Largely invisible to Israelis, the pre-1967 borders profoundly shape the lives and hopes of Palestinians.
In 1949 the lines on the map of the Armistice Agreements between newly-established Israel and its Arab neighbors were demarcated in green ink. The Green Line, as these lines became known, was later recognized internationally as the borders of the State of Israel. After Israel occupied more territories in 1967, the Green Line became synonymous with the term “pre-1967 borders,” usually in reference to the distinction between pre-67 Israel and other parts of Mandatory Palestine.
Over the past forty-seven years, the political relevance of the Green Line has become a controversial issue in both intra-Israeli and intra-Palestinian politics. The most enthusiastic supporters for keeping the Green Line alive have been Israelis and Palestinians advocating the two-state solution. While the feasibility of this solution seems to be fading away, it is worth examining whether the Green Line still exists—not as a legal entity but as a sociological reality.
The Green Line is like an object in a hologram: we can see it from certain angles, but it disappears if we look at it from other directions. The policy of consecutive Israeli governments since 1967 has been affected by the contradictory forces of the Greater Israel ideology, pulling toward de facto if not de jure annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the anxiety over losing a Jewish majority in the State of Israel, which this annexation would potentially lead to. The result is a series of inconsistencies in policy and rhetoric.
Israel has never officially annexed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, except East Jerusalem and some neighboring villages. On the ground, however, roads crisscross the territories, and Jewish neighborhoods, towns, and settlements have been established beyond the Green Line, with a current population of more than half a million. This number is the result of decades of governmental investment and economic incentives.
The inconsistency between de facto annexation and de jure avoidance of this annexation is reflected in the cartographic representation of the Green Line. In maps appearing on the websites of various Israeli ministries, the Green Line might be absent (for example, the Ministry of Construction and Housing) or modified in a way that reflects partial annexation of the West Bank (for example, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Interior). Not coincidentally, the map of the Central Bureau of Statistics, the body responsible for counting people, clearly distinguishes between pre-67 Israel and the West Bank (except East Jerusalem, which is officially annexed to Israel).
While Jewish Israelis can freely cross the Green Line back and forth, often without being aware that they are doing so, this is certainly not the case for Palestinians. In order to cross the Green Line into Israel proper, Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are required to apply for a special permit, whose issuance is based on subjective and sometimes arbitrary criteria; Palestinians found inside the Green Line without it are penalized harshly. Permanently moving across the Green Line is out of question, and since 2003 even the spouses of Israeli citizens have not been allowed to relocate inside the Green Line.
As a result of this differential policy, Jewish Israelis and Palestinians experience the Green Line differently. Since 1967 the Green Line has become invisible for most Jewish Israeli citizens. The Israeli education system has mostly ignored it. As a result, most graduates of the Jewish Israeli education system are unable to draw the line on the map, and frequently are not aware of its legal significance.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, on the other hand, are well aware of the Green Line. First, because this line interferes with their contact with other Palestinians, and second, because their Israeli citizenship places them in an intermediate political status, between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians beyond the Green Line who are not citizens, and ensures them relative benefits vis-à-vis their fellow Palestinians. Palestinian citizens of Israel still suffer from consistent discrimination in many spheres of life, but since 1966 they no longer live under military rule, and therefore they are less vulnerable to arbitrary decisions of officers and soldiers. They do not have to cross check points on a daily basis, and they are free to leave the country and return.
Most important, their lives, in and of themselves, are more secure. Since the bloody events of October 2000, when Israeli police killed twelve Palestinian citizens of Israel, the police have been relatively careful in their treatment of Palestinians inside Israel. One of the great concerns of Israeli security services is that Palestinian citizens of Israel would join other Palestinians in a future intifada. Following the murder of the Palestinian boy Muhammad Abu Khdeir in East Jerusalem in early July, Israel witnessed a wave of demonstrations, stone-throwing, and blocked roads by furious young Palestinian citizens—a scenario very similar to the events of October 2000, triggered then by the killing of the young Muhammad al-Durrah in the Gaza Strip. This time, however, police strictly avoided gunfire against demonstrators and rioters.
This is in clear contrast to similar riots in Ramallah in the West Bank in May this year, where two Palestinian boys were shot dead by an Israeli sniper. The disregard for Palestinian lives in the Gaza Strip these days further emphasizes that Israeli authorities tend to create a certain level of distinction between Palestinian citizens and non-citizens. The Green Line, therefore, makes a distinction between territories with different levels of protection of Palestinian lives from Israeli authorities.
Though Palestinian citizens of Israel have always expressed unquestionable solidarity with other Palestinians beyond the Green Line and have frequently emphasized the unity of the Palestinian people in public rhetoric, their methods of struggle have mostly remained within the boundaries of Israeli law, and therefore set them apart from other Palestinians. Take for example the annual commemoration of the Nakba on each side of the border. Nakba Day (on 15 May) in the West Bank has been part of the continuous struggle against Israeli military occupation. It frequently has been characterized by violent confrontations, including stone throwing, burning tires, and troops shooting on Palestinians. In contrast, the major commemorative event of the Nakba in Israel, the March of Return (this takes place annually on Israel’s Day of Independence) has turned into a family friendly, peaceful festival with ice cream trucks, free supply of bottled water, and souvenir and book-selling booths.
The event is well organized, fully coordinated with the police who prevent Jewish-Israeli provocateurs from approaching the participants. Furthermore, the political commemoration of Palestinians in Israel frequently emphasizes the Green Line. Monuments built to commemorate Palestinian martyrs are almost exclusively dedicated to martyrs who were Israeli citizens, and tend to exclude Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
A wave of anti-Arab legislation over the past decade and the continuous failure to achieve civil equality might have undermined the above-mentioned distinctions. The Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha found in his surveys that while in 2003 fully 72 percent of the Palestinians in Israel said that their way of life and behavior is more similar to that of Jewish Israelis than to that of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in 2012 only 54 percent held this view. Still, according to the same surveys, a clear majority of the Palestinians in Israel (63 percent) support a two-state solution with the Green Line as a border between Israel and Palestine.
The Green Line has different meanings for different groups and individuals. For contemporary Israeli policymakers, it exists only as an element in the matrix of control of Palestinian movement. For the shrinking Israeli Zionist left, it represents the hope for preserving a state with a Jewish majority living in peace. For the ideological settlers in the West Bank, it is an object they try to erase. For the majority of Jewish Israelis, though, it is either a vague silhouette or does not exist at all. For Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it is a very tangible reality because only a few of them can cross it, after much effort.
For a significant but declining number of Palestinian citizens of Israel, imagining the Green Line as a future peaceful border enable them to keep hoping that co-existence between their Palestinian identity and Israeli citizenship is still possible. In the present, many of them experience the Green Line simultaneously as an obstacle, hindering Palestinian unity, and as a border providing relative protection. Because the Green Line-based two-state solution is unlikely to materialize in the foreseeable future, the Green Line is becoming a major ‘present absentee’ of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, invisible to many, a symbol of hope for some, and a threat to others.
Tamir Sorek is Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. He is the author of Arab Soccer in a Jewish State: The Integrative Enclave and a forthcoming book that focuses on Palestinian commemoration practices in Israel (2015).
"The Green Line, as these lines became known, was later recognized internationally as the borders of the State of Israel"
This is false. There are no treaties or agreements between nations that set the borders of the state of Israel, except between Jordan and Israel, and between Egypt and Israel. Neither of those borders is the Green Line.
Posted by: Fred | August 4, 2014 at 10:12 AM