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"Israel has one of the most extensive and highly developed hiking trail systems of any country in the world. Millions of hikers use the trails every year during holiday breaks, on mandatory school trips, and for recreational hikes. Walking the Land offers the first scholarly exploration of this unique trail system. Featuring more than ten thousand kilometers of trails, marked with hundreds of thousands of colored blazes, the trail system crisscrosses Israeli-controlled territory, from the country's farthest borders to its densest metropolitan areas. The thousand-kilometer Israel National Trail crosses the country from north to south. Hiking, trails, and the ubiquitous three-striped trail blazes appear everywhere in Israeli popular culture; they are the subjects of news articles, radio programs, television shows, best-selling novels, government debates, and even national security speeches. Yet the trail system is almost completely unknown to the millions of foreign tourists who visit every year and has been largely unstudied by scholars of Israel. Walking the Land explores the many ways that Israel's hiking trails are significant to its history, national identity, and conservation efforts"--
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Language Use
Introduction: Israeli Hiking Trails and Their Spatial, National, and Existential Dimensions
1. The Construction of a Jewish Hiking Culture in Palestine, 1904-1935
2. The Palmach and the First Marked Hiking Trail, 1935-1948
3. The First Israeli Hiking Trails, 1949-1963
4. The Foundations of the Country-Wide Trail Network, 1963-1979
5. Completing the Network and Creating a National Trail, 1980-2001
6. Postscripts, 2001-2021
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Shay Rabineau
