Hiking became an important practice within the Zionist nation-building project in the early years of the twentieth century, and the act of “walking the Land” became a means by which immigrant and native-born Jews came to know late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine as the Jewish homeland. The first systematically-marked hiking trail appeared in November 1947, shortly before the United Nations vote on partition and the outbreak of war. Israel’s first hiking trail networks only took shape in earnest in the mid-1960s, and spread quickly across Israeli-controlled territory over the next two decades. Today, Israel’s trail system boasts more than 10,000 kilometers of trails, including the 1,200-kilometer Israel National Trail – INT or in its Hebrew name- Shvil Israel. During the past decade, a number of academic works have examined Israel’s hiking trail network, and the culture of hiking that thrives upon it. These studies have also raised new questions for historians, sociologists, geographers, and economists.
The aim of this panel is to present new perspectives and academic approaches to hiking trails in Israel in general and to Shvil Israel in particular in order to broadens the academic research of this important and interesting phenomenon