Skip to content
Shoresh Wiki

Green Line

The Green Line (Hebrew: הקו הירוק, HaKav HaYarok; Arabic: الخط الأخضر, al-Khatt al-Akhdar) is the 1949 armistice demarcation line between Israel and Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, the de facto border of the State of Israel from 1949 until the Six-Day War of June 1967. “Pre-1967 lines” and “the Green Line” describe the same boundary. The West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights all lie beyond it, on the Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian sides of the 1949 line respectively.

Etymology

Section titled “Etymology”

The name is literal, not symbolic. Israeli and Jordanian officers drawing the 1949 armistice map used a thick green grease pencil to mark the ceasefire line separating the two armies’ positions, following the general logic of the UN-brokered truce that ended the fighting begun by the Arab invasion of the new state. The green ink on the map gave the boundary its name, and it stuck in common usage on both sides.

Origin: the 1949 armistice agreements

Section titled “Origin: the 1949 armistice agreements”

After Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Israel signed separate general armistice agreements with Egypt (24 February 1949), Lebanon (23 March 1949), Jordan (3 April 1949) and Syria (20 July 1949), all under UN auspices. The Israel-Jordan agreement’s Article VIII explicitly describes the demarcation line as provisional, drawn to fix military positions, “without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines.” That caveat matters: the line was a ceasefire artifact, never a peace-treaty border, and the parties said so in writing. Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1950, a move recognized only by Britain and Pakistan; Egypt administered Gaza without annexing it. The Tripartite Declaration of 25 May 1950, issued by the United States, Britain and France, affirmed the armistice lines as the operative frontiers pending a final settlement, without conferring sovereignty on anyone.

1967 and after

Section titled “1967 and after”

Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War, fought after Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers, blockaded the Straits of Tiran, and mobilized alongside Jordan and Syria. From that point the Green Line stopped functioning as a border in any operational sense: Israeli civil law was extended over united Jerusalem, and the West Bank came under Israeli military administration, later subdivided into Areas A, B and C under the Oslo Accords. The Arab League’s September 1967 Khartoum Resolution, the “three noes,” rejected negotiating a return to the 1949 lines in exchange for peace, and the line has never been restored by treaty. UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016) reaffirmed that Israeli settlement beyond the 1967 lines has “no legal validity,” while stopping short of calling the Green Line a sovereign boundary; no UN resolution has ever fixed it as one.

Precise usage and common misuse

Section titled “Precise usage and common misuse”

In careful usage, “Green Line” and “1967 borders” denote the 1949 armistice line, a marker for where the occupation question and the settlements debate begin, not an internationally ratified frontier. Propaganda regularly erases that distinction, calling the line “Israel’s recognized borders” as though the 1949 agreements created one, when Article VIII of the Jordan armistice and the Tripartite Declaration both say the opposite. It is also frequently misused to imply the whole matter is legally settled, when the correct framing is occupied versus disputed, a live legal and political argument, not a closed one. Honest usage treats the Green Line as what the 1949 negotiators called it: a ceasefire line pending a negotiated peace that, eight decades on, still has not been signed.

Section titled “Related pages”

Sources

Section titled “Sources”