Whose Green Line is it anyway

School may be back in swing and the Knesset may be (briefly) back at work, but the dog’s breakfast gracing Hebrew-language front pages Wednesday morning is a stark reminder that the country is still in the throes of a major-news-free cucumber season.

While all three major dailies – Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom — prominently place the story of migrants massing in Hungary, the papers disagree on which local story is the day’s marquee item.

In Israel Hayom, the lead story is an “Are you smarter than a fifth grader”-style quiz given to teachers, many of whom fail to correctly answer basic – really basic — Israeli history and Judaic studies questions. On the question of what happened on November 29, for instance, 69 percent of the 500 teachers surveyed did not know that it is the anniversary of the date the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Similarly, 57% did not know what the Green Line is (we will take a leap of faith that Times of Israel readers, at least those of you who are not teachers, do know), though the paper admits that question may have been doomed to elicit less than ideal responses.

“Some of the teachers chose to give the significance of the line according to their own political worldview instead of giving a factual answer. Answers of this type – like ‘an unreal border people decided Israel has to divide itself along,’ or ‘an imaginary leftist line’ – were considered incorrect, since they are not answers you would expect a teacher to give a student,” the paper reports. “But there were also answers impossible to characterize like this, like ‘a border between Israeli Arabs and Israel, ‘ or ‘the line that marks the 1967 borders’ or ‘a border crossing between Israel and Palestine,’ or ‘something to do with the borders of Israel or whatever.’ There’s no doubt, though, that the most original answer was ‘the line that determines environmental quality.’”

All is not lost, though. Only 32% could not recite the first four lines of the Israeli national anthem, and the same number could not name all five books of the Pentateuch, no matter the order. However, commentator Boaz Bismuth takes little heart from those number either and lets the sarcasm fly off his pen — oddly aimed primarily at Israeli culture’s obsessions with reality TV — in response.

“You can take solace in the fact that it could be worse. Imagine for a moment if a teacher in a school your child attends didn’t know the name of the host of ‘Master Chef.’ You would be livid. You might even think about changing schools, or maybe cities, or maybe even countries,” he writes. “But that fact that the teacher of your students doesn’t know the first four lines of ‘Hatikvah’ is actually okay. You can think that with the words of Naftali Herz Imber, the kid will go on to compete on ‘Kochav Nolad.’”

Yedioth leads off with its own exclusive, a plan by Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon to lower the sales tax a whopping 1 percent, shrinking the regressive levy to a downright niggardly 17 points.

The paper reports that the move is being pitched because the country is actually collecting more taxes than it needs, and the Finance Ministry fears the surplus will just end up in the hands of the dastardly Defense Ministry instead of going to citizens’ other needs.

“In past years the treasury usually used the surplus to lower the public debt, a move economists now say is unnecessary, since the gap between public debt and GDP is relatively small. In any case, a senior economist said, ‘It’s preferable to lower the gap with growth,’” the paper’s Sever Plotzker reports.

Haaretz’s big honkin’ headline is a curtain-raiser for a Knesset vote on a new anti-terror bill that will throw anybody who so much as identifies with a terror group in jail for three years, as well as enshrining administrative detention, essentially the holding of suspects for long periods without charging them, in Israeli law and not as part of British Mandate-era emergency measures.

The paper notes that the bill is not new and has been floating around the Knesset for years but has never managed to wiggle its way into law. The measure was stuck wallowing in committee until a few weeks ago when it was suddenly pushed forward by politicians in the wake of the fatal firebombing of the Dawabsha family, apparently by Jewish terrorists.

Despite the bill’s apparent importance in fighting Jewish terror and long history, the paper is very much against the measure, calling it problematic in a lead editorial and making the case for a more thorough debate without it being shoved through the legislature during a special session called to pass the budget.

“This expansion does nothing to facilitate the battle against terror — a battle that is obviously completely justified. On the contrary, it undermines the moral validity of this battle, and thereby sabotages it. Instead, the bill should be treated as an opportunity to finally abolish the Emergency Defense Regulations, reconsider the Kafkaesque practice of administrative detention, and formulate tools that strike a balance between the need to maintain the security of the state and its citizens and the need to protect the right to due process,” the paper writes. “There’s no reason to pass a law like this, even if only in first reading, during the recess, at the same time as the vote on the budget and the Economic Arrangements Bill, and without a thorough, meaningful public debate. One must hope that the Knesset will come to its senses and refrain from this disgrace.”