what are Israel's borders ?

Bruce Wolman has long been interested in the issue we raised earlier today on this site, Israeli maps that fail to show the Occupied Territories as Palestinian lands. He writes:

I was quite amused at the furor Hillary Clinton made a few years ago about Palestinians not showing Israel on the maps in their schoolbooks. When I was in Israel from 1999-2000, none of the tourist maps indicated the territories.

After Hillary's tirade, I did a search of official Israeli maps and tourist guidebooks, and lo and behold, what did I find - the same maps as the Palestinians used, except the area was called Israel rather than Palestine. No occupied territories, no disputed territories, just Greater Israel including Judea and Samaria. How did Hillary expect the Palestinians to draw Israel's borders when neither she nor Israel would officially state what Israel's borders are?

I hadn't checked for awhile, so here is some research I just did: a sampling of Israeli maps on the Web.

Modern Israel according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as of Jan 1, 2004:

The territories are now defined and denoted as "under Israeli control" with final status pending. Note Jerusalem is not included. However, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism provides a map of Israel on its web site that makes no such distinction. The screen shot is at right, small. You can take another look by uploading it here. Next, below to the right, outlined in red, is a map from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (or CBS) web site (in Hebrew).

And what about Diaspora youth? In the map from Taglit-Birthright Israel, the territories are avoided. Their map is at left, all in white, a little cartoonish.
On the virtual tour there is no mention of touring the Occupied Territories.

Now here's the map from the Israel Science and Technology Directory:

It's at right, very high school geography book like. You'll see: no occupied territories.

The Jewish Agency for Israel has a whole web page linking to various maps that relate to the History of Israel and Zionism, but no map of Israel today. This page is frequently referred to by other "educational" web sites.

The JAFI also has a web page for Hasbara and maps.

It appears that the Palestinians are not the only ones with map issues in their schools. Israel has its own problems as revealed in this report from Australian Broadcasting: Green line turns Israel's schools into political battleground."

And here's another story from an Israeli publication: "Education Committee rejects adding Green Line to school maps."

Here are Israeli children working on a Green Map for an international Children's Environmental Conference in 2006. At that link, you can see that the Occupied Territories are not marked as such.

And the situation has not changed since then.

In March, 2009 a BBC reporter interviewed three Israeli settler youths:

The boys show me their school map, used in schools across Israel. The West Bank is not marked as a separate territory. Ari, Matan and Yadin say Israel still views the land as its own. Except for the Palestinian towns there.

In February, the Knesset Education Committee decided by a majority vote that the pre-Six-Day-War border, or the Green Line, no longer exists, at least that is what they want to insure is taught in the Israeli schools. As Yehuda Ben Meir, an Israeli who actually opposes returning to the Green line as the international border, complained in Ha'aretz:

Is it possible to ignore the fact that no government in Israel, including those headed by Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, ever even proposed annexing Judea and Samaria or imposing Israeli law there? Is it the role of the education system to teach things as they are or to engage in political indoctrination? The youth must not be presented with an imaginary map divorced from legal, diplomatic and physical reality.

Posted by Philip Weiss at 01:12 PM in History, Israel/Palestine, Settlers/Colonists,
U.S. Policy in the Mideast