When Menachem Begin was seeking to become Israel’s first Likud prime minister in the parliamentary elections of 1977, he ran on a platform that was unequivocally committed to annexation of the West Bank, the 2,263-square-mile territory west of the Jordan River that Israel had captured from Jordan in the so-called Six-Day War of 1967. Its population before the war was almost entirely Muslim Arabs, but to many religious Israelis and admirers of the pioneer Zionist Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the land was known as Judea and Samaria, its biblical names, and a rightful part of “Eretz Israel,” or Greater Israel.
“The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable, and is linked with the right to security and peace,” the platform’s first paragraph said. “Therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the [Mediterranean] Sea and the Jordan there will be only Israel sovereignty.”