Ilana and I always have opposite reactions when we visit America’s great suburbs. This last Shabbat in southern New Jersey was typical. Ilana gets dreamy about having her own lawn, house, garden–all that elbow room, all that green. And I get antsy–why should I want to live in a place where you have to drive half an hour to buy a pair of socks?

Ilana and I both grew up in suburbs, but Israel’s old time suburbs were an entirely different sociological animal than American suburbs are. Holon, the southern suburb of Tel Aviv where Ilana spent her childhood, was a city of tiny, cramped dwellings and dreary apartment buildings, populated largely by working-class families. They lived there because they couldn’t afford to live in the city.

Silver Spring, Maryland, where I grew up, was solidly middle-class. Most families there owned their own house, had a decent-sized back yard, a lawn mower, and two cars. The American suburbanite’s dream was not to move to the city but rather to move out to an even more distant and more spacious suburb where you had to drive even farther to get those socks.

This difference was epitomized in the 1960s when the film version of the Bernstein/Sondheim musical West Side Story was released in Israel. The West Side of the title was inner-city New York; the movie’s Hebrew title was “Suburban Story.” In Israel, poverty ruled, immigrants struggled, and gangs ruled the streets in the suburbs, not the city.

As Americans have grown richer, they’ve built more and more suburbs, more and more distant from core cities, requiring more and more roads and infrastructure, destroying more and more woods and grasslands. America has lots of space, so you can still get out to places like the Troutbeck, where I’m now staying, but you have to travel farther each year to get there.

As I’ve written, the American concept of the God-given right to a detached house and back yard has seeped into Israeli culture in recent years, prompting the construction of American-style commuter suburbs around Israel’s urban areas.

The problem is that Americans have a large supply of countryside. They can be wasteful of their green areas and still have lots left. In Israel, each new suburb and each new road robs us of the little green space that still remains in our densely-populated land.

Ilana yearns for what she didn’t have as a kid. I had it; I know how great it is to have all that room. But at what price?

South Jersey has its charms, but I’d rather be in South Jerusalem. In an era of burgeoning population and scarce resources, cities, not suburbs, are the solution.

While Israel’s environmentalists have successfully pushed through the establishment of a number of national parks in recent years, they’ve been less successful at protecting green spaces that aren’t parks. Yet the preservation of pristine areas between urban areas is vital if Israel’s landscape and wildlife are to survive. In today’s Ha’aretz (Hebrew edition), Tzafrir Rinat reports on how these areas are being encroached on by settlements and farms, and cut in pieces by new roadways. He writes:

Last month the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel published a report on the threat to open spaces in Israel. The report lists 60 building and development plans that will damage open spaces. Among the most prominent are new roads in the Sharon and Modi’in areas, construction in the Ramon Crater, and the mining of phosphates in the Negev.

As I noted in my post Why Israel is Losing Its Green Spaces: The Pointed Roof Hypothesis, living in the country has become something of an Israeli middle-class dream. Add to that the mystical-nationalist aura surrounding settlement in Israel and the result is that the country’s open spaces are under a double threat.

Israel has more than enough cities and towns-and more than enough suburban communities and farms. Future residential construction must be confined to existing urban centers. Roads and railways are important in order to tie the country’s disadvantaged and forgotten periphery to its center, but they must be planned in ways that minimize their damage to habitants and landscapes. And they must be kept to a minimum-impossible if new settlements kept getting built, each with its own access road.

What’s wrong with this picture? And what does it have to do with the destruction of Israel’s countryside?

Remember that this commercial is being shown in Israel, in Hebrew, as an advertisement for a local telephone company.

Answer: only a tiny fraction of Israel’s population lives in this kind of Brady-Bunch home. The overwhelming majority of people in this country live in two or three-bedroom apartments. According to this table from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, even the wealthiest ten percent of this country’s population live, on the average, in homes of 4.65 rooms (including living room, not including kitchen). Two-thirds of the population lives in less than four rooms. So, well-off people may have another bedroom. Few have family rooms, huge kitchens, and second stories.

So why does the phone company advertise with a commercial that depicts a kind of home that few Israelis can identify as their own?

I have a theory I call the pointed-roof hypothesis.

When my children were small and began drawing pictures, I noticed that when they drew a square with a triangle on top. That is, a house with a pointed roof.

Now the strange thing is that if you walk through our neighborhood—or in fact practically any neighborhood in Israel—you don’t see homes that look like this.

I realized that the square-and-triangle shape is an icon of a house, rather than a depiction of one. It’s not meant to represent reality; it’s like a hieroglyphic character. Like the dial phone that appears so often on computer screens to represent a phone function. My kids were all born after the age of dial phones, but they know what that icon means.

According to the pointed-roof hypothesis, the huge two-story house with family room and huge kitchen is has become the icon of the Israeli home. Houses have pointed rooms; homes have a staircase, a family room, and a huge kitchen. The image most likely derives from the cultural steamroller of American commercials and sitcoms that have become ubiquitous on Israeli screens, especially since the inception of cable tv.

I suspect that the phone company is not aiming for the high end of the market. Rather, the advertisers are using these images because a depiction of a typical Israel apartment would not register the idea “home” in the minds of most Israelis.

Icons are often innocuous. No kid is going to ask his parents to buy him a dial phone because of the icons he sees on his computer screen. But the fact that a standard American middle-class suburban house has become the icon of “home” in Israel is worrisome. In fact, increasingly, young Israelis seem to expect that this is the kind of home they ought to live in.

Israelis live in apartments because our country is small. To preserve green spaces and countryside, we need to limit the amount of built-up land. Over the last two decades, old farming towns have turned into commuter suburbs, new neighborhoods have encroached on countryside at the margins of cities, and new settlements have gone up in large numbers, not just in the West Bank but also in the Galilee and around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Now there are plans to build a string of such new settlements in the plain southwest of Jerusalem, the last large stretch of pastoral, sparsely-populated countryside in central Israel.

In these new communities, young, well-off families buy and build homes that look like the icons they see in tv commercials.

It’s the sharp end of the pointed-roof hypothesis. As icon becomes reality, some Israelis have a lot more space inside their homes. The result will be that all of us will have much less space outside.