Okay, lately I have been thinking about planning a long-term trip to Israel. I don’t have a clear rationale for this yet, just a vague feeling that I should see a part of the world that shows up so often in the news for myself. I am not Jewish, or even very religious; this is mostly about curiosity.
However, not being an idiot, I do realize there must be risks for any American visiting any part of the Middle East. Have you ever visited Israel? What was your experience of Israeli culture/people/society?
NOTE: I am NOT interested in debating the rightness of Israeli/American foreign policy, and I would not undertake a trip like this as an expression of some sort of pro-Israeli sentiment. I don’t really care about Israel in particular; only insofar as it has a tremendous impact on my own country’s stature abroad. I’m soley looking for impressions of what type of place it is to visit. Were people friendly? What do they talk about? What is it like to visit there? And, I guess the issue of the wisdom of such a trip at all should be addressed. Is there a way to do it safely?
Israel is as good of a place as any for observing a new culture. It is a big difference from anything you will see in the United States. It is probably the only place where you will see a completely Jewish city. One where almost everyone practices Judaism. You won’t really have a sense of what Jews are like unless you visit Jerusalem on a Sabbath and see all the families hanging out on the streets. If you go visit the Western Wall, I would suggest you do it on a Friday night. That is when there are less tourists and beggars and more religious people.
As others have noted in the other thread, it is full of history. So if seeing ancient cities and artifacts is your thing, you should definitely go.
Another cool thing about Israel is the beaches. Much more cleaner than anything here. They have the red sea and the dead sea. Both are really cool to experience.
As for your safety, I don’t really know. I had armed guards with me the whole time I was there.
I won’t address the question of what to see and whether or not it’s worth a visit in that sense – IMO that part’s a slam-dunk
As to safety, you just need to know what places to avoid – same as anywhere else in the world. Tel-Aviv is, again IMO, safer than NYC or almost any large city in the world. Other than the constant fighting in the area around Gaza, there hasn’t been any terrorism in Israel proper in the last year, and the widespread fire Northern Israel came under in the summer of 2006 is not likely to repeat soon (and even then, Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem were completely safe)
All in all, while I won’t go so far as to say there is no danger in Israel, I think that your overall chances of being injured through violence – be it terrorism, traffic accidents or run-of-the-mill muggings and such – are much the same or even less than the average in the Western world.
I don’t mean to be an ass, but you can also “have a sense of what Jews are like” by having dinner with a Jewish family in Atlanta, talking to a Jew in Mexico City, or going to a synagogue in Bombay.
BTW, here is an interesting Blog entry (well documented, though) about safety in Israel.
From the link:
Note that this includes civilian and military casualties in the Summer of 2006 Lebanon war, yet does not include US casualties in Iraq during the same time frame. Without the Labanon War casualties, the rate of Violent Death in Israel for 2006 would have been 3.1 per 100,000 inhabitants.
This doesn’t include (for either country) traffic accidents’ casualties, which are also much higher in the US than in Israel – the death rate in the US was 14.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2005 (no data for 2006 at my cite), while the rate in Israel was 5.9 (cite)
My Mom went there a few years ago, during a period when it was fairly calm. She was part of a tour group. It was a wonderful experience for her.
She did tell me, though, that she was offended by one of their guide’s attitudes towards the Palestinians. He’d gone out of his way to discourage the group from spending their money at the Palestinian shops, saying that “those people” are dirty and whatnot. My Mom upbraided him for his remarks and pointed out that Israelis had been victims of that same attitude in the not-so-distant past. Junior Madeline Albright on the prowl!
And then she went to some ordinary mall. Loved it.
Before we went to Israel in December, I was worried about terrorism. Mr. Neville crunched the numbers (I’m not quite sure exactly what statistics he used, but I trust him) and came up with a figure of a 1 in 10 million chance of being killed in a terrorist attack during our 10-day trip to Israel. I did some quick and dirty order-of-magnitude calculations, and that’s definitely in the ballpark. I did some more math and figured out that the chances of any given American being killed in a car accident in a two-week period is 1 in 185,000.
Short answer for math-phobes: you’re much more likely to die in a car accident if you stay home than you are to die in a terrorist attack if you go to Israel.
Here’s an interesting article about how people tend to misjudge risks from things that have a high media profile, like terrorist attacks. People’s judgment of those risks is way out of whack with reality:
I would express my thoughts on safe traveling in Israel this way–historically terrorists have been aware that tourism is one of Israel’s significant forms of income, and have tended not to attack touristy things.
Depending on your approach to traveling, it may be worth going with a group tour through a reputable organization–then if things change, someone else gets to decide what constitutes “too dangerous” for you. Either by canceling the trip, or by choosing to spend more time away from various high risk locations.
But, if you don’t like traveling with tour groups, a tour group shouldn’t be neccessary just to protect you from terrorism.
As it happens, I went to Israel in the span of time between Rabin’s assassination and the start of suicide bombings a few months later. Great time to go–I felt perfectly safe, and almost everyone believed that the peace process would be successful --even though no one was quite sure how they would get there from here. I was there on a tour group through my college, and enjoyed it very much.
