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.