There is no ‘should’ about visiting Israel, but this is why you might want to go…

Last week I was in Israel. It’s not the first time I’ve been there since the war started, but it was my first time visiting the north, an area that has largely been ignored by the world in the wake of events in Gaza.

As I walked back to my hotel in Haifa, the streets were buzzing. Families flocked to restaurants, music blared, and lanterns lit up the 300-year-old cobbled streets.

The crowds weren’t there for Pesach or Easter, they were celebrating Eid. In the shadow of the Baha’i Gardens, Muslims and Jews mingled in the German Colony, eating knafeh, puffing on shishas and blaring Arabic remixes of Avicii songs. They were hardly unusual scenes for Haifa or Israel as a whole, but they were sights that I hadn’t anticipated 2,000 miles away in London.

And as those of us with sympathies for Israel know well, they are not scenes in which the country’s detractors have any interest. Moreover, coexistence takes work. As a city guide in Haifa said to me: “There is no one sprinkling coexistence fairy dust over the city.”

The vocal minority of people who hate Israel for existing aren’t interested in these vignettes of coexistence

But the vocal minority of people who hate Israel for existing aren’t interested in these vignettes of peace and harmony, in the same way that they’re not interested in the tens of thousands of Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze Israelis who have been forced to uproot their lives after Hezbollah’s massive rocket salvos from southern Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Muslims continue to go about their daily lives in Israel. As I walked around the port of Acre, a predominately Muslim town, the atmosphere was remarkable for how unremarkable it was.

It is easy to forget this when the lens that you view the conflict through is clouded by loud voices screaming about topics they know nothing about, and always claim with hostile insistence that they know more about Israel than the people who actually live in the country.

When you go to Israel, as I imagine many of you will soon, you realise that it is not an idea to hate or love. It is a real place with real issues, a material reality that is washed away in our minds by the tsunami of news reports that have bombarded us over the past 18 months.

And the most notable thing I have witnessed is the dozens of struggling small businesses crying out for support. Muslim, Druze, Christian and Jewish businesses across Israel are suffering because of a war they did not start. A war that everyone wants to end, irrespective of whether they agree or disagree with the reasons for waging it.

I spoke to a man called Bassil, a Christian distiller of arak in the village of Mi’ilya in the Galilee who has a small visitor’s centre on a hill overlooking Lebanon.

He said he hadn’t had any business since the start of the war. It was a similar story for a Jewish tour guide in Haifa doing a PhD in the queer history of northern Israel, and for a lavender farm in the Golan Heights run at a kibbutz on the border with Syria.

And for a moshav-run coffee shop that opened its doors during the pandemic and has never enjoyed a normal year of business.

It is hard to know how to help other than to implore people to go to Israel and see the country for themselves. But there are, of course, reasons not to come just now and they aren’t likely to disappear any time soon.

Why trek around the Golan Heights when, for less money, you could see the rolling hills of Tuscany? Or the Loire Valley? Or the Swiss Alps?

No one should feel morally obliged to visit Israel, but for those who do come over Pesach, for those want to recharge their connection to the history of the Jews in Israel, there’s a whole country of people who truly welcome your support.

Josh Kaplan visited Israel courtesy of the Israel Government Tourist Office

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