When Israel secretly decided to erase the Green Line

Minutes of top-secret cabinet meetings in 1967 reveal how the decision to erase the Green Line from Israel’s official map was made. The Line wasn't the only thing that was erased.

A media storm sprang up last month over the decision by the Tel Aviv Municipality to hang in the city’s classrooms maps of Israel showing the Green Line – the armistice line that Israel and its neighbours agreed upon in 1949, following Israel’s War of Independence. 

Until 1967, that line signified Israel’s de facto eastern border and demarcated its sovereign territory. The line has not appeared on the State of Israel’s official maps throughout all the years of the occupation, and deliberately so, in the wake of secret decisions made by the security cabinet at the end of 1967. 

Instead of the Green Line, it was decided to denote Israel’s (unofficial) borders via the cease-fire lines of the Six-Day War fought in June of that year, encompassing the territories of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

Since then, the official maps printed by the Survey of Israel, a government agency, haven’t distinguished between the territory of the state as it was on the eve of the 1967 war and what it comprised afterward. In practice, as a glimpse at the official map shows, Israel (just such: not “State of” and not “Land of”) stretches from the Mediterranean Sea, in the west, to the Jordan River, in the east. The political decision in 1967 to erase the line from the official map may have been intended to keep open all options about the future of these territories. 

However, with the establishment of settlements in occupied territory and their transformation, in the eyes of many, into an integral part of Israel, the erasure of the line went from being a cartographic exercise to a political reality. The Green Line was in fact forgotten, and for many Israelis no longer exists.

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Why Israel Secretly Decided to Erase the Green Line (Haaretz)

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Image: A map of Israel from 1964 ( Efi Hoory, Cc-by-sa-3.0/Haaretz)