Toward Decolonization in Tourism: Engaged Tourism and the Jerusalem Tourism Cluster

In the context of the ongoing Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine, tourism has proven to be an important instrument in shaping images and imaginative geographies related to both Palestine and Israel. Consequently, the Palestinian reality has been widely erased from the Israeli-controlled tourism sector in historic Palestine. The Zionist settler colonial project has rendered Palestinians invisible not just by forcing them behind walls but also by coopting their food, crafts, and folklore or representing them as the eternal “other.” Correspondingly, tourism is a practice that normalizes these images and reorders and reshapes perceptions of people, places, and their relation to the world.[1] Research has documented how narratives in Israeli and Palestinian tours conflict as both sides present their version of the facts.[2] However, after participating on two very different tours in the Old City of Jerusalem, I began to think differently about the effect of these tours. Narratives are not just competing. They relate to each other according to the power imbalances between Palestinians and Israel, and are in fact deeply embedded in the ongoing colonial situation.Sandeman’s New Jerusalem is an international company based in Germany that provides free daily tours in all major European cities and also in the Old City of Jerusalem, Jaffa and Tel Aviv.[3] In March 2014, I participated on the full day “holy city tour” and was guided around Jerusalem’s Old City with a group of international tourists. Kyle, our guide, was a Jewish-American man in his forties who had immigrated to Israel and now guided groups through the busy streets of the Old City.[4] The story he told us was focused on ancient history and biblical stories that came to life through his tour. The contemporary social or political situation was largely omitted. While we were strolling through the Christian quarter, he explained that“in the Middle East, religion is what makes you part of a community. It is very different from the West. You can identify through religion. In the Middle East everybody speaks Arabic, so you cannot identify through language, so religion is a means to identify yourself.”His generalization about the Middle East clearly gave my fellow tourists a story they could relate to. It was a familiar a lens through which they could understand Jerusalem and the Middle East in general.Later, I went on another tour of the Old City, this time with an independent Palestinian guide from Jerusalem. He did not have the guiding certificate from the Israeli government. The tour put Kyle’s story into perspective. Seeing the city through the eyes of a Palestinian guide exposed colonial and Orientalist narratives that had been normalized in the previous tour. Nasser explained why religious symbols were omnipresent in Palestinian neighborhoods. They are means of identification, not just of religious zeal (although there were exceptions), because Israel prohibited Palestinians to publicly display their national flag. Deprived of this specific means to visually identify themselves, Palestinians use religious markers to distinguish themselves from Jewish Israelis. Kyle’s story of religion was suddenly taken out of its confined colonial truth and confronted with the political reality on the ground. What people such as my first guide recognized to be inherent qualities of the people of the Middle East are actually cultivated in power relations of colonialism and oppression. Nasser’s tour did more than oppose the Israeli colonial discourse, it pierced through Western, Orientalized categorizations. Story by story, he reordered the world in an anti-colonial image and called into question what tourists perceived as normal.Kyle and Nasser’s stories are not coincidental; rather, they give us a glimpse of how tourism is intertwined with political processes, claims, and goals. Historically, tourism has been strongly embedded in colonial practices.[5] Holidaymaking and traveling have been used as propaganda tools to justify colonization and spread truths about colonizer and colonized. …