Published: 2 May 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The representation of Israel was rather rough (I suppose Jerusalem was somewhere near the belly-button) but the game did its job: the kids got their bodies moving and we inserted some educational content into the game.
I have been thinking a lot about that game in these past weeks. Around the celebrations of Israel’s 70th anniversary, I have been confronted by images of the map of Israel, used by Jewish institutions within the Australian Jewish community, that do not, in any way, mark the Green Line around the occupied Palestinian territories. Examples of this can be seen in the logo used by the Sydney-based Israel Study Tour (IST), and in a celebratory Facebook post by the Zionist Council of NSW.
The Green Line is the Armistice Line drawn in 1949 after the 1948 Independence War between Israel and the Arab states around it. At the time it signified the border of Israel between Jordan and Egypt. After 1967 it marked the lands that Israel conquered in the Six Day War but over which it never claimed sovereignty - the West Bank and Gaza - where some 4.5 million Palestinians live today.
Let’s be clear: the use of any map of Israel that does not demarcate the Green Line is a political statement. These maps are not only factually incorrect but also dangerous. They erase the future borders of a two-state solution and quietly imply an Israel ethnically cleansed of Palestinians (and perhaps Palestinian-Israelis as well).
Most alarmingly, they represent an Israel that does not have peace with its neighbours, an Israel and occupied Palestinian territories that are less safe for those residing there.
By way of comparison, if maps of Palestine that did not demarcate the State of Israel were to appear in schools across Australia, there would be nothing short of an uproar from Australian Jewish community leaders. There have been various discoveries of Middle Eastern and European airlines wiping Israel off their route maps, resulting in articles in the Australian Jewish News and angry op-eds by conservative columnist Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun.
This is not the first time that members of the Diaspora have called into question the Israel maps used by Jewish educational institutions. In 2014, many British Jewish educational institutions were revealed to be using maps without the Green Line, and the UK Jewish organisation, Yachad, launched a campaign called “Sign on the Green Line.”
This campaign was aimed at drawing attention to the importance of educating Jewish children about the Green Line and encouraged British Jewish institutions to commit to using maps on which it was marked.
Likewise, the US advocacy group, J Street, published maps of Israel with a text-based lesson plan to help Israel and Jewish studies teachers discuss the Green Line and its importance with their students. They aptly noted: “The disappearance of the Green Line from our maps is a clear symptom of a larger problem.
The vast majority of Jewish Americans, including our communal leaders, claim to support a two-state solution, recognising that it is the only way to safeguard Israel’s future. Yet we often talk about and teach about Israel in a way that physically erases the Green Line, which forms the basis of that solution. When the Green Line disappears from our maps, it is also eroded from our consciousness.”
And it is not only in the Diaspora that this phenomenon is taking place. In 2016 Haaretz reported that Israeli high schools were using maps that not only omit the Green Line, but erased all Israeli-Arab towns other than Umm el-Fahem and Nazareth, “saving seventh-graders from having to contend with the fact that they live in a state in which some 1.7 million human beings – over 20 percent of the population – are Palestinian.” It seems that Jewish schools in the Diaspora are in good company.
I take full responsibility for how nonchalantly I erased the Green Line when playing the “make the Israel out of your body game”. I never pointed to my campers’ shins to make a comment about Gaza or asked them to shift their bellies sideways to symbolise the chomp that the West Bank takes out of that nice straight line that their torsos created.
However, I am now asking Jewish educational institutions in Australia to also take responsibility. What maps do you use in your classrooms? What conversations are you having about the Green Line with your students and educators?
I challenge educators to engage their students in conversations about the Green Line to keep the dream of peace in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories alive for generations to come.
Main photo: Map of Israel , with Green Line,from J Street (left) and close up of map in Zionist Council of NSW 70th anniversary image, with no Green Line (Facebook)
