Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
(470 kilometers) long, which means that an automobile can travel from the northernmost
point to Eilat, a city at the country's southern tip, in about nine hours. The biggest east-west
expanse is across the northern Negev desert; a car can travel those 85 miles (135 kilometers) in a
speedy ninety minutes. At its narrowest, within the pre-1967 borders, the country is just 9 miles
(12 kilometers) across. The narrow corridor connecting Jerusalem to the rest of the country is
just 4 miles wide (less than 6 kilometers) north to south, within the pre-1967 borders.
BORDERS
1948-1967
Israel's borders have in practice been the ceasefi re lines from 1948, demarcating the territory of
Israel when the fi ghting ended after its War of Independence. Those borders were confi rmed
by armistice agreements with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon — each of Israel's neighbors.
As a result, Israel includes the Galilee hill region in the north, stretching from the Sea of Gali-
lee to the Mediterranean and including the cities of Acre and Haifa. A narrow belt of territory
along the coast, including Tel Aviv, links this area to the large but only lightly inhabited Negev
desert and then extends southward through Beer Sheba to Eilat, at the end of the Gulf of Eilat,
which empties into the Red Sea. In Israel's center, another narrow belt, the Jerusalem Corridor,
stretches eastward to connect Jerusalem with the rest of the country.
Other territory from the Palestine Mandate after its dissolution in 1948 was outside Israel.
Egypt occupied and governed the Gaza Strip. Jordan captured and annexed the West Bank (the
Judea and Samaria of Jewish history) and the eastern part of Jerusalem, including the Old City.
This annexation went largely unrecognized internationally.
Under the UN Partition Plan of 1947, which proposed the creation of two states, a Jewish
one and an Arab one on the territory of the former Palestine Mandate, Jerusalem was to be
under UN control. But neither the Jewish nor the Arab side supported that part of the pro-
posal, and no one ever made any attempt to implement it. As a result, almost all countries have
refused to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and have located their embassies in Tel Aviv.
A look at Israel's pre-1967 geography shows the strategic vulnerabilities imposed by its ter-
rain. In the north, the Golan Heights of Syria looked down on a fl at Israeli plain that stretched
with no natural defensive barriers to the nearby Mediterranean.
To the east, the long, winding border, hilly country, and narrow corridor connecting west
Jerusalem to the rest of Israel provided numerous military advantages to Jordan's army and,
after 1967, to Palestinian forces. In Jerusalem itself, before 1967, Jordanian snipers could and
did fi re into the Israeli part of town from the Old City's walls.
To the south, the Sinai Peninsula provided Egypt with a large military operational area
separated from its population centers and the Suez Canal while giving Israel a long border that
was hard to defend. Egyptian artillery controlling the Gulf of Eilat from its narrowest point at
Sharm al-Shaykh could easily cut off ship traffi c to Israel's southern port of Eilat.
Guerrilla and terrorist forces could cross Israel's border at many points to reach popula-
tion centers and sabotage facilities. The country's small size would also make it vulnerable in
the future to short-range missile attacks. Indeed, so close was the pre-1967 border that planes
