ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the landscape symbols central to contested definitions of Israeli society, polity, and economy since the first modern consideration of Jewish statehood. It focuses on representations and images formed around the country's frontiers and peripheries, because these border landscapes served as principal sources in the creation of Israel's national iconography. The farmer's arid the laborers frontier signified, to a specific social group, a symbol of something that went beyond the settlements' morphological, economic, or social structure. The periphery has been viewed as a marginal area in social, economic, and political terms, produced by processes of uneven development and unequal exchange. The members of the northern periphery complain of a dramatic growth in the Arab population in contrast to the meager increase in Jewish population, and warn against the danger of a regional demographic imbalance.
