What happened to the Green Line?
09/16/22 • 43 min
1 Listener
Last month, a controversy erupted in Israel when the Tel Aviv municipality, in time for the new school year, distributed maps to classrooms that showed the Green Line. Although the 1949 armistice lines that formed Israel's unofficial borders at the cessation of the 1948 war are internationally recognized, in Israel the Green Line is a contentious point, seen as incorrectly demarcating between "Israel proper" and the settlements in the occupied West Bank. Indeed, in sending the maps to schools, the Tel Aviv municipality flouted Education Ministry guidelines.
The episode was a timely reminder of what +972 editor Amjad Iraqi and Meron Rapoport, an editor at Local Call, argued in a pair of essays they wrote for The Nation in August: that the Green Line, both as a result of Palestinian grassroots resistance and Israeli efforts to undermine the idea that the West Bank is a separate entity, is gradually becoming irrelevant.
You can read Iraqi and Rapoport's pieces at +972 Magazine here and here, or at The Nation here and here.
Visit +972 Magazine and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Become a member of +972 Magazine: 972mag.com/members
Support the show: 972mag.com/donate
Sign up for our weekly newsletter, The Landline: 972mag.com/newsletter
Last month, a controversy erupted in Israel when the Tel Aviv municipality, in time for the new school year, distributed maps to classrooms that showed the Green Line. Although the 1949 armistice lines that formed Israel's unofficial borders at the cessation of the 1948 war are internationally recognized, in Israel the Green Line is a contentious point, seen as incorrectly demarcating between "Israel proper" and the settlements in the occupied West Bank. Indeed, in sending the maps to schools, the Tel Aviv municipality flouted Education Ministry guidelines.
The episode was a timely reminder of what +972 editor Amjad Iraqi and Meron Rapoport, an editor at Local Call, argued in a pair of essays they wrote for The Nation in August: that the Green Line, both as a result of Palestinian grassroots resistance and Israeli efforts to undermine the idea that the West Bank is a separate entity, is gradually becoming irrelevant.
You can read Iraqi and Rapoport's pieces at +972 Magazine here and here, or at The Nation here and here.
Visit +972 Magazine and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Become a member of +972 Magazine: 972mag.com/members
Support the show: 972mag.com/donate
Sign up for our weekly newsletter, The Landline: 972mag.com/newsletter
Previous Episode
The Jewish Comedian Calling Out Apartheid in Arabic
1 RecommendationsNoam Shuster-Eliassi, an Israeli comedian based in south Tel Aviv, spent her childhood and early adulthood invested in a traditional model of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. Growing up in Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam, a mixed community in central Israel where Jews and Palestinains live together by choice, Shuster-Eliassi took to peace activism as a young adult, becoming part of dialogue groups and working with a UN subsidiary.
Yet she came to find this mode of activism inadequate, she told the +972 Podcast. "I got to a very extreme point where I couldn't deal anymore with how much we were not making any progress in humanitarian work and in the NGO world."
Turning to stand-up comedy, she said, not only helped her feel less alone in struggling against the situation in Israel-Palestine, but also helped the trilingual Shuster-Eliassi — she speaks Hebrew, Arabic, and English — express herself in the way that she wanted. "[Comedy] released my voice. It made me say the things that I dreamed of saying, it made me reach the people I'm dreaming of reaching — it made me speak in all the languages that I know."
The music in this episode is by DAM and Ketsa.
The audio clips in this episode are taken from the short documentary "Reckoning With Laughter," directed by Amber Fares and produced by Rachel Leah Jones. "Reckoning With Laughter" can be watched at either Al Jazeera or The New Yorker.
Visit +972 Magazine and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Become a member of +972 Magazine: 972mag.com/members/
Support the show: 972mag.com/donate/
Sign up for our weekly newsletter, The Landline: 972mag.com/newsletter/
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