Marking and Mapping the Nation: The History of Israel's Hiking Trail Network

Israel has one of the most highly-developed hiking trail networks in the world. It covers the entire country, including the Golan Heights and the West Bank, and its history spans that of the modern State of Israel. However, despite the fact that the marked and mapped trail system spreads so widely across contested territory in the Middle East, no scholarly works have devoted significant attention to its development. This dissertation is a history of simun shvilim---the twofold project of marking Israel's hiking trails on the ground and on topographical maps---and it examines the trail network as a space upon which Israelis have articulated their relationship with the Jewish homeland. Using maps, archival materials, transcribed interviews, newspaper articles, magazines, and other primary sources, this study reconstructs the activities of a group of elite scouts and hikers who expressed their relationship with the Land in opposition to Zionist construction and development. It describes the rise of Jewish hiking in Palestine, the marking of the first trail in 1947; the creation of the first marked and mapped network in the Judean Desert in the early 1960s; the establishment of new networks along Israel's borders in the 1960s and 1970s; the spread of the country-wide network during the 1980s; the inauguration of a national trail in the 1990s; the completion of the country-wide map series in the 2000s; and the status of Israeli trail-marking today. In the end, the marking and mapping of the Land by the simun shvilim project constituted a form of development unto itself, and transformed Israel's unknown spaces into known and navigable places.