Elusive Line Defines Lives in Israel and the West Bank
By ISABEL KERSHNER
NYT
BARTAA, West Bank — For decades Israel has tried to erase from public consciousness the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary with the West Bank at the heart of stalled negotiations for a Palestinian state.
Israel has built on either side of the Green Line and deleted it from textbooks and weather maps. Israeli drivers plying the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway crisscross the unmarked line at the Latrun Interchange every second of the day, slicing through half a mile of West Bank territory and several more miles of no man’s land, oblivious to the area’s fraught history.
In Jerusalem, where Israel annexed the eastern part of the city and its holy sites after the 1967 war, a new light rail system traverses a patchwork of Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods, gliding blithely across the invisible boundaries.
Yet a recent journey along the line, from the northernmost Jalama checkpoint to the tiny villages of Al Ghuwein and Sansana in the arid hills of the south, shows that despite attempts to blur it physically, Israel has carefully preserved the line in legal and administrative terms, and it defines lives on both sides.
(More here.)
NYT
BARTAA, West Bank — For decades Israel has tried to erase from public consciousness the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary with the West Bank at the heart of stalled negotiations for a Palestinian state.
Israel has built on either side of the Green Line and deleted it from textbooks and weather maps. Israeli drivers plying the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway crisscross the unmarked line at the Latrun Interchange every second of the day, slicing through half a mile of West Bank territory and several more miles of no man’s land, oblivious to the area’s fraught history.
In Jerusalem, where Israel annexed the eastern part of the city and its holy sites after the 1967 war, a new light rail system traverses a patchwork of Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods, gliding blithely across the invisible boundaries.
Yet a recent journey along the line, from the northernmost Jalama checkpoint to the tiny villages of Al Ghuwein and Sansana in the arid hills of the south, shows that despite attempts to blur it physically, Israel has carefully preserved the line in legal and administrative terms, and it defines lives on both sides.
(More here.)
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