The scene is a fourth-grade geography lesson in the coastal town of Herzliya. The teacher, Yael (a pseudonym), shows the children a bas-relief map depicting the Land of Israel as stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. “This is the State of Israel, this is our state,” she tells the pupils. One of the students, Galia Bar-Tal, seeks to set the teacher straight. “That’s wrong,” she says. “The demarcation of the Green Line is missing from the map.”

Seven years have passed since this incident, yet Bar-Tal, a smart girl with a political conscious, still remembers how the teacher reprimanded her in front of the class. “Galia, stop bringing politics into the classroom,” Yael said.

Galia’s father, Daniel Bar-Tal, a leading political psychologist, was not surprised by the teacher’s reaction. “Teachers convey the accepted values of the society in which they live,” Bar-Tal recently told Al-Monitor. “Any education is political, and any map of the State of Israel is political, but the Green Line runs counter to the prevailing spirit [of ignoring the occupation of the West Bank], and the teacher therefore views it as wrong.”

Galia’s story provides yet another explanation for the strengthening of the conservative right at the expense of the Zionist left. Thousands of Yael’s former students who cast their ballots in the April 9 elections were taught that the State of Israel extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River and that anyone challenging this view is deviating from the truth, the consensus, “Israeli-ness.” The teacher herself may not even know about the Green Line because the demarcation of Israel’s June 4, 1967, border was missing from the books she had as a pupil.