Political firestorm in Israel: putting the Green Line in text books
According to the Israel Broadcast Association, “a political firestorm has erupted following the decision of education minister Yuli Tamir to restore the Green Line (pre-1967 border) to Israeli text books”.
[Source: Israel Broadcast Association: Via Mosaic on Link TV.]
The amount of grief given to Palestinians over issues concerning their textbooks has been extraordinary. The Jewish Virtual Library devotes a special section to Palestinian textbooks and incitement and includes 12 extensive studies.
According to Miftah, The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue & Democracy:
Studies of Palestinian textbooks have revealed that any strong anti-Israel and anti-Semitic material in the curriculum comes from books that the Palestinians did not author and are replacing. (Ironically, these same books that were actually authored by Jordanians and Egyptians were distributed by Israel in east Jerusalem after only removing the cover.) Furthermore, books that were written by the Palestinian Authority in 1994, 2000, and 2001 are free of such material.
And the controversy in Israel is whether to even put the West Bank and Gaza into the textbooks. The minister is being accused of “wiping out 1/5 of the Jewish land that has served as the cradle of Jewish history.” The Jewish land to which they refer is the West Bank and Gaza.
December 8th, 2006 at 7:35 am
It’s interesting that the presenter early on identifies the Green Line as “[Israel’s] pre-67 borders”.
The Green Line is the ceasefire line from 1949. It is not now, nor has it ever been a “border”. While I expect journalists in this country to get those details wrong, one would hope that Israeli journalists would have a knowledge of the basic status of such things.