Landscape and national modernism in Israeli Highway 90: the case of the northwest Dead Sea segment, 1967–1971

Abstract

Israeli Highway 90 spans the whole country, running parallel to the Israel– Jordan border to its east. The longest road in Israel (478 km), it serves as Israel’s backbone, extending from the 19th-century pioneering village of Metula on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, to the popular tourist city of Eilat on its southern border with Egypt. The 35 km-long northwest Dead Sea segment, which is the subject of this article, is located on a part of the road within the occupied territories of the West Bank. Stretching along the Great Rift Valley, Highway 90 offers some of Israel’s most breathtaking landscapes: the Arava Desert; the Dead-Sea and Judean Desert; the dramatic Jordan Valley; the Sea of Galilee in the north; and the cool northern Galilee, within which over 20 national parks, nature reserves, and UNESCO-recognized cultural landscapes are located. The road runs through and next to 1880s Jewish pioneers’ agricultural cooperatives, firstgeneration kibbutzim, small towns, former British Mandate army bases and abandoned former Jordanian ones, Palestinian villages, colonial West Bank settlements, and two semi-military checkpoints. It thus forms a symbolic journey through history from the crossing of the Jordan River in the biblical period via the myth of Masada, the last stronghold of the Jewish revolt against the Romans in 73 C.E., and the Qumran caves, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, up to the 21st century. The road’s proximity to the eastern border, its changing landscape, and perceptions of the landscape and the border play a significant role in the ideological formation of culture and society in Israel. To convey the juxtaposition and the affinities between the border and the road parallel to it, I refer to Highway 90 as a borderoad, implying that the road and the border constitute a unified liminal space and landscape. The hybrid notion of the borderoad forms the border as a present-absent while the road performs as a civil-military international boundary. The road then, just like the border, operates as a national emblem, and so does its landscape. Moreover, being in the contested territories of the West Bank the northwest Dead Sea segment conveys multiple meanings of the borderoad. The road is fabricated from various segments, some of which are national highways of the highest quality, while others are outdated, two-lane, single carriageways in poor condition. Even so, despite its segmentation and the differences of width, maintenance, and classification, it operates as a complete road that serves its users as well as the state as a functional, symbolic and ideological medium. As a nation-state, the idea of modernism is fundamental to the formation of the state of Israel, its culture and society. This is well manifested in roads as well as in borders. This article suggests an inquiry into facets of early modernism of Highway 90 and its landscape, and will focus on a 35 km stretch on the northwest coastline of the Dead Sea, from Ein-Gedi to Ein-Feshkha, built between 1968 and 1971 (figure 1).