Israeli Education and Culture Minister Yuli Tamir’s initiative to return the Green Line to maps of Israel in students’ textbooks has caused a storm and earned her many verbal attacks from the ultra right-wingers. The Green Line was the border mark between Palestinian East Jerusalem and the Israeli occupied West Jerusalem until the 1967 war.
The hawks in the Israeli government claim that the new school map is part of a secret move to give up Israeli territories such as the Eastern Jerusalem, Gaza and other areas occupied in the 1967 war. They said that the move amounted to ending the plan to annex more territories as part of the implementation of the Zionist ambition of establishing a greater Israel. They blame Tamir of enforcing a leftist agenda on Israel.
Tamir, who is a member of the Labor party and leader of the Peace Now movement, told the directors of various departments in the ministry that she intended to return the Green Line to the text book maps in order to make the students learn their history with clarity and realize how the holy city was divided into two parts.
On the other hand, rightist leaders said the minister was stabbing Israel’s settlement policy in the back.
The council of settlers in the West Bank issued a statement saying it would never succumb to any leftist pressures and would continue teaching students that the real Israel lies between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
They denounced the minister’s move as an attempt to cut out about a fifth of the State of Israel from the map to please her Palestinian friends. Former Yesha Council chairman and one of the settlers’ leaders, Israel Harel, said: “Ministers in general, and the education minister especially, do not determine Israel’s borders.... I suggest the borders should be de facto... and mention these are not final borders.”
He claimed that there are legal documents showing that pre-1967 Israel has been expanded to include Eastern Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and several other settlements acknowledged by the United States. He referred to a letter written by US President George W. Bush to Ariel Sharon in 2004 saying that a permanent settlement of the Middle East conflict should take in to consideration the new reality that emerged after the establishment of Jewish settlements in the edges of West Bank.
The deputy leader of the Likud Party, Benjamin Netanyahu, demanded the cancellation of the education minister’s new map. Netanyahu said: “If the Israeli education minister comes up with this map how can we succeed in our efforts to mobilize a massive campaign to persuade CNN and other international news channels to replace the map of Israel they currently display when they broadcast any news about Israel with another map with the East Jerusalem and Golan Heights as part of Israel?”
Tamir’s reply to this demand was, “This campaign is unfair, and akin to intellectual terrorism.” She said her aim was to make the students learn how the Israeli borders were pushed forward besides how the leaders of the state of Israel were obsessed with the idea of annexing those lands.
She argued that it was unreasonable to allow a generation to grow up without knowing what were the country’s borders in 1948, and the developments after 1967, besides how East Jerusalem and the Wailing Wall were annexed for the unification of Jerusalem.
This is by no means a domestic matter to be sorted out by Israelis alone, but a serious issue that will have a far reaching effect on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel’s insistence on not having defined and permanent political borders is proof of its scant respect for international conventions. The present dispute, obviously, confirms the suspicion that Israel still has designs to grab more territories from the Arabs. The right-wingers, apparently, fear that if any permanent border mark is drawn for Israel it would be the end of their greed to occupy and annex more and more Arab lands.
