Teach the Green Line
Education Minister Yuli Tamir's plan to teach the Green Line in schools has provoked a bizarre storm of outrage on the Right. What makes this reaction bizarre is not that outrage is unwarranted; it is that the outrage has focused on the wrong issue.
The Right is up in arms over Tamir's decision that textbook maps of Israel should include the Green Line. Yet on this point, Tamir is obviously correct. Schools are supposed to give children the basic knowledge they need to function as informed citizens, and in Israel that means knowing where the Green Line is. Without that knowledge, it is impossible to form an intelligent opinion on the No. 1 political issue of recent decades: whether Israel should withdraw to the Green Line or its vicinity.
Indeed, the Right should be the first to demand that children receive this information. For years, it has accused the Left of obfuscating the dangers inherent in withdrawal, but it is precisely the widespread ignorance of the Green Line's location that makes this possible. How can anyone understand how vulnerable withdrawal to the Green Line would leave central Israel if he does not know just how close that would bring Tel Aviv to Palestinian rocket launchers? Or how easily gunmen could hit at Kfar Saba from the Green Line? Or how quickly an army stationed on the Green Line could march to the sea and sever Israel in two? For precisely this reason, a study conducted two years ago by two Hebrew University professors, which was quoted in last week's Haaretz, found that when university students who identified themselves as rightists were shown maps of the Green Line, their professed willingness to engage in political activism rose sharply. Before seeing the maps, most had pictured the West Bank as much smaller than it is; learning the truth made them realize just how high the stakes really are. (In contrast, the maps had little impact on students who identified themselves as leftists.)
Clearly, it would be wrong for textbooks to show the Green Line as a border, which it is not now and never was: It is the War of Independence armistice line, which neither side accepted as a final border. However, there is no indication that Tamir intends any such thing, and the problem is easily avoidable - for instance, by making borders solid lines and the Green Line a dotted one...
...Finally, there is the inevitable effect of peer pressure. In classes where most students are on one side of the debate - a likely outcome in many schools, given that political views in Israel tend to fracture along religious and geographical fault lines - students on the other side will be reluctant to press their case for fear of antagonizing their peers. That will make the debate still more one-sided.
The result is that students who come into class without strong views on the subject are likely to emerge thoroughly indoctrinated by whichever political position is adopted by the teacher and the majority of the other students - both because they will not have heard the other side's best arguments, and because the combination of teacher and peer pressure is highly unconducive to forming independent views. And that is a gross abuse of the education system's power.
Schools are supposed to give children the information they need to function as adult citizens, and knowledge of where the Green Line is located is indeed essential for an Israeli citizen today. But when schools cross the line from instilling knowledge to political indoctrination, democrats of every political stripe should rise up in protest.
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