Reviews: Atlas of Israel

Summary

This review evaluates the third edition of the Atlas of Israel (1985), focusing on its thematic scope, cartographic design, informational authority, and relationship to the second edition of 1970. The assessment surveys the atlas’s forty double-page plates and accompanying signed essays, considering its treatment of the physical environment, settlements, population, social and cultural conditions, economic activity, agriculture, transportation, and environmental quality. Particular attention is given to map scales, bilingual Hebrew–English presentation, relief bases, colour schemes, statistical graphics, and thematic symbols, as well as to the cooperation among government agencies and universities that underpins the volume. The reviewer finds the atlas cartographically impressive: its integrated design, confident use of colour, screened-relief backgrounds, choropleth sequences, graduated symbols, and especially small bar graphs generally make dense information intelligible. Minor weaknesses include inconspicuous scale references, insufficient justification for class intervals, the misleading clustering of point symbols, limited spatial differentiation in several themes, and the use of dated agricultural data. Comparison with the more extensive second edition shows that the new volume is not a comprehensive replacement but a complementary work. It omits or reduces earlier coverage of historical geography, wars, vegetation, soils, species, crops, and individual industries while expanding the mapping of contemporary social and economic distributions, labour intensity, and productivity. Overall, the third edition is judged a tour de force of national-atlas production: authoritative, visually sophisticated, and accessible. Its quality demonstrates the continuing scholarly and symbolic value of the traditional printed national atlas despite the emergence of electronic mapping systems.