Several leaders from Judea and Samaria expressed rage following reports that Tel Aviv’s Mayor Ron Huldai has given school in his municipality maps of Israel that did not include Judea and Samaria and that showed the Green Line as Israel’s border, in defiance of the Ministry of Education’s position on the matter.
Gush Etzion Regional Council head Shlomo Ne’eman stated Tuesday that Huldai “refers to a line that is not relevant either to the reality on the ground or to the Israeli public consciousness.”
“Let’s recall that Huldai, who tried in the previous elections to appeal to the national arena, failed and resigned because he did not receive the trust of the general public in the Knesset elections, now, he is trying from his seat in Tel Aviv to establish the consciousness regarding the inheritance of our ancestors,” Ne’eman charged.
Huldai planned to run for the Knesset in the 2021 election as part of a new left-wing party named The Israelis but later announced that the party would run having failed to reach an electoral agreement with other parties.
However, “in one thing Huldai is right,” Ne’eman said, “in that he raises the need to apply sovereignty to Judea and Samaria, in which tens of thousands of Jews live as second-class citizens, when any mindless person can decide to remove them from the map at any time.”
Oded Revivi, the head of the Efrat Council, said that the students of the schools in Efrat will visit Tel Aviv during the coming school year “even though the mayor of Tel Aviv doesn’t like us that much, as it turns out, or sees us as non-legitimate residents of Israel. We will come, (without a passport) to get to know the first Hebrew city… we will learn where It all started… sorry, mistake, it started a little before… in places like Efrat, for example, with Rachel the Matriarch. Whenever we come to Tel Aviv to visit, we will remember where it all really started. Thanks to Huldai for reminding us.”
According to the Haaretz daily, which reported on Huldai’s plan, the Education Ministry told the municipality on Monday that it can’t use the map, “not even as a poster on the wall.”
