By erasing the Green Line, Israelis inadvertently label everything as being equally up for grabs,
instead of making clear that sovereign Israel is not part of the discussion.
I was looking over a hiking map of the region around Jerusalem. Big as a tablecloth, it showed the countryside in vast, loving detail: every trail, picnic area and archeological ruin, with topographic lines marking the folds of the hills. It had everything one might want to plan a day-trip—all but the Green Line, the border between Israel and the West Bank. The map doesn’t tell a hiker when he or she is about to enter occupied—and more dangerous—territory.
I admit that this was no surprise. The trail maps at the downtown Jerusalem bookstore of the Society for the Preservation of Nature were produced by the Survey of Israel, a government agency. Government maps—which means most maps in Israel—don’t show the Green Line. Few Israelis know that the order to erase it was given all the way back in October 1967, less than five months after Israel conquered the West Bank in the Six-Day War. After that, official maps showed only the line between neighboring Arab states and territory controlled de facto by Israel, with no distinction between sovereign Israel and occupied territory.
For that matter, relatively few young Israelis, even the smartest, have a clear understanding of where the Green Line is. Last year Hebrew University geographer Ilan Salomon and researcher Larisa Fleishman published a study they conducted among students at their own institution and at Bar-Ilan University. Only 37 percent of the Hebrew University students and 26.5 percent from Bar-Ilan could draw the approximate line between Israel and the West Bank.
After all, the textbooks with which those students grew up didn’t show the Green Line, either. My children use the standard school atlas by Moshe Brawer, the Tel Aviv University geographer who wrote the authoritative study on the exact border between Israel and Syria on the eve of the Six-Day War. But Brawer let the pre-1967 lines play hooky from his schoolbook. Under the name “Israel,” children see everything between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.
Now for the breakthrough: Education Minister Yuli Tamir recently gave instructions to put the Green Line in new textbooks. “I want to make clear to students the reality in which we lived until ’67 and up to today,” she explained. Tamir represents the center-left Labor Party in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s ruling coalition. Though she might not even have realized it, she was making historical amends: The cabinet minister who gave the orders to erase the line in 1967 was Yigal Allon, a founder of the Labor Party. If Tamir holds on to her job, if the Knesset doesn’t intervene, if teachers use the new books, young Israelis might learn the borders of their own country.
Predictably, Tamir caught hell. “The school system must be free of any sign of politics,” declared former education minister Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party-National Union. Another rightist Knesset member said that “putting politics in the schools is an attempt to bring Soviet Russia back to life in Israel.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud submitted a parliamentary motion of no-confidence. The critics, naturally, did not regard the absence of the Green Line from schoolbooks as either politics or indoctrination.
The debate also showed how thoroughly the actual significance of the Green Line has been repressed and how difficult it will be to get teachers to teach it. In the daily Ha’aretz, the Education Ministry’s coordinator for geography said the line would be included in a new curriculum dealing with historical “factors creating Israel’s borders” and the continuing debate over where the permanent border should lie. A curriculum, that is, that relegates the Line to the pre-1967 past and perhaps to the future.
Yet, right now, in the present, the Green Line may be the single most significant fact of Israeli life. What’s inside the Line is sovereign Israel. Except for annexed East Jerusalem, everything outside is subject to the rules of temporary military occupation according to Israel’s own legal system. For nearly 40 years, the press has reported on “the territories.” Soldiers serve in “the territories,” even if young people growing up to be soldiers aren’t told where “the territories” begin. The right has turned settling in Judea and Samaria, a.k.a. the West Bank, into a patriotic value. Yet Judea and Samaria are geographically defined by the Green Line.
True, many Palestinian maps also leave out the Green Line. But that’s no example for Israel to follow. Since 1967, moderate Israelis have regarded the West Bank as the area of uncertain status subject to a future territorial compromise. For moderate Palestinians, the land to be divided diplomatically is all of historic Palestine, from the river to sea. That’s why they can insist that even if they get every square inch of the West Bank, they’ll still be making a huge concession. By erasing the Green Line, Israelis inadvertently label everything as being equally up for grabs, instead of making clear that sovereign Israel is not part of the discussion.
In international diplomacy, virtually everyone who recognizes Israel also recognizes the Green Line as its border. Yet foreign embassies are located in and around Tel Aviv, as if that’s our capital. All, it seems, can play at political fiction. We should be pointing out that the Knesset, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Supreme Court all sit in West Jerusalem, on land that is undisputedly Israeli. Drawing the Green Line only strengthens our case.
So here, and now, the state of denial about the border damages the State of Israel. If Tamir can teach the teachers not to indoctrinate, she’ll be serving Israel well. The real patriot in this case turns out to be the public figure accused of subversion for straying into the dangerous territory of truth.
Gershom Gorenberg is a Jerusalem-based journalist and the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977.
