Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told JNS on Monday he supports renaming the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) office to the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea and Samaria.
“An interesting idea—I’ll talk to him,” Smotrich said, responding to JNS’s question about Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan’s appeal to Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz to formally change the name of the body.
“It’s under the defense minister’s authority,” continued Smotrich, who is responsible for civilian issues in Judea and Samaria as the second minister in the Defense Ministry. “Great idea, important, really. It expresses that words have meaning.”
COGAT is a unit of the Defense Ministry established after Israel liberated Judea, Samaria and Gaza during the Six-Day War in 1967. It manages local civilian and humanitarian affairs and also liaises with Palestinians.
Dagan contacted Katz about the proposed name change six months ago, but “half a year has passed and there is no response,” he wrote in a letter to the Defense Ministry published by Israel National News on Monday.
“The fact that the Defense Ministry and the Israel Defense Forces cling to the term ‘territories’ is a moral and historical injustice,” said Dagan, adding: “Judea and Samaria are not ‘territories'—they are our home.”
The regional leader accused the ministry of “adopting the anti-Israel narrative, instead of leading with a firm nationalist and Zionist line.”
In his initial letter, Dagan noted that back in 1968, Israel’s Government Naming Committee, which officially approves names for places and sites, decided that the area would be known by its historical name.
Dagan also pointed to legislative initiatives across the United States, promoted by the Samaria Regional Council, that call for the official government use of “Judea and Samaria.”
Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee Chairman Simcha Rothman, a member of Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party, told JNS on Monday that he would be advancing a bill to require the use of the term “Judea and Samaria” in all legislation and official documents.
“The use of the term ‘Judea and Samaria’ as an official designation was proposed by me out of a clear moral and nationalistic perception,” he said. “The use of the true name of our homeland has real importance both on the ground and at the political and international level.”
The bill amends the titles of existing legislation implementing various interim political agreements with the Palestinians to replace “West Bank” with “Judea and Samaria,” without altering the substance of those laws.
The bill is also sponsored by Knesset members Limor Son Har-Melech and Yitzhak Kroizer, members of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit Party, Rothman said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has led an unprecedented drive to expand control of Judea and Samaria, approving some 50,000 homes and over 50 new Jewish communities since December 2022.
Nearly 70% of Israeli citizens want Jerusalem to extend its full legal sovereignty over the region, according to a poll from January 2025.
