Delineating the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel
The story of the Green Line has all to do with a blue pencil. Yet after its delineation, it was overprinted on Israel’s official maps with the color green (Brawer, 2002). As discussed in the previous section, after the 1948 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors the line between Israel and Trans-Jordan was to be delineated during the armistice talks. At the talks was the Israeli military general and head of the Israeli mission Moshe Dayan. As one participant in the meeting recounted:
Either purposely or because he [Dayan] was not a very good map-reader, he took a blue pencil and he drew the line and the Arabs were less cartographers than he was. Instead of cartographers to draw the line, they drew the line. And he took a blue pencil and he drew the line and the width of the line of the pencil was nearly 2 millimeters - being nearly 300 meters - so you see if you take one side of the blue line or the other side you have two different boundaries. And I was present there ... and I was at the time still a Graduate student ... and I drew attention [to the fact] ... I said, you know what you are doing? ... the line itself is 300 meters! But he dismissed it.
(Interview B 12)
This unreflected dismissal was to come with huge costs. This carelessly delineated line ran through built-up areas and often cut communities off from their water sources and agricultural land, and thereby gave rise to disputes that are still not settled. According to an interviewee, the thick blue line means that “there is a stream of country which is 200 or 300 meters wide which is disputed as to the exact position of the line” (Interview B 12), and to make matters worse, there are:
actually three lines - we have the Israeli Green Line which includes Eastern Jerusalem and some minor other areas, we have the Jordanian or the Arab Green Line, which actually concurs with the armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan, and we ... have the Green Line of the United Nations, which are the maps of the United Nations truce supervision body, and they are not identical!
(Interview B10)
The UN maps were based on the armistice agreement and amended according to the UN mixed armistice commission, which was chaired by a UN officer and included Israeli and Jordanian military representatives and operated between 1949-67. Whenever there were incidents along the boundaries, the commission
Enforcing Israel/Palestine’.s border spaces 97 addressed respective Israeli or Jordanian complaints and voted in favor of either one or the other side. Although the commission’s decisions were documented, they were not implemented and amendments to the line were not executed. Not only was the UN's interpretation of the line not implemented, but the Jordanians also never demarcated their line. The Israelis, however, soon after the signing of the armistice agreement, went out and implanted their line on the ground with boundary posts, barrels and heaps of rocks. To be sure:
Israel demarcated the line and they invited the Jordanians to participate in the demarcation. They refused. What they did, they sent observers, which were not members of the teams which demarcated the line, but they were ... present nearby and they had a look from the other side.... In some cases, they protested ‘this is not the correct line', but their protests were ignored. Israel demarcated the line ... they put in various forms of boundary posts.... The Jordanians had their own maps ... on the maps they had their version of the position of the line, but they did not demarcate it on the area itself as the Israelis did.
(Interview BIO)
Thus, with three Green Lines, yet only one of them demarcated, agreement on the line’s location was hardly likely. As one expert points out:
to put it bluntly the Israelis are very determined that their line is the correct line and they will not negotiate on any other line. The Palestinians who inherited all these documents from the Jordanians when Jordan withdrew from Palestine, are not very sure about their line.... They have their doubts, and in some cases, they don’t have one version.
(Interview B 10)
With the Palestinians unsure of their line, and Israelis convinced of theirs, the UN brought their maps to their New York headquarters and restricted their access. Indeed, these maps are now “absolutely confidential.... The United Nations felt that these documents may either help the Palestinians or the Israelis and they don’t want to take sides. They want to be completely neutral” (Interview B 10). As the armistice line was never fully demarcated and does not follow any physical features, there is now a frontier zone of about five kilometers that is ill defined, yet severely impacts the local population (Brawer, 2002: 476).
With the line in place, however fuzzy its borders, it has persistently impacted cross-border regions, economic development, agricultural practices and social interconnectivity across the border area. Post-1949, Arab villagers who had by and large worked agricultural land in the lowlands lost access to their farmlands, employment opportunities, markets and access to seivices. At the same time, the Israeli government sponsored the establishment of Jewish settlements alongside the border. Settlers, who often were new Jewish immigrants were frequentlydriven by Zionist ideology, determined to “redeem the land” for the Jewish people, and replace depopulated and displaced Palestinian communities along the Green Line with Jewish settlements. To do so was seen as a way to secure Israel’s new frontier region and participate in the mission of nation-state building and its expansion into the newly acquired territories (Falah, 2002). Such spatial developments, including government-sponsored resettlement programs, led to far-reaching changes in the human and natural landscape of the frontier. While the Jewish population increased on the Israeli side of the line, the Arab population decreased on the Jordanian side. At the same time, ethnic and cultural identities on either side become more and more distinct. Indeed. Arab villages on both sides of the borders “which were all very similar in their geographical characteristics, before 1949, developed into two dissimilar groups of villages divided by an international boundary” (Brawer, 1978: 545). At the same time, economic activities and modernized agricultural techniques made the Israeli frontier ever more distinct from the Jordanian border region. The varied topographical developments on either side become so stark that “it was possible to identify, with considerable accuracy, on air photographs, over long stretches, the exact location of the boundary line even where it was not demarcated” (Brawer, 1978: 545). The new border thus came to differentiate between varied economic and topographical developments and separated two increasingly contrasting political and administrative systems. With the border providing an ever-sharper division in the natural and human landscape, tensions also rose along the frontier zone.
After the 1967 war, and Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank, the Israeli government decreed that the Green Line was no longer to be represented on official maps printed for the public. Yet it continued to have sway and appear on administrative maps. In other words, “in the West Bank there is no Israeli recognized sub-districts, so the boundary of the administrative division is actually the Green Line" (Interview B 10). Also maps used by the military continued to represent the Green Line. Indeed, crossing the Green Line, no matter whether it cartographically exists or not, entails not only entering a territory subject to different legislations, governmental services and developmental policies, but also an area that is governed by Israeli military law.3 Therefore "virtually - the Green Line exists. It exists in practice, in good many ways” (Interview B 10). Despite its administrative significance, not to print the Green Line on official maps, however, has its politics:
So practical maps on which the administration operated had the Green Line. But for public use, maps for schools, wall maps, public places, no Green Line! The basic view was that this is not a boundary. This is only an agreed temporary separation line and therefore we don't want to publish it and by thus recognizing that this is the boundary of Israel.
(Interview B 10)
With the official elimination of the Green Line, other changes also transpired. For instance, the Green Line ceased to function as a form of separation. Economic
Enforcing Israel/Palestine’.s border spaces 99 exchange increased yet again, with ever more Palestinians seeking employment inside Israel. At the same time, with the Green Line no longer being the frontier zone, the expansion of Jewish settlements moved into the heart of the West Bank (Falah, 2002). As a result, Jewish and Palestinian enclaves increasingly developed side-by-side yet separate from each other. Their proximity only accentuated their differences. The ethnic, religious and social characteristics as well as the standard of living within the Jewish enclaves existed largely in discord with their cultural environments. At the same time, they remained completely dependent on the Israeli home country (Brawer, 2002).
The expansion of economic interchange quickly came to a halt with the start of the first Intifada in 1987.4 As a result, the Israeli government reimposed the Green Line’s function as a full-fledged border. Economic exchange was minimized and the border became increasingly closed for Palestinians attempting to enter Israel. Instead, foreign workers from Thailand, China and Romania replaced the former Palestinian workforce within Israel. Until 1993, economic links between the West Bank and Israel came to a virtual standstill, with severe economic consequences for West Bank Palestinians. It was not until the 1993 Oslo Accords and the end of the Intifada that economic relations improved. Besides the subsequent increase in economic interchange, cross-border criminal activities, such as the stealing of Israeli cars for delivery to Palestinian-run “car slaughterhouses” (where cars were disassembled and its spare parts resold), were also thriving. Yet the thaw of cross-border relations, whether legal or illegal, was again short-lived. At the end of 2002 and the rise of the second Intifada, the legal movement of a Palestinian labor force into Israel declined to a trickle, with - once more - devastating effects on the Palestinian economy (Brawer, 2002; see also Roy, 1987; UNESCO, 2005).
The construction of the Separation Barrier contributed to the economic stress on Palestinian communities as closures inside the West Bank and the closing off of the Israeli labor market for Palestinian workers further destabilized the Palestinian economy (HEPG, 2003). The World Bank pointed out that, by June 2000, 21% of all employed Palestinians worked in Israel in primarily low-skilled construction and agricultural jobs which provided more than 21% of Palestinian Gross National Income, making Palestine one of the most remittance-dependent economies in the world. Thus, the focus on labor export to Israel has made Palestine’s economy particularly vulnerable to closures (World Bank, 2003). Moreover, the Separation Barrier segregated some Palestinian farmers from their agricultural land which became enclosed in the "seam zone” (the area between the Green Line and the Separation barrier) to which their access was tightly regulated and often restricted, which impacted agricultural output and sustainability of farming practices in these regions (Sadeq and Lubrano, 2018). By 2003, the report by the UN also confirmed that the loss of land and the encirclement of Palestinian communities due to the wall’s construction meant that the Separation Barrier, “could effectively isolate Palestinian communities from their economic and social means of support - further exacerbating the process of economic fragmentation associated with the current internal closure and curfewregime” (UN, 2003). Furthermore, Sadeq and Lubrano’s econometric analysis (2018) revealed that the barrier continues to have a large and long-term impact on poverty dynamics and persistence inside the West Bank.
To this day, the Israeli government may have erased the Green Line from official maps, yet it has also enforced its existence for different social groups in diverse ways. While Palestinians are acutely aware of its existence as for them it presents a strictly enforced border, Israeli settlers and military personnel can easily and often unknowingly cross the line. The Green Line hereby is founded on a radical “provisionality” that continues to leave questions of borders, sovereignty and polity open-ended and unsettled (Falah, 2002). Indeed, the Green Line today is even fuzzier than when it was first drawn as a blue line in 1949.
According to an Israeli cartographer, a mutually agreed upon borderline is, however, not a political priority. He maintained that the Israeli government does not “want to hear anything about it ... they don’t want to enter into any discussion of the question of the boundary” (Interview B 12). At the same time, Palestinians have refrained from proposing possible territorial divisions as “any new proposal would jeopardize what they have achieved in the UN and could give Israel the wrong signal - namely that Palestinians might agree to live with less territory” (Falah, 2002: 506). However, one of Israel’s primary cartographic experts, who was also consulted by the then President of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat’s advisors about the location of the Green Line, would tell everyone, including his high-ranking Palestinian visitors as they sat in his office “to me the Israeli [version] isn’t accurate, the Arab version is not accurate and the UN version is not accurate, and not only this - they are bad!” (Interview B 12). The line also has many faults that are “detrimental to one side or the other” (Interview B 12). Therefore, there is no doubt in his mind, that for any future peace agreement, the line has to be drawn anew. While changes would not be extensive, they nevertheless would have to take into account geographical matters, assure that villages were not split into two and that communities were not cut off from their water sources and farmlands. Exchanges of land so as to improve the line for both sides, nonetheless, would depend on “good will and good sense”, and on a mutually satisfactory “agreement on how to administer the boundaiy and the agreement of good neighborly relations” (Interview B 12). Therefore, a boundaiy cannot only function as a result of being demarcated and maintained, but its sustainability also crucially depends on mutually satisfactory agreements of what constitute “good neighborly relations” which define the parameters for cross-border economic exchanges and social mobility.
