Discovering the Green Line

In kindergarten at my Jewish elementary school, my class took a “trip to Israel.” Our miniature chairs were arranged in two columns split by an aisle, and a TV was rolled in front of them, prompting hushed excitement. The lights were dimmed; a tape was slid into the VCR, and a blue sky dotted with clouds appeared on the screen, with the wing of a plane in the foreground. Our two teachers told us to buckle up in Hebrew, and we clipped imaginary seatbelts over our waists, giggling. They then walked down the aisle, offering us snacks and cups of juice, in Hebrew as well. We watched as the wing of the plane onscreen grew closer to brown and green earth, the sparkle of Tel Aviv’s buildings coming into view. When it landed, the teachers began singing and clapping, as many do when they actually land in Israel, and we sang and clapped too. In Hebrew, they told us to exit the plane.

The rest of the day consisted of us touring the country by way of special activities around the classroom and playground. We went on an archaeological dig in the flower garden, went swimming at an oasis at the sprinkler, visited the spice market set up on the plastic-topped tables. We wrote notes to place in a cardboard Western Wall and ate falafel and Israeli salad in the cafeteria for lunch.

It’s clear why my five-year-old self thought of Israel as a paradise. Though that imaginary trip to Israel is the clearest example of how we were taught to love the country, that love was reinforced every day in Hebrew class. Beyond merely learning to speak and write the language, we learned about Israeli culture, trying new and delicious foods and singing modern Israeli songs.

Hebrew class was like that at my school even as a got older. Though the vocabulary and grammar lessons grew more advanced, the culture and history lessons remained simple and sunny, and we still had a class completely devoted to singing on one day every week. In sixth grade, I took a pre-Bat Mitzvah trip to Israel, and even actually being in the country did not challenge my idea of Israel as a perfect paradise, as the real oases and spice markets and Western wall were even more picture-perfect than what I had learned about in school.

Our class’s real eighth grade trip to Israel even further reinforced my idealized notions of the country. We stayed with Israeli families who fed us such Israeli delicacies as Bamba and passion fruit, and visited beaches and beautiful kibbutzim. Summers spent at a Jewish overnight camp reinforced that idealized vision of the country, as we sang the same Israeli songs and lived in cabins with cool Israeli counselors who taught us Hebrew slang.

I did not realize what was lacking in my understanding of Israel until I was a sophomore at a Jewish high school. In retrospect, this seems exceedingly late, given that I had already traveled there twice, had learned about the country since pre-school, and was by the age of fifteen certainly old enough to be cognizant of current affairs. Yet, I did not know there was such a thing as the Green Line until my tenth grade history class.

The first unit was on Israeli history. The narrative of Israel’s initial founding felt relatively familiar: a small, brave group of Zionists fighting against much greater powers, from Britain to Egypt to Jordan, to name a few, though my high school class gave me a more nuanced view of those events than I had had before. But then we got to the Six-Day War of 1967. Up until that point in my education, the narrative I had learned of that war was straightforward: every Arab nation surrounding Israel had united to attempt to destroy the country, and Israel had miraculously fended them off. I remember no mention of pre- and post-war borders until that day in tenth grade, when my teacher mentioned the pre-1967 borders, commonly called the “Green Line.” When the teacher brought it up in class, it was with the assumption that we knew, at least at some basic level, what it was. I don’t know if I was the only student who had no memory of hearing that term before, as I was too embarrassed to ask anyone else. It’s rare to have something so central to your identity, something you feel that you know to be true, get flipped on its head so suddenly. Through the rest of that unit in history class and countless Google searches, my understanding of Israel, which I had felt was complete, shifted and expanded and fractured into complexities that I had never thought about for a second before.

What made discovering the Green Line, more than any other fact about Israel, so consequential for me is the combination of its vital importance in understanding Israel coupled with the sense that it was intentionally hidden from me. As for their vital importance, the borders are central to all the major peace talks that have taken place between the two sides, to their futures, and to the current dynamics of life on either side of the line. And to some extent, the Green Line’s concealment really is intentional. Attempts to blur it physically are well documented. Israel has built on either side of the Green Line, and it doesn’t exist in most Israeli textbooks and weather maps, in addition to the materials used in American classrooms like mine. The main highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem crisscrosses the line, though one wouldn’t notice while driving over it. The Green Line is also blurred on the part of many Palestinians, who still harbor claims to the land on the Israeli side of the line. Understanding the Green Line and the ways in which it is blurred is an essential starting point for understanding the complexities and conflicts of modern Israel.

I was lucky to go to a Jewish high school that fostered and encouraged dialogue about these issues, and by the next fall when my class spent a semester in Israel the next year and actually crossed the Green Line to speak to Arab residents on the other side, my understanding of Israel had grown immeasurably. We heard from him about the very real, daily difficulties that the Green Line imposed on his life, including long checks at the line every day when he crossed it to get to and from work and the separation of members of his family by the line which made it difficult to visit each other. I felt that I was finally seeing the full picture, and at the same time the magic that I had felt on that kindergarten “trip” disappeared, as I felt that I could no longer trust the memories I had
of that feeling.

I don’t blame my elementary school teachers for wanting to instill that kind of wholehearted love of Israel in us. I still do have a little bit of that pure love for Israel in me, and I’m glad it’s there. But the shock of suddenly realizing how incomplete my understanding of the country was in high school definitely marred that feeling, and for a while I felt that my elementary school teachers had lied to me. Much of the blame for my lengthy ignorance of the darker nuances of the country’s history is my own – I could have done some Googling much earlier. And yet I do wish that my teachers back in elementary school had found a way to instill a love of Israel while simultaneously making us aware of its faults and the multiple facets of its history, so that my tenth grade realization would not have been so shocking or disheartening.

I believe that the way to nurture American Jews’ relationships with Israel is to encourage engagement in tough issues from a young age, so that the realization of its complexity does not feel sudden and crushing. One simple change in elementary school classrooms that I feel could make a difference is the introduction of maps that include the Green Line. All of my classrooms in elementary school included a big map of Israel.

Sometimes there were even multiple, such as topographical maps or maps with pictures of landmarks or biblical sites. But none of the maps included the Green Line. That left no physical marker to engender kids’ questions and first discussions of such issues as the country’s borders and the two-state solutions.

Some organizations, most notably J-Street, are advocating to place these types of maps in Jewish institutions. I know it would be a hard sell to try and get teachers to talk about these issues among young kids, for whom the classic Zionist narrative that I was taught is so appealing and almost magical. But I believe that’s what Jewish educators, in America and beyond, need to do if we are to build a future for Israel and our place within it, and not just remain in the past.

Rachel Butler ‘18 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at rachelkbutler@wustl.edu.