From Nazareth to Capernaum, From Hermon to Arad

The proliferation of alternatives to the Israel Trail

This is the final part of a two-part series. For the first part, see here.

Since the creation of the Israel Trail, numerous alternative trails have been created by different communities. Some of these have been successful, while others barely registered; all of them have reflected an attempt to carve out a different political, historical, or religious facet of the land.

The most successful has undoubtedly been the Jesus Trail. A grassroots initiative led by Maoz Inon (whose parents were murdered on October 7) and David Landis, this is a 65-kilometer route through the Galilee from Nazareth (where Jesus was raised) to Capernaum (where he launched his ministry). This involved previously neglected tourism infrastructure in Arab villages and was extremely successful, becoming the first trail to attract significant numbers of foreign hikers to Israel. Instead of supporting the project, though, the Ministry of Tourism created its own Gospel Trail with three million shekels in funding. This also stretched from Nazareth to Capernaum, but remained almost completely in JNF forests, with no lodging options for hikers. The project was a failure. As Rabineau writes in Walking the Land: A History of Israel Hiking Trails: “The Gospel Trail failed because at its core, it was more a political project than a hiking trail.”