Israel and the green Line
Mirth December 7th, 2006 - 1:29 pmGreen Line in school maps angers right-wingers
Education Minister Yuli Tamir decided on Tuesday that new geography textbooks ordered by the Education Ministry will include the so-called Green Line in their representations of the map of Israel, triggering condemnation from right-wing MKs.
“This is for the purposes of education and demonstration and discussion,” Tamir told The Jerusalem Post , flatly rejecting as “irrelevant” the objections of the politicians who blasted her decision.
“There was a conscious choice to make the Green Line disappear,” she said of previous government policies that left the demarcation line out of official maps, “but I don’t think we should educate to ignorance. Israel’s eastern border has not been marked [in the schoolbooks], and it should be.”
Former chairman of the Education Committee MK Zevulun Orlev (NU-NRP) led the charge against the move, saying that Tamir wanted to impose “Peace Now” ideology on the ministry.
The term Green Line is used to refer to the 1949 Armistice lines established between Israel and its opponents (Syria, Jordan, and Egypt) at the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The Green Line separates Israel not only from these countries but from territories Israel would later capture in the 1967 Six-Day War, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its name is derived from the green pencil used to draw the line on the map during the talks.
