Getting lost in the Green Line

As a CAMERA alert informed me, one written by Tamar Sternthal, the papal trip of Benedictus XVI to Israel has confused the Los Angeles Times newspaper, which allowed some errors of fact about Israel to appear in its pages. One of them seems to been a stumble over the Green Line, as if it were a tripwire for political geographic correctness.

Duke Helfand, an LA Times reporter, erroneously states in one article that the Pope will arrive at:

the West Bank, where he'll visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and Jerusalem's Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site."

Ooops. Yad Vashem, for sure, is not in the "West Bank" and I would suggest that neither is the Western Wall. They are located in Jerusalem. And, if one wants to get nitpicky, Yad Vashem is actually in the western section and was under Israeli control prior to 1967, that watershed year when maps got redrawn, Biblical locations became rediscovered and the Green Line became, well, obsolete to a great extent.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (1)

The Green Line comes... and goes

Did you know that the "Green Line" is sixty years old?  Tom Segev, who is as much a pro-Green Line proponent as I am its opponent, has reported in his Ha'aretz column  that: "...the demarcation of [the Green] line... took place at the Hotel des Roses on the Greek island of  Rhodes, where Egyptian and Israeli representatives met at the end of the War of Independence... under the auspices of the United Nations... [mediator and later Nobel Peace Prize awardee Ralphe] Bunche, [who] bent over backwards to get the sides to reach an agreement... The two sides signed on February 24, 1949. We got Beersheeba; they got Gaza... "

Of course, Segev doesn't mention 19 years during which Arabs refused to recognize the Green Line as inviolate to terror, rather constantly infiltrating Israel, killing civilians, pillaging property and seeking to eliminate the "Zionist entity."

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (1)

Explaining the media bias

The Green Line. That virtual definition between Jewish nationalism and Zionist messianism, between rational political behavior and extremist social disharmony, between good and bad.

Well, that's not really true but a four decades-old campaign has placed upon your eyes, my readers, green-tinted glasses and you believe, perhaps, that there are two realities, one of Israel in its post-1949/pre-1967 boundaries (never internationally recognized you'll recall) and another of Yesha, the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and, yes, Gaza.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (9)