Cartography of Israel

Mapping the Land of Israel intersects with theology, law, politics, education, and national identity. The Madaba mosaic placed Jerusalem at the center of an early Byzantine representation of the Holy Land.[1] Jewish legal authorities defined the boundaries of Erets Israel for agricultural and other halakhic purposes, while modern debates over school maps have addressed which political boundaries should appear in textbooks.[6][7]

Maps are widely regarded as tools that imply trust, objectivity, and fact. Yet borders and place names are political and cultural features that shift in response to historical events, so a map that appears authoritative may embed contestable assumptions about sovereignty, nomenclature, and legitimacy.[3] This dynamic is especially pronounced in a region whose historical maps depict changing empires, administrative systems, settlements, armistice lines, and proposed territorial arrangements.[8]

The sources document several overlapping cartographic traditions. Devotional and symbolic maps conveyed religious meaning rather than surveyed geography.[9][10] Technical and administrative maps recorded topography, roads, settlements, and land administration.[11][12] Zionist institutional and peace-proposal maps documented settlement or advanced particular territorial arrangements.[5][13] Modern GIS and educational projects use maps to analyze historical accuracy, demographic change, and the presentation of contested boundaries.[14][3]

The oldest surviving cartographic document associated with the Land of Israel is the Madaba Map, created around 565 CE from more than two million colored stone cubes set into the mosaic floor of a Byzantine church at Madaba, now in Jordan.[1] Covering the Holy Land from Lebanon in the north to Egypt in the south, it contains what scholars identify as the earliest known urban mapping of Jerusalem.[1] The map was discovered in 1884 and, although only a portion survives, it was thought to have been approximately 65 feet long in its complete form.[15]

Another early representation is the Tabula Peutingeriana, a long parchment road map discovered in Germany in 1507, generally considered a twelfth- or thirteenth-century copy of a lost fourth-century Roman original that depicted roads and settlements across the ancient world, including the Land of Israel.[16] A map attributed to Ibrahim Ibn Muhammad Istakhri, dated approximately 952 CE, depicts the Land of Israel as Falastin within the broader geographic unit of ash-Sham, or Syria, reflecting the Islamic administrative geography of the period.[16]

Medieval Christian cartography treated the Holy Land as a devotional subject rather than a surveyed territory. The Psalter Map, dated approximately to 1225, was intended to elucidate the writings of the Church fathers rather than to represent geography accurately.[9] Jerusalem appears at the center of a world map; the Holy Land is rendered at an enlarged scale, with the Dead Sea, the rivers Jor and Dan joining to form the Jordan, and towns including Jericho, Caesarea, and Akko.[9] In 1475 Lucas Brandis added two maps to an encyclopedic Christian work—described as the first printed maps, since earlier maps had been manuscripts—one a circular world map centered on the Holy Land and one a map of the Land of Israel centered on Jerusalem. Like most medieval maps, both represented the biblical lands symbolically rather than geographically.[17]

The 1584 map of Jerusalem by the Dutch cartographer and theologian Christiaan van Adrichem stands in this same symbolic tradition. Van Adrichem never visited the Holy Land; his map presents Jerusalem with gardens, fountains, and European-style architecture while incorporating biblical and Christian themes including the Via Dolorosa and Crucifixion imagery.[10] The National Library of Israel places this map within a broader body of thousands of antique maps of Jerusalem and the Holy Land that reflect the religious orientation of their creators rather than topographic survey.[10]

The cartographic record associated with the region extends back further still in written form, even if not in surviving maps. The first Mishnah of Gittin identifies eastern, southern, and northern boundaries of Erets Israel through named geographic markers, with the western boundary treated initially as the Mediterranean coast.[6] Later, Rambam described the agricultural-law boundaries as imaginary lines connecting these markers—an exercise in territorial definition that constituted a form of legal cartography even without graphic representation.[6] These halakhic boundaries are described as artificial rather than coinciding with natural geographic features: the eastern boundary lies west of present-day Jordan and east of the Jordan River; the southern boundary divides the desert between the Negev and Sinai; and the north-western boundary is said to bisect Acre, placing parts of the city inside and outside the Land of Israel.[6]

Hebrew geographical maps were historically relatively rare. When they were produced, they represented the Land of Israel as a distinct entity, emphasizing its sanctity and uniqueness in Jewish tradition.[18] One of the earliest Hebrew printed maps is the map prepared by Abraham Bar-Jacob for the 1695 Amsterdam Haggadah.[18] Bar-Jacob, a convert to Judaism, based his work on Christian cartographer Christian Adrichom's 1588 map but incorporated distinctly Jewish elements: the route of the Exodus from Egypt to Canaan and the territories of the twelve tribes of Israel.[18]

The 1581 Bünting Cloverleaf Map, produced by the German pastor Heinrich Bünting, presented the world as a cloverleaf with Jerusalem at its center.[19] The Hebrew Union College exhibition “Envisioning Maps” characterizes Jewish maps as encompassing not only places of Jewish ownership but also places where Jews lived and were expelled, including maps of immigrant memory, biblical Israel, and modern Israel.[19]

In the absence of geographic maps, rabbinical teachers developed a separate tradition of cartograms—schematic diagrams that represented spatial relationships described in Scripture while disregarding true geometrical location. The 1817 diagram attributed to Jacob Auspitz belongs to this tradition, developed when rabbinical teachers lacked access to proper geographic maps but needed to explain territorial relationships mentioned in Jewish texts.[20]

The transition from symbolic and devotional maps to technically rigorous topographic surveys began in earnest in the nineteenth century. The most significant early systematic survey was carried out for the Palestine Exploration Fund by C. R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener between 1872 and 1877, with supplementary surveys east of the Jordan conducted by G. Schumacher between 1884 and 1887.[11] The resulting map of Western Palestine was published in an 1897 edition consisting of twenty-six sheets at a scale of one inch to one mile, or 1:63,360.[11]

A Ben-Gurion University study that reviewed 375 historical maps of the Negev covering the period from 1799 to 1948 quantified the accuracy gains achieved through these surveys.[14] Maps based on nineteenth-century explorers' notes had median errors of several kilometers; Palestine Exploration Fund surveys from 1872 to 1890 reduced errors to several hundred meters; and British World War I maps and maps produced by the Mandatory Survey of Palestine subsequently achieved errors below 100 meters.[14] The study used geographic information systems to scan and rectify the maps and concluded that GIS analysis can determine the accuracy and usefulness of historical maps for studying settlement processes and legal disputes over land ownership.[14]

The Palestine Exploration Fund surveys were also the foundation for later official cartography. The 1927 Jerusalem plan in the National Library collection, for example, was surveyed in 1921, supplemented in September 1924, revised in July 1927, and printed by the Survey of Palestine at a scale of 1:2,000—using contours and spot heights to represent relief.[21] This detail illustrates the broader trajectory from symbolic Jerusalem representations to precise technical and topographic mapping across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[21]

The Survey of Palestine prepared maps specifically for international deliberative bodies. A 1946 map series and a 1947 “Progress of Land Settlement” map were each part of eleven-sheet sets prepared for the information of the United Nations Special Committee of Inquiry.[22][12] The 1947 map recorded the situation as of 30 April 1947 at a scale of 1:250,000, including an inset of southern Palestine and road revisions through 1941, and was among the documents placed before the committee as it deliberated on the future of the Mandate.[12]

The cartographic documentation of Zionist settlement began in parallel with the settlement process itself. The Central Zionist Archives' Maps and Architectural Plans Collection preserves approximately 130,000 maps and plans dating from the end of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, the majority of which are planning maps for settlements established by departments of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund.[5] The Archives notes that these maps, including plans that were never implemented, document an important aspect of settlement in the Land of Israel and the State of Israel.[5]

A 1947 pictorial map published by the Jewish National Fund marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Zionist Organization and surveyed fifty years of Zionist settlement and development in the Land of Israel, covering the period from 1897 to 1947.[23] Edited by Ernst Mechner and designed by S. F. Loeb, it appeared in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish editions, highlighted sites regarded by its editor as milestones in the settlement process, and also served as a fundraising instrument for Zionist institutions.[23]

The Official Atlas of Israel, whose first Hebrew edition appeared under the title Atlas Yisrael during 1956–1964, was published in an expanded English-language edition in 1970 by the Survey of Israel and the Ministry of Labour, covering cartography, physical geography, human and economic geography, and history.[24] The Survey of Israel's Mapping and Geographic Information System department establishes standards and produces printed and digital mapping products serving infrastructure planning, construction, land management, maritime mapping, navigation safety, security, emergency services, environmental quality, research, development, and tourism.[2] Its cartography department develops topographical maps, city maps, and maps of Israel; its photogrammetry and remote-sensing unit maintains aerial photography, orthophoto, elevation, topographic-database, and mapping-archive products; and its GIS department produces mapping products from the national topographic database.[2]

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publication Israel's Story in Maps, issued in Jerusalem in 2006, provides factual and background material through maps and graphs addressing Israel, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the peace process.[25] Its structure covers ancient political entities, Jewish settlement patterns, pre-state boundary-setting, the British Mandate, the 1947 UN Partition Plan, armistice lines, cease-fire and disengagement agreements, modern territorial representations, topography, security, and size comparisons.[25] The publication describes a sequence of maps for major border-setting stages: the southern border process of 1906, northern border negotiations from 1916 to 1923, the British Mandate, the 1922 separation of Transjordan, and the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which it states was accepted by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947, by a vote of 33 to 13.[25]

The publication also describes the 1949 armistice lines as intended to be temporary and expected to be replaced by permanent borders.[25] Its maps distinguish international borders, armistice lines, battlefront lines, demilitarized zones, no-man's land, areas under occupation or administration, and territory acquired by Israel or Jordan—a level of line-type differentiation that reflects the cartographic complexity of the period.[25]

The Central Bureau of Statistics' Historical Statistical Atlas covers the State of Israel from 1948 through 2018, presenting historical statistical data spatially and including 28 historical maps scanned from originals, six maps using current data with the cartographic structure of historical maps, and 235 maps produced specifically for the atlas.[26] Its mapped subjects include population, housing conditions, urbanization, built-up areas, agriculture, traffic, residential values, tourism, and regional economic and demographic change.[26]

The National Library of Israel's cartographic collection is centered on maps of the Holy Land and is described by the Library as among the largest collections of its kind in the world.[4] Its core holdings include approximately 1,600 antique maps of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, alongside thousands of antique maps of other regions, survey maps of the Land of Israel and the surrounding region from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and modern maps of Israel, its cities, and neighboring countries from before the establishment of the state to the present.[4] The collection contains maps in European languages as well as Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic.[4]

The physical collection was built principally from maps donated by Eran Laor in 1975 and Howard Golden in 2022.[4] A 2023 National Library announcement described Golden's donation as consisting of approximately 466 rare maps and 120 books containing prints, illustrations, and maps of the Land of Israel, dating from 1475 to 1800; approximately 400 of these were new to the Library's holdings, and a significant percentage had been printed before 1700.[27] The Library catalogued and digitized them for preservation and research and made them available as downloadable primary sources free of charge.[27]

The Library's digital cartographic projects included a 2002 collection of antique Jerusalem maps created with the David and Fela Shapell Family Digitization Project and the Hebrew University's Department of Geography.[28] Based on the Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, the project included real and imaginary representations of Jerusalem dating from 1486 through 1930, with detailed bibliographic data and zoomable image formats.[28] In 2007, the Library and the Shapell project launched the Holy Land Maps website, which contained more than 1,000 maps dating from 1462 through the early twentieth century.[28] An announcement from the same period stated that approximately 1,100 original and rare maps had been made available online, each with a bibliographic description and search options by mapmaker, location, or year.[29]

The Central Zionist Archives' collection of approximately 130,000 maps and plans, mostly produced by Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund departments, provides an institutional record of the Zionist settlement enterprise distinct from the National Library's focus on historical and antique cartography.[5] Together, the collections preserve complementary records for the study of Israel and the Land of Israel.[4][5]

The cartographic record associated with Palestine and Eretz Israel spans from maps depicting the period of Saul, approximately 1020 BCE, through representations of the Roman and Byzantine empires, the Crusades, Ottoman rule, the modern period, and the British Mandate.[8] The pre-modern sequence includes a 1225 Psalter Map, the first printed map of Israel in 1475, the 1581 Bünting Cloverleaf Map, a 1660 map of Jerusalem, and a map of Israel in the 1695 Amsterdam Haggadah.[8]

The modern historical map sequence is dense with documentation. It includes maps of Jewish settlement in Palestine from 1881 to 1914; Jerusalem, Hebron, and Jaffa in 1912; Ottoman administrative districts of Palestine and Syria in 1915; areas excluded under the Hussein-McMahon correspondence in 1916; Palestine under the Sykes-Picot Agreement; the process of setting the northern border from 1916 to 1923; the Palestine claimed by the World Zionist Organization in 1919; the Jewish National Home under the 1920 San Remo Conference; Palestine and Transjordan in 1922; the British Mandate from 1921 to 1923; the 1931 census; several partition plans from 1937 and 1938; the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan; and an index to villages and settlements in Palestine from 1949.[8]

For maps depicting the region during 1920–1948, the Anti-Defamation League recommends showing the borders of the British Mandate and using historically appropriate terminology such as “British Mandate for Palestine,” “French Mandate Syria,” and “Transjordan.” It criticizes the ambiguous use of “Palestine” without the Mandate designation and argues that maps of the period should reflect the region's Arab, Jewish, Christian, and other populations.[3]

The United Nations Digital Library's cartographic record for the 1947 partition plan describes a map depicting the proposed Arab State and Jewish State as well as the boundary of the former Palestine Mandate.[30] A separate UN map record titled “Israel” lists the boundary of the former Palestine Mandate, the Armistice Demarcation Line, and district boundaries—distinguishing between the former Mandate boundary, the post-1948 armistice lines, and administrative divisions rather than treating them as a single type of line.[31]

The Hebrew Union College exhibition “Envisioning Maps” characterizes cartography as politically and culturally interpretive rather than merely descriptive, stating that maps have been used as visual propaganda and that maps of Israel can represent changing borders, political and territorial divisions, biblical memory, demographic information, and fears of disappearance from the world map.[19] One artwork by Maty Grünberg, included in the exhibition, portrays Israel from 1947 onward through colored lines representing borders as they evolved over time.[19]

The political dimension of mapping is apparent in collections compiled by governments, international organizations, and advocacy bodies. The Jewish Virtual Library's collections include country-wide political maps, administrative divisions, economic activity, land use, population density, and satellite views, alongside maps of settlements in the West Bank—known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria—Gaza in 2005, Hebron, IDF checkpoints, IDF redeployment options, Palestinian refugee camps, the West Bank economy, and a range of peace proposals.[32][13]

The peace-proposal maps are especially revealing of cartography's political function. The collection includes the 2003 Geneva Accord territorial exchanges, President Clinton's Parameters from 2001, the final-status map presented at Taba in 2001, a Golan peace proposal from 2000, Camp David Summit proposals from 2000, an Israeli offer before Camp David in 2000, Oslo II from 1995, the Abu Mazen-Beilin Plan from 1995, and the Allon Plan from 1968.[13] Each is both a proposed geographic arrangement and an artifact of territorial negotiation.[13]

The Israel Briefing Book's map sequence encapsulates how maps can narrate a national story through selection: presenting the British Mandate area in 1921–1923, the 1947 Partition Plan, the 1948 Arab invasion, the 1949 armistice lines, Israel before the 1967 Six-Day War, the Golan Heights before 1967, cease-fire lines after the Six-Day War, Israeli population centers in relation to the armistice lines, UNRWA refugee camps in 2000, the Palestinian Authority's own map of Palestine, and possible future borders.[33] The sequence also includes maps of Hamas deployment in Gaza City in 2009, Hezbollah positions in Lebanon in 2010, and Hamas rocket ranges in 2014—illustrating how security and threat mapping has become a component of Israeli strategic communication.[33]

David Newman's analysis presents modern GIS and computer cartography as tools for testing possible Israeli-Palestinian boundary arrangements, with satellite imagery and mapped data layered to examine settlements, transportation, land use, industry, agriculture, and water resources.[34] Newman nevertheless concludes that there is no optimal boundary line capable of completely separating Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs without population transfers.[34]

The Green Line, created through the 1949 Rhodes Armistice Agreement, functioned as a boundary between Israel and the West Bank from 1949 to 1967, a period of eighteen years.[35] David Newman's analysis describes it as an artificial boundary that divided an Arab landscape, placing people on either side under different demographic, economic, social, and cultural influences.[35]

Newman wrote in 1997 that, although the Green Line had been formally removed in 1967, its administrative and psychological imprint persisted. He reported that the Government Surveyor's Office, which produced the official Atlas of Israel and other national maps, was not permitted to include the West Bank or the Green Line boundary and that this policy had continued under both Likud and Labor governments; the line appeared only on historical maps depicting the 1949–1967 period.[35] He also noted that roadblocks placed during security closures followed the former line, a practical acknowledgment of its functional survival despite its formal removal.[35]

Derek Penslar's study of maps in teaching about Israel documents specific Israeli cartographic choices in this period. A 1999 map by Israel's Nature Reserves and National Parks Authority depicted Israel as extending from the Jordan River to the sea and included the Golan Heights, greater Jerusalem, and the West Bank without the Green Line.[7] A 2000 Israeli National Tourist Office map shaded Palestinian-controlled urban areas in the West Bank while allowing much of the remaining West Bank to blend visually into Israel proper.[7]

In December 2006, Education Minister Yuli Tamir called for Israeli textbooks to depict the Green Line and for a high-school curriculum addressing the delineation of Israel's borders, arguing that students needed to understand when and how Israel took control of territories so they could debate possible border adjustments.[7] The proposal drew strong opposition from the Israeli right, which rejected what it saw as a challenge to the legitimacy of territories captured in 1967.[7] The episode illustrated how deeply the cartographic question of the Green Line intersected with political debate over the future of the territories.

A 2023 report from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center examined approximately 115 maps appearing in Palestinian Authority schoolbooks issued in 2020, drawing on 125 books for grades 1 through 10 across subjects including geography, history, social studies, science, and technology.[36] For comparison, the research also examined two officially licensed Israeli geography textbooks.[36]

The report found that some Israeli textbook maps depict the country as one unit under the name “Israel” without internal boundaries when the maps are not political—giving a “Soils in Israel” map as an example that includes Judea and Samaria, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.[36] The report contrasts this with Palestinian textbook and institutional maps that, in its analysis, often depict the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea as a single entity called “Palestine.”[36]

An earlier 2003 report by the Center for Special Studies examined maps circulated by Palestinian Authority institutions, political organizations, research bodies, charities, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other groups.[37] Its corpus included maps captured during Israeli military operations, official Palestinian textbooks from 2001 to 2003, maps displayed in offices and institutions, and maps reproduced on advertisements, postcards, posters, badges, artworks, and souvenirs.[37] The report explicitly stated that it did not examine maps published officially or unofficially in Israel.[37]

The 2003 report describes several Palestinian maps as omitting Israel's name, presenting “Palestine” as extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and replacing or omitting names of predominantly Jewish Israeli cities.[37] Examples cited include Tel Aviv being omitted or replaced by Jaffa, Natanya by Umm Khaled, Beit She'an by Bisan, and Eilat by Umm al-Rashrash.[37] The report also identifies exceptional English-language or Western-oriented maps within the same corpus that name Israel and show the Green Line, indicating that the cartographic conventions were not uniform across all Palestinian-produced materials.[37]

The report lists maps associated with different historical and political periods used in Palestinian educational and political contexts: a 1945 map used in a traditional-costume publication, maps of the 1947 partition boundaries, maps of the 1949 armistice lines, British Mandate district maps, maps of villages abandoned or destroyed between the early twentieth century and 1967, and a 1995 “State of Palestine” map produced after the Oslo Accords.[37]

Academic and governmental cartography of Israel and the region has been transformed by geographic information systems and remote-sensing technology. The Ben-Gurion University study of 375 historical maps of the Negev demonstrated that GIS can be used to quantify the accuracy of historical maps, delineate the boundary between cultivated land and desert, trace the establishment of settlements, and quantify the sedentarization of nomadic Bedouin populations—making historical cartographic archives directly usable for contemporary research and legal analysis of land ownership.[14][14]

The Survey of Israel's Mapping and Geographic Information System department applies these tools institutionally, maintaining aerial photography, orthophoto, elevation, topographic-database, and mapping-archive products, and producing mapping products from the national topographic database for applications including infrastructure planning, construction, land management, maritime mapping, navigation safety, security, emergency services, and environmental quality.[2]

The Central Bureau of Statistics' Historical Statistical Atlas, covering 1948 through 2018, represents a further application of modern analytical mapping to historical data: presenting population, housing, urbanization, built-up areas, agriculture, traffic, residential values, and tourism information spatially across more than seven decades of Israeli statehood.[26] The atlas was designed to republish historically significant statistical maps, compare topics across censuses, and provide a contemporary snapshot of Israeli society—combining archival and analytical functions in a single cartographic project.[26]

Because maps imply objectivity and fact, the choices embedded in them—which name to assign a city, which boundary to show, and which entity to label as a state—carry particular political weight in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These choices are points of scholarly and political dispute and have generated debate in educational, diplomatic, and legal settings.

A 2019 New York State Regents examination that included two historical maps of the region generated significant criticism. The first map, intended to portray 1920–1948, did not clearly show the British Mandate borders and used “Palestine” rather than “British Mandate for Palestine.”[3] The second map accurately showed the borders proposed in the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, but the Anti-Defamation League argued that its framing misleadingly suggested the plan proposed a Jewish state but not an Arab state, although the resolution proposed both.[3]

The broad question of how to label maps of the 1920–1948 period is itself contested. The Anti-Defamation League recommends using historically specific terminology—“British Mandate for Palestine” rather than simply “Palestine”—and argues that maps of the period should reflect the region's Arab, Jewish, Christian, and other populations.[3] Its position is that less precise labeling can imply a single-community territorial history that does not reflect the demographic or administrative complexity of the Mandate period.[3]

Claims about the political content of Palestinian educational maps derive primarily from sources affiliated with Israeli advocacy or security research—principally the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center and the Center for Special Studies—and should be understood as analyses produced within particular institutional frameworks rather than as comprehensive surveys of all Palestinian cartographic practice.[36][37] The tension between these analyses and the cartographic choices of Palestinian institutions is part of the broader political conflict over maps of the region.

Official Israeli representation of the Green Line has also prompted disagreement. Newman's 1997 analysis reported that the Government Surveyor's Office omitted the West Bank and Green Line from contemporary official maps, while Penslar documented maps in which the West Bank blended visually into Israel proper.[35][7] Yuli Tamir's 2006 proposal to restore the Green Line to school maps and the political opposition it generated demonstrate that such cartographic decisions remain connected to competing views of the territories and Israel's future borders.[7]