How the 'Occupied Palestinian Territories' Were Invented

The United Nations, Cold War Soviet propaganda, and global media didn’t just report a conflict; they created the language that shaped it.

photo: Ash Hayes/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by David E. Firester, the author of “Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

Some phrases sound ancient, authoritative, and inevitable.

“Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” is one of them.

But the phrase is not ancient. It is not in any foundational diplomatic document from 1948, 1956, or 1967. It is not even in the binding United Nations Security Council resolution that governs the post-1967 diplomatic order.

It is a brand — crafted, repeated, and normalized into existence through Cold War propaganda, UN General Assembly bloc politics, and decades of linguistic conditioning.

And, remarkably, it all begins with a single (missing) word: the. When the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242 on November 22, 1967, the key territorial clause read: “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

Not the territories. Not all territories.

British Ambassador Lord Caradon, who drafted the resolution, later said this omission was deliberate: The boundaries were to be negotiated, not restored by fiat. U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg reaffirmed the same point.

Yet, within a decade, the political winds shifted. The Soviet Union and its allies began remapping the very language surrounding Israel, engineering a vocabulary that would eventually replace legal interpretation with ideological assertion.

In the mid-1960s, the KGB launched Operation SIG (“Sionistskiye Gosudarstva” — Zionist Governments), a global campaign to reframe Israel as a racist, colonial aggressor and the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate voice of an invented “Palestinian people.” Ion Mihai Pacepa (the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc defector) and the Mitrokhin Archive confirmed the core objectives: Equate Zionism with racism, brand Israel a colonial implant, elevate the Palestine Liberation Organization through UN institutions and non-aligned states, and flood the world with new terminology.

In keeping with the outcome of Soviet influence, the first use of the phrase “occupied territories” and “occupied Arab territories” in UN-filed material appears in 1973, titled “Report of the Fourth Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries.”

Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat made his first speech to the UN on November 13, 1974, in which he claimed there was “occupied Arab territory” and spoke of the desire to “establish an independent national State on all liberated Palestinian territory.” Similar phraseology appeared in the July 21, 1976 “Report of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People,” which added the phrase “Palestinian territory.”

After claiming that the “question of Palestine is at the heart of the Middle East problem…” — and tying it to the “legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people” — UN General Assembly Resolution 35/169 in 1980 became the first UN resolution to combine the linguistic components that will later form the modern phrase. It referred to “Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967” and “Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967.”

It did not yet use the modern formula “occupied Palestinian territories,” but Resolution 35/169 marks the conceptual turning point: the first time “Palestinian” and “occupied territories” begin to appear in close semantic relationship inside an official UN resolution. This is the real starting point for the shift that matures into the modern “Occupied ‘Palestinian Territories’ brand.

UN General Assembly 38/166 in 1983 then went on to use “occupied Palestinian territories” explicitly in the resolution title, marking the formal emergence of the modern terminology. This linguistic groundwork was crucial. It created a conceptual framework in which the phrase “occupied Palestinian territories” would later appear routinely.

By 1980, Resolution 35/169 had introduced phrasing such as “Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967.” While it did not yet contain the exact modern formula, it represented the conceptual turning point: the point at which the UN began linguistically pairing “Palestinian” with “occupied territories.”

The first resolution to use the exact phrase “occupied Palestinian territories” was UNGA Resolution 38/166, adopted on December 19, 1983. The resolution referred explicitly to “the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people … in the occupied Palestinian territories.” This marked the first official appearance of the modern phrase and the beginning of its institutionalization.

An earlier precursor can be seen in Resolution 35/169, which refers to “Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967,” effectively combining the elements that later become the standardized phrase “occupied Palestinian territories.” This was not law; it was political rhetoric. The UN General Assembly cannot create legally binding territorial categories — but it can create linguistic consensus, and it did.

By 1983 and 1984, the phrase became the title of resolutions: “Living Conditions of the Palestinian People in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” (38/166), “Economic Development in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” (39/223), and “Living Conditions of the Palestinian People in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” (39/169). Once those headlines hit print, the phrase went global overnight. The brand calcified instantly, and it reshaped the world’s political lexicon, with aftershocks that still rumble today.

“Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” is not descriptive; it is prescriptive. It smuggles three political claims into what sounds like neutral geography: The land is inherently and exclusively “Palestinian,” Jewish presence is intrinsically illegitimate, and negotiation is unnecessary because ownership is already decided. This is textbook linguistic branding. The conclusion is embedded in the premise.

The Soviet “Red” narrative (Israel = colonial aggressor) fused with the Islamist “Green” narrative (Israel = religious usurper) around a shared vocabulary: Zionism = racism, down with Israeli colonialism, and solidarity with the Palestinian people. That vocabulary, forged in Moscow and Bucharest, was laundered through the Non-Aligned Movement and the UN General Assembly. It is the exact same lexicon we hear on campuses and in NGOs today.

By the mid-1980s, the UN General Assembly had fully institutionalized the phrase “Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories,” using it with such frequency that it acquired the appearance of diplomatic inevitability. Once the UN repeated it often enough, Western media simply followed suit. What began as a political slogan was soon treated as an objective fact.

Major outlets — such as the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press, and The New York Times — adopted the terminology as standard style-guide language, folding “Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” into their reporting and framing of the Israeli-“Palestinian” conflict. The UN’s usage offered a convenient shorthand for describing the areas Israel controlled after 1967, and the media absorbed it with little scrutiny. Within a few years, the phrase was no longer limited to UN debates; it had become a fixture across global platforms.

But this was never mere linguistic convenience; it was an ideological coup.
By routinely labeling the Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria (rebranded by Jordan as “the West Bank”) and Gaza as inherently “Palestinian,” the Western press quietly rewrote history: Israel’s presence ceased to be a legitimate dispute and became a self-evident, illegitimate “occupation.” The phrase itself did the arguing: The land was declared Palestinian by definition, Israel a foreign colonizer by definition, and the entire conflict reduced to a morality play of dispossession.

Conspicuously absent from this new narrative was any mention of the inconvenient truth: It was the Arab states themselves who, after 1948, invented and perpetuated the permanent “refugee” status of their Arab brethren, deliberately keeping them stateless as a political weapon against Israel, not as victims of Israel.

As the term gained currency, repetition did the rest. Each news report, policy debate, human-rights brief, and academic study that employed “Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” helped normalize it, embedding the phrase deeper into the global lexicon. Through this constant reinforcement, the media did more than echo the UN’s language; it actively shaped the political understanding of the conflict, amplifying the broader narrative that portrayed Israel’s actions through the lens of occupation, resistance, and presumed injustice.

And the formula proved irresistible to the ideological Left, which is perpetually in search of a perfect, photogenic underdog whose eternal victimhood can be weaponized against the West, a role the newly minted “Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” filled to perfection.

In effect, “Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” became a semantic instrument: a symbol of “Palestinian” victimhood and a rhetorical tool used to predetermine the moral framing of the dispute. Journalism did not merely reflect the terminology; it cemented it, ensuring that a politically constructed phrase would define public discourse for decades.

“Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” is not a geographic description; it is a Soviet-designed, UN-institutionalized, media-amplified propaganda brand — one that first appeared in December 1980, was locked into resolution titles by December 1983, and has since taken on a life of its own. It is now so deeply embedded that most people who use it have no idea it is younger than the personal computer, the compact disc, and the Space Shuttle. Understanding its precise birth certificate is the first step to dismantling it.

The battle over the Middle East is fought with tanks and rockets, but it is won or lost with words. “Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” is one of the most successful linguistic weapons ever deployed, a phrase that rewrote history, froze diplomacy, and turned a complex territorial dispute into a global morality play. And now you know exactly when, where, and by whom it was invented.

The phrase “Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” has long since evolved beyond its origins. It is not a neutral geographic label, not a legal term, and not a product of historical continuity. It is a deliberately engineered political tool: a linguistic weapon crafted to frame the Israeli-“Palestinian” conflict through a single, unchallengeable ideological lens. “Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” emerged from the convergence of several forces determined to reshape global perceptions of the land Israel liberated in a defensive war in 1967. Its earliest and most potent architect was Soviet disinformation.

To understand the phrase’s origins is to expose the architecture behind it. “Occupied ‘Palestinian’ Territories” is an artifact of Cold War propaganda — crafted by the Soviets, institutionalized by the UN, and amplified by Western media and activist movements — whose power lies in the illusion of inevitability it projects.

---