The long-distance hiking `Golan Trail` is a local initiative established in internationally and locally contested land of the Golan Heights, facing an uncertain political future. As the uncertainty rose steeply in the `90s, the Golan`s leadership drove for a significant conceptual strategy change, intended to build local and public solidarity and a sense of spatial-political belonging. The target population of this strategic-conceptual change was the general Israeli public and the local residents, via educational and community programs, which aimed to strengthen a sense of regional identity and pride and thereby promote a desire to belong to the community and stand-up for it. One tactic was to create an imagined `regional community` accentuating regional identity while downplaying other components of identity embraced by the local residents. The community included only Jews, and the emphasis was on settlement in the Golan as a process of renewal rather than a new phenomenon in the Jewish history of the region. The Golan Trail project, inaugurated in 2007 as part of the 40th-anniversary celebrations for the renewal of Jewish settlement in the Golan, was drawn up in tandem with the strategic change adopted in the Golan and as an integral part of it.
This suggested paper illuminates the intention of using community programs and education as a regional unification facilitator by inculcating a sense of community belonging and responsibility along the trail. The trail was also incorporated in educational and community programs for the Golan settlers to facilitate `landscape normalization` and downplay the political uncertainty by boosting the perception of the Golan as normalized land - geographically, socially, and politically.