How the Green Line became a red line in Israeli education

Education Minister Naftali Bennet in classroom

Akiva Eldar writes in Al Monitor, “The scene is a fourth-grade geography lesson in the coastal town of Herzliya. The teacher, Yael (a pseudonym), shows the children a bas-relief map depicting the Land of Israel as stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. “This is the State of Israel, this is our state,” she tells the pupils. One of the students, Galia Bar-Tal, seeks to set the teacher straight. “That’s wrong,” she says. “The demarcation of the Green Line is missing from the map.”

“Seven years have passed since this incident, yet Bar-Tal, a smart girl with a political conscious, still remembers how the teacher reprimanded her in front of the class. “Galia, stop bringing politics into the classroom,” Yael said. Galia’s father, Daniel Bar-Tal, a leading political psychologist, was not surprised by the teacher’s reaction. “Teachers convey the accepted values of the society in which they live,” Bar-Tal recently told Al-Monitor. “Any education is political, and any map of the State of Israel is political, but the Green Lineruns counter to the prevailing spirit [of ignoring the occupation of the West Bank], and the teacher therefore views it as wrong.”

Map of Green Line

“Galia’s story provides yet another explanation for the strengthening of the conservative right at the expense of the Zionist left. Thousands of Yael’s former students who cast their ballots in the April 9 elections were taught that the State of Israel extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River and that anyone challenging this view is deviating from the truth, the consensus, “Israeli-ness.” The teacher herself may not even know about the Green Line because the demarcation of Israel’s June 4, 1967, border was missing from the books she had as a pupil.”

Map of occupied territory

“Surveys conducted in 2015 and 2018 by New Wave Research for the newspaper Yisrael Hayom indicate that every second student and teacher do not know what the Green Line is…Daniel Bar-Tal, an expert on school curricula and decidedly on the left, notes that governments use textbooks to methodically convey broad national narratives. “Textbooks express the ideology and ethos of a society,” explained Bar-Tal. “They instill values, goals and myths that society seeks to broadcast to new generations.” (more…)