a few days before it was announced:

As Clark Clifford, Harry Truman’s legal adviser, would later recall, “most of us assumed the new nation would be called Judaea.”

The reason why Israel couldn't be called Judea (or Judaea) was because Judaea wasn't actually going to be part of Israel:

But according to the partition plan, all of the traditional geographical area of Judea was slated either to be internationalized (in the case of Jerusalem and its environs) or to become part of the proposed Arab state. A Jewish state named Judea that didn’t include the geographical Judea would have been, to say the least, an anomaly. Moreover, even if it did wind up possessing some chunk of Judea, the Jewish state would also comprise a much larger area than that.

This didn't really stop 'North Macedonia', so perhaps times have changed.

The second choice was apparently 'Zion', but again:

With Judea ruled out, another suggestion, Sharef told Brilliant, was Zion—“but Zion is the name of a hill overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem” and therefore not intended by the UN’s partition plan to be within the borders of the proposed Jewish state. True, even the Bible refers to Jerusalem and sometimes to the entire Land of Israel as Zion, and in that sense the name had been adopted by the “Lovers of Zion” movement in the 19th century and then, obviously, by the Zionist movement itself. But for a sovereign Jewish state-to-be, actual geography mattered; how could such a state be called Zion when Mount Zion wasn’t going to be a part of it?

'Israel' was the only other option:

How was the name decided? By a vote in the People’s Administration, the cabinet-in-waiting, on May 12....the cabinet secretary Zeev Sharef would write that the decision was arrived at “in the absence of any other suggestion.”

Of course, within a few decades, Israel would come to control both 'Judea' and Mount Zion, but the country's name stuck.

how could such a state be called Zion when Mount Zion wasn’t going to be a part of it?

As the old quip goes, "you Turks protest against Armenia having Mount Ararat on their coat of arms, but look at your own flag, surely you aren't trying to lay claim to the moon itself?"

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