Staging Israel/Palestine: The geopolitical imaginaries of international tourism

Tel Aviv-Jaffa

The dominant narrative of Tel Aviv-Jaffa presented to tourists begins with the founding of the original neighborhood in 1909 by a group of European Jewish families who purchased land north of the Palestinian port city of Jaffa. By the mid-1930s, the population had grown to 130,000 and Tel Aviv was officially declared a city. In 1950, after the establishment of Israel, Jaffa was formally merged with Tel Aviv. Today, tourist discourses treat Jaffa as an afterthought in foregrounding Tel Aviv through the imaginative geography of Israel as Europe. Throughout texts written for and by tourists, Tel Aviv is extolled as a vibrant, cosmopolitan “oasis of European culture” in the Middle East that is “Defiantly permissive, in contrast to its strict neighboring countries” (Fowler, 2016), “passionately secular and avowedly carefree … where the search for the perfect cup of coffee and a commitment to L.G.B.T. pride seems to take precedence over Israel’s complicated politics” (Kamin, 2015). Such descriptions point to an underlying premise that Tel Aviv may be in the Middle East, but it is not of the Middle East—that despite its location, the essence of its identity is more befitting of Europe. ⁷ This narrative has historical roots; Tel Aviv’s founders had imagined it as emulating the European cities that were familiar to them. In the contemporary landscape, the dominant imaginary manifests in the perception of Tel Aviv as an exception to the Israel that is mired in political tension and violence, with a pervasive binary opposition of modern, secular, liberal Tel Aviv against ancient, religious, conservative Jerusalem (Azaryahu, 2007). This binary implies that Jerusalem, weighed down by thousands of years of history, continues to be steeped in conflict, whereas Tel Aviv, barely a century old, is unshackled from such problems.

Crucial to Tel Aviv’s tourist landscape is the depiction of the youthful city boldly rejecting ties to a biblical past through the production of its history as beginning only with modern European Jewish arrival to an “empty” land. Alongside this particular temporality, the exceptionalizing narrative threaded through the city’s prominent tourist features works through processes of spatial distancing that insist both that Tel Aviv is unlike the rest of Israel and similar to European and North American cities. The preeminence of the city’s beaches asserts its Mediterranean identity as a place of carefree relaxation rather than of political or religious tensions evoked by the imaginary of Israel as part of “the Middle East.” The emphasis on Tel Aviv’s wide-ranging leisure activity—as “one of the most vibrant cities in the world” with “world-class nightlife,” a “buzzing cultural scene,” and an “international outlook” (Tourist Israel, n.d.)—asserts its place as a cosmopolitan destination. The connection to western urban life is made concretely through the White City, a collection of approximately 4000 Bauhaus buildings. Brought with the influx of German immigrants in the 1930s, the architectural style is seen as embodying Tel Aviv’s essential identity as a successful graft of desirable aspects of European culture onto the Middle Eastern landscape (Rotbard, 2015). Its functionalist aesthetics are portrayed as reflecting Tel Aviv’s modernist sensibility in creating a “purified, resurrected, clean, confident” new society from a blank slate (Segal, 2012: 230). The designation of the White City as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003 was seen as an affirmation of Israel’s democracy and pluralism (Nitzan-Shiftan, 2007), values understood to be enabled by its origins in early 20th-century European Jewish arrival, even as it obfuscated the historical relationship with Jaffa (see Levine, 2007). The highlighting of the White City in tourist discourses emphasizes the link between the European influence in Tel Aviv’s early years and its progressive character today.

This discourse of exceptionalism is also underpinned by a narrative of Tel Aviv as an exemplar of Zionist renewal in the Jewish homeland. Although its Independence Hall was the location of the declaration of the Israeli state in 1948, its centrality in the national imaginary shifted when Jerusalem was conquered in 1967. As the government moved there and a 1980 law declared it Israel’s “undivided capital,” Tel Aviv experienced urban decline and distanced itself from Israeli society’s political turmoil. In the 1980s, the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv rivalry was articulated as a clash between the “reactionary and fanatic Israel” and the “secular, liberal, and enlightened Israel” (Azaryahu, 2007: 218). The search to “redefine a secure Israeli past” that was “distinct from the Jewish past that was now represented by Jerusalem” (Nitzan-Shiftan, 2012: 396) saw the redevelopment of the beaches and the celebration of the White City. Around the same time, Independence Hall was restored as a museum; its narrative links the success of Tel Aviv to the original victory of Israel’s establishment through Zionist ideals of Jewish self-rule and a normalized modern existence—a realization of Theodor Herzl’s dream for Jews to “be at home in Palestine and yet not be tied down to the biblical past … independent and yet not to have turned one’s back on Europe” (Schlör, 1999: 80). The exceptionalist mythos of Tel Aviv works to extrapolate the imaginary to all of Israel, asserting that the state is a modern democracy that may be located in the Middle East but is certainly not characteristic of it.

The spatial and temporal dimensions of these narratives are especially manifest in walking tours of Tel Aviv. On the tour I undertook, we begin at the clock tower at the northern edge of Jaffa and walk through the American-German Colony, Florentin, and Neve Tzedek neighborhoods before concluding in front of the Founders Monument across from Independence Hall. By retracing the path of the founders out of Jaffa, the tour has participants performatively embody Tel Aviv’s origin story that is reproduced throughout tourist materials—Lonely Planet, for example, describes Tel Aviv’s founders deciding to “leave the cramped, unsanitary and sometimes unfriendly confines” of “the predominantly Muslim and Christian Arab town of Jaffa” (Robinson et al., 2012: 111). The tour foregrounds the city’s European influences by highlighting the German and British architecture, but incorporates that into a decolonial narrative of young Tel Aviv triumphantly overcoming British rule in the Jewish homeland. In front of the Founders Monument, the guide shows us an iconic photograph by Avraham Soskin of the 1909 lottery of plots while narrating how early residents took the empty sand dunes and built up a flourishing modern city. He links this to the present with the assertion that immigration from around the world has bolstered the multiculturalism that identifies Tel Aviv as a progressive, cosmopolitan city today.

In addition to underlining Tel Aviv’s exceptional characteristics, the tour emphasizes that they are what make Tel Aviv like other global cities. This is most explicit when the guide states that “gentrification here is the same as gentrification everywhere in the world,” which he illustrates through the neighborhoods we pass through—picturesque Jerusalem Boulevard used to be crime-ridden, artsy Florentin used to be an industrial area, elegant Neve Tzedek used to be a slum. The contrast between the narration and what we see reinforces a teleological narrative of Tel Aviv’s development. Notably, Palestinians are completely missing from the history that is conveyed to us. But they do appear in a story about the city’s secular culture: amid the irreverent graffiti of Florentin’s grungy alleyways, the guide points out a notorious nightclub where gay members of “the Arab community from the West Bank” and of “the community of Orthodox Jews from the West Bank” come to party. To my fellow tour participants’ appreciative chuckles, he notes, “the irony is that the rest of the time, these communities are enemies!” Such narratives imply that politics can be, and indeed are, left at the threshold of Tel Aviv’s exceptional spaces of leisure; the offhanded reference to the occupation depicts it as an ultimately trivial matter. ⁸ In asserting Tel Aviv’s distinction from the rest of Israel and similarity to western cities, this portrayal thoroughly reproduces the mythos of a modern city whose short history begins with its founders “building something out of nothing” and is entirely dissociated from the conflict and violence typically associated with Israel.

The salience of leisure and excitement in Tel Aviv’s tourist landscape is seemingly removed from politics, but this view is embedded with significant power relations that become especially evident when turning to Jaffa. Jaffa is staged as the relaxed counterpart of fast-paced Tel Aviv—a mere backdrop with a singular historical narrative of how it was conquered by different civilizations until the Israeli state was established and all was well. The part of Jaffa frequented by tourists is “Old Jaffa,” a bounded area bordering the southern end of Tel Aviv that consists of archeological excavations, historic buildings, scenic gardens, and charming alleyways lined by artisan shops. Tourist sights are explicitly delineated with official municipal plaques, ranging from religious buildings and the locations of pre-1948 events such as the 1936 “Arab revolt” to sites such as “Andromeda’s Rock,” the supposed setting of the Greek myth. These markers invite tourists to accept the imaginary of “Old Jaffa” as a whimsical historical supplement to the modern city of Tel Aviv. The guided tour I went on reinforces the dominant state narrative of the landscape by moving through these designated sights. Throughout our walk, the guide emphasizes Jaffa’s unfathomable age as its salient feature, focusing on making biblical stories come alive at sites including the House of Simon and St. Peter’s Church, and highlighting Ottoman structures such as the clock tower and the Mahmoudiya Mosque. As we walk through the sandstone alleys of the artists’ colony, the guide reiterates the story about the Jewish community leaving crowded, dirty Jaffa to establish Tel Aviv; when we arrive at the famed shoreline with Tel Aviv’s gleaming high-rises in the distance, he makes sure to direct our attention to the picturesque view. This serene landscape, the guide affirms, is characterized by “Jewish-Arab” coexistence: though we must hear about “the conflict” often, “you don’t really feel it here because it’s more open and liberal.” He adds that, when he was living in Jaffa, he shared a building with Jews, Muslims, and even a Holocaust survivor. This throwaway anecdote further suggests a tension-free imaginary that aligns with the sights of Jaffa presented to us.

The dominant imaginary of Jaffa is premised on its Orientalist domestication as Tel Aviv’s quaint, unthreatening Other, which bolsters the Israeli national narrative through the settler colonial process of the material and discursive production of emptiness (Hughes, 2017). Jaffa had been a socioeconomic and cultural center of Palestine; despite the mythos of Tel Aviv’s establishment on empty sand dunes, it was actually bordered by built-up areas of Jaffa, and much of what became Tel Aviv was built over Palestinian orchards and villages (Levine, 2005). In the 1948 nakba, many of Jaffa’s residents fled the violence or were expelled. After the establishment of Israel, Jaffa was annexed and new Jewish immigrants were settled in expropriated Palestinian houses (LeBor, 2007). ⁹ Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Jaffa deteriorated and was seen as a slum by Tel Aviv residents. Jaffa’s Palestinian population was largely overlooked by planning policies and their neighborhoods were systematically neglected by the municipality (Monterescu, 2015). Following the redirection of national attention to Jerusalem in 1967, Jaffa featured centrally in efforts to recoup Tel Aviv’s significance. “Old Jaffa” was developed as a primary tourist destination and cultural center, with preserved archeological and religious sites highlighting ancient Greek and Roman epochs, crusader and Christian elements, and “findings from the sparse Jewish presence in the city” (Rotbard, 2015: 121). In the present, the processes of Palestinian dispossession and disenfranchisement are erased from the limited tourist landscape in order to produce a terra nullius on which Tel Aviv’s origin and development into the contemporary city can be neatly projected. ¹⁰ Moreover, the Palestinian neighborhoods south of “Old Jaffa”—lived places with rich histories and ongoing tensions—are excluded entirely from the smoothed-over tourist understanding of Jaffa. The carefully cultivated landscape of “Old Jaffa” comes to signify the whole of Jaffa for international tourists.

While narratives about Tel Aviv emphasize the European influences throughout the city’s development in the past century, discourses of Jaffa highlight its expansive yet remote history, a heritage that does not interfere with the imaginary of modern Tel Aviv. Such narrations paradoxically function to compress Jaffa into a sanitized and superficial tourist landscape by focusing on biblical events and ancient civilizations while excluding the history of the nakba and settler colonial dispossession that cannot be assimilated into the dominant narrative. For example, Jaffa’s official tourism website extensively details the city’s history from the Bronze Age through the Ottoman era but surreptitiously smooths over the events of the British Mandate through 1948 (Old Jaffa Development Company, n.d.). In the Jaffa Tales Exhibit, the timeline presented similarly glosses over this period by using passive language and framing the British as the colonial power from which Israelis won independence: after “Jaffa is conquered by General Allenby” and “the British demolish part of the old city,” Jaffa is “left devoid of most of the Arab residents” during “the War of Independence,” but is ultimately “restored” and “unified with Tel Aviv” after “the foundation of the State of Israel.” The accompanying video uses flashy animation, live-action holographs, and corny dialogue in its chronological account of Jaffa’s “magnificent past,” which ends with an opaque reference to the arrival of Zionists before blithely stating that “there is a good end to this story” for Jaffa after all. The bounded landscape thus comes to resemble a theme park of neatly packaged sites aimed at an entertaining experience. “Old Jaffa” provides a singular teleological narrative of Tel Aviv’s development, underlining the constructed contrast between Jaffa, stuck in the past, and future-oriented Tel Aviv. But there is also a paradoxical un-fixing of Jaffa, in that tourists hear about the dirty, overcrowded city of earlier times while only seeing charming buildings and carefully cultivated gardens. The disparity implies that Jaffa could only flourish under the management of Tel Aviv, as part of Israel—and that this is why, together, Tel Aviv-Jaffa is free from the tensions of the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” that are present elsewhere. Notably, tourist discourses of Tel Aviv-Jaffa only refer to past and present Palestinian residents as “Arabs,” an erasure that favors “a vague Arab-ness” that can be “incorporated into Israel and Israeli-ness as a docile ‘minority’” (Hochberg, 2015: 17); the mentions of “Jewish-Arab” coexistence obscure the ongoing struggle of Jaffa’s Palestinians as well as their broader political identity that links them with Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

The dominant imaginative geography produced and enacted through the curation of the tourist experience in Tel Aviv-Jaffa positions Tel Aviv as being familiar to a predominantly Euro-American tourist audience—liberal, secular, and cosmopolitan, like other western cities. Jaffa is subsumed into this imaginary as Tel Aviv’s Other through temporal fixing, depicted as a static backdrop with thousands of years of history that ended at 1948, in contrast to Tel Aviv’s dynamic forward development in the present. The construction of Jaffa’s Otherness suggests that “the Arabs” were of a distant past and that Tel Aviv’s history only truly begins with the arrival of European Jews on the “empty” sand dunes. This foundational narrative is part of the settler colonial process of producing emptiness in an attempt to claim a sense of Israeli indigeneity (Veracini, 2019), part of the “colonial fictions” of the Zionist settlement project that underpin the public secret for Israelis today (Kuntsman and Stein, 2015: 15). For international tourists, this dynamic works more insidiously: the traces of the historical and ongoing violence of dispossession enacted against Jaffa’s Palestinians are erased from the landscape so that Israeli settlement and state-making are naturalized. The military occupation of Palestinian territories—at most referenced as an abstract “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”—is depicted as being far away from, and unrelated to, life in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. The history of settler colonialism that structures the landscape of Tel Aviv-Jaffa itself is elided from tourist understanding, with an underlying implication that “Arabs” are ultimately elsewhere and elsewhen. Through the narrative of Tel Aviv’s exemplary triumph, the sanitized landscape that is staged for international tourists upholds the fiction of Israel as a progressive liberal democracy, distancing Tel Aviv from the settler colonial processes inherent to Israel. The geopolitical reality that is constructed and performed through this landscape becomes legitimated and tourists become unwittingly complicit in the public secret; the “apolitical” tour experience thus does serious geopolitical work by naturalizing the landscape that is a product of Israeli state violence.

The West Bank

The “Best of the West Bank Tour” in which I participated departs from West Jerusalem, invoking the classic Orientalist gesture of temporarily accessing the potentially dangerous, foreign space of “the Middle East” and returning to the relative safety and familiarity of Israel at the end of the day. Offering an “exciting and easy way to gain a unique and fascinating insight into life in the West Bank,” it promotes its itinerary of Jericho, Ramallah, and Bethlehem as “three of the highlights of the West Bank” (Abraham Tours, n.d.). The tour implies that it provides “the best” by bringing together a selection of sites curated to maximize tourists’ own edification and enjoyment, producing at the outset a generalized tourist landscape where the contexts of specific places become less salient. This process is further entrenched by the bounded experience of the guided bus tour, since participants have little opportunity to access the landscape beyond the tour’s limited frame as they are transported from site to site. The concurrent experience of possible danger and captivating exoticism is conveyed to tourists through three narratives in this selective landscape. The first is the portrayal of the West Bank as Eretz Israel, “the Holy Land,” focusing on the religious importance of biblical sites within a “Judeo-Christian” framework from which Palestinians are largely absent. ¹¹ The second is a spectacularized view of the Wall that offers tourists the thrill of coming close to “the conflict” without having to engage in its politics. The third is a narrative of how life goes on in the West Bank despite the occupation, which is produced through the performance of Ramallah as a capital city like any other. These disparate depictions come together to construct the tourist landscape of the West Bank as being primarily defined by its unforgettable juxtapositions.

This tourist imaginary is premised on Israeli public secrecy about the military regime in occupied Palestinian territory, which casts it as separate from a democratic Israeli state. Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s physical distance from the West Bank and location in “Israel proper” allows for international tourists to be inadvertently enrolled into the public secret, but the process plays out differently in the West Bank, a landscape structured by the mechanisms of Israeli domination. These mechanisms extend beyond the physical occupation of territory to include overtly forcible measures such as curfews and arrests; the creation of “facts on the ground” such as settlements, bypass roads, the Wall, and checkpoint systems (Kotef and Amir, 2011; Weizman, 2007); and bureaucratic legalities that lend a benign face to the occupation (Halper, 2000). Even the popularity of Israeli companies’ itineraries in the West Bank speaks to the Israeli monopoly over the Palestinian tourism industry, which is part of a broader strategy to increase Israeli control over Palestinian life through economic dependency (Kelly, 2016). In this context, public secrecy colors the international tourist experience by working to obscure the extent of Israeli military control and limit the tourist landscape to sites where its everyday violence (see Joronen, 2019) can be elided during the temporary experience of the tourists. Of course, the occupation is not a totalizing force; the West Bank is a place of Palestinian everyday life, affective attachment, and embodied resistance (Harker, 2009; Salih, 2017). ¹² However, I emphasize the structuring forces of the occupation in order to push back on the dominant tourist framing that I am analyzing, which tends to minimize the occupation’s effects. This is a pernicious obfuscation for those who only get a brief glimpse of the West Bank through the supposedly apolitical tourist lens. While the Palestinian population is not simply an object of settler colonial rule, this section illustrates how the tour enlists participants into Israeli public secrecy through its staging of the West Bank as a set of disparate imaginaries.

The West Bank as “the Holy Land” is the prevailing tourist imaginary for sites in Jericho and Bethlehem. In Jericho, the tour visits Qasr el-Yahud on the Jordan River, where Jesus is said to have been baptized, and Tell es-Sultan, the archeological site of Jericho’s ancient city. Qasr el-Yahud had been closed to the public while under Jordanian control between 1948 and 1967 (Cohen, 2016); the part that reopened in 2011 is surrounded by areas that are still mined. Despite the signs warning of mines and the Israeli soldiers stationed nearby, these hints of military violence are rendered unthreatening for the tourist experience. The site is serene, with tour participants dipping their feet into the water as the guide tells us biblical stories and pilgrims get baptized nearby. At Tell es-Sultan, we view excavations of ancient civilizations as the guide emphasizes that though Jericho is over 10,000 years old, few people live in the city today. Jericho’s biblical significance is further highlighted by the guide narrating the temptation of Jesus that took place on a nearby mountain, and inviting us to drink from a fountain blessed by the prophet Elisha. Although the focus on biblical narratives is certainly expected in the touring of holy sites, the staging of Jericho for tourists in this way contributes to the settler colonial project of casting the West Bank as Eretz Israel. The tour’s temporal fixing produces Jericho as a place solely of the distant past; in the acts of drinking from Elisha’s Spring or dipping into the Jordan River, we are urged to experience a sense of spiritual communion with the holy land, so that the ancient past comes to be superimposed onto the depopulated, scenic landscape of the present. This process is reinforced by spatial distancing: the parts of Jericho frequented by most tourists are limited to these sites, while the contemporary city where Palestinians reside is excluded from the tourist encounter and imaginary. The tour ultimately conveys a sense of Jericho as a sparse landscape of biblical authenticity rather than a lived Palestinian place.

In Bethlehem, the tour visits the Chapel of the Milk Grotto and the Church of the Nativity, where we hear about the practices of the different denominations and participants photograph the silver star that marks where Jesus is believed to have been born. As part of the “Best of the West Bank” itinerary, the centering of Christian holy sites flattens Bethlehem to its biblical significance so that contemporary Palestinian life is obscured from tourists’ view. Settler colonial dispossession operates in Bethlehem through the infrastructures of military occupation: it is the site of three refugee camps, the municipality suffers severe socioeconomic consequences from the Wall’s restriction of Palestinian movement and land use, and even the Church of the Nativity is not removed from these circumstances—during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, Israeli forces laid siege to the church for over a month because 200 Palestinians had taken refuge there. But the violence of the occupation in residents’ everyday lives is omitted from the tour guide’s narration, which instead stages Bethlehem through a sense of religious transcendence. As in Jericho, the tour’s focus on biblical sites while ignoring present-day Palestinians reinforces the Israeli geopolitical project through spatial distancing: not only are these holy places inscribed within a broader global geography of international Christianity, but they are also linked with other sites of “Judeo-Christian” significance within “Israel proper” such as Nazareth and the Galilee. This approach elides the territorial context of Jericho and Bethlehem as sites under Israeli military occupation. ¹³ In producing a reified geography of “the Holy Land” at the expense of understanding Bethlehem as a complex place of lived Palestinian experience, the tour upholds Israeli public secrecy by inviting participants into the settler colonial view of this territory as Eretz Israel.

But another part of Bethlehem’s tourist landscape does bring the contemporary into focus. A short drive from the holy sites is a section of the Wall located next to Banksy’s Shop (what is now Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel, which opened in 2017). The guide provides us with little narration about the economic dispossession the Wall enacts or its implications for Palestinian territoriality and sovereignty. ¹⁴ We are instead left to encounter the Wall’s imposing structure as a sightseeing highlight, and tour participants photograph themselves against the backdrop of its extensive graffiti and get the opportunity to add their own scrawls. This performative engagement turns it into an exotic icon of “conflict” in an abstract sense rather than conveying any understanding about how it functions as a mechanism of settler colonial control (see Alatout, 2009; Salamanca, 2016; Weizman, 2007). ¹⁵ Without this context, the spectacle of the Wall’s material existence distances it from the regime of Israeli control operating throughout the West Bank and not merely at the boundary between Israel and Palestinian territory that the Wall is presumed to constitute. Not only does the staging of the Wall as a tourist site enroll participants into the public secret through the implication that the “conflict” here is separate from the workings of the Israeli state, but it further obscures the power relations of the encounter itself. The tour depoliticizes the occupation and packages it into an experience of personal gratification: the focus on the famous Banksy graffiti and the proliferation of tourists’ messages of peace on the Wall turn the realities of the Wall and its impact on Palestinian lives into an objectified background of westerners’ experiences (Toenjes, 2015). In inviting participants to perform a hollow act of solidarity, the tour provides an opportunity for us to have a feel-good moment without demanding actual political engagement. Rather than making us think about our own complicity as tourists coming to see the occupation, the tour further presses participants into the geopolitical reality that the occupation is something separate from the Israeli state.

The narrative of life going on under the occupation comes through the tour’s staging of Ramallah through the sites of the Muqata’a—Yasser Arafat’s presidential compound where he was buried—and the city center. At the Muqata’a, the guide talks about the symbolism of the monumental architecture and encourages us to take photographs with uniformed, armed Palestinian Authority soldiers. Lacking narration of the broader historical context, the tour experience at the compound contributes to the illusion of the Oslo process that Palestinians are “proto-citizens of their own political representation” (Weizman, 2007: 158). ¹⁶ The soldiers’ presence performs the legitimacy of a sovereign nation-state, which sets up Palestine as an equal actor in “conflict” with Israel and conceals the uneven relations of how the PA is merely “an effect produced by the reorganization of Israeli power” (Gordon, 2008: 172). In the city center, we are led through market streets and squares, with attention specifically directed at Pizza Hut and KFC signs in the urban commotion. Tourists visit cafés and bars touted by guides as “another side of Palestinian society”—that is, as unexpectedly modern, secular, and westernized. The complexities of Ramallah as a Palestinian space of political struggle and everyday life (Abourahme, 2009) are flattened in its portrayal as a vibrant capital city. By directing us to see the familiar sights in the foreign landscape, the tour conveys an Orientalist sense of appreciation for the view that Palestinian daily life is actually untouched by tension or violence. It suggests that, though Ramallah may be so different from the western cities with which we are familiar, the “reality” is that the residents’ lives are surprisingly similar to our own. This brief cultivation of perfunctory rapport contributes to the superficial and decontextualized staging of Ramallah, which enrolls tourists into public secrecy precisely because it does not conform to our expectations of what occupied territory is “supposed to” look like. ¹⁷ In combination with the symbolic representations of Palestinian sovereignty at the Muqata’a, tour participants are left with the imaginary that there is a Palestinian nation-state with a flourishing capital city like any other.

The dominant imaginative geography of “the Middle East” that is produced and enacted through the staging of the West Bank as a tourist landscape serves to strengthen the Israeli geopolitical project. Jericho, Bethlehem, and Ramallah are brought together as the “highlights of the West Bank,” offering “different facets of an extraordinary region” to provide a “varied and fascinating tour” (Abraham Tours, n.d.). Instead of conveying an understanding of the West Bank as a complex whole or substantively engaging with the nuances of Palestinian life under military occupation, the tour decontextualizes the sites in order to curate a palatable tourist experience. Spatial distancing functions in the tour’s depiction of Jericho, Bethlehem, and Ramallah as fragmented snapshots invoking distinct imaginaries, obfuscating how all of the West Bank is subjected to Israeli control. Temporal fixing constrains the sites either to a biblical landscape of the distant past or to a post-Oslo landscape that elides the longer history of Israeli settler colonialism and military occupation. While the tourist landscape of Tel Aviv-Jaffa smoothly reinforces the idea that the occupation is completely unrelated to the Israeli state, the tourist landscape of the West Bank enrolls tourists into the public secret in a more disparate way. The staging of “the Holy Land” erases the presence of the occupation and signs of contemporary Palestinian life altogether, so that tourists come away with an imaginary of the West Bank as a biblical landscape free of contestation and military control. The staging of the Wall as an icon of “the conflict” flattens it into a mere backdrop for tourists’ experiences of personal gratification rather than allowing for engagement with the politics of the occupation or even their own complicity in touring the West Bank. The staging of Ramallah as an ordinary capital city obscures the complex dynamics of the occupation in favor of presenting a sovereign Palestinian state that is an equal actor in “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” This disjointed tourist landscape asserts the foreignness of the West Bank as part of “the Middle East” and thus not Israel. As a result, this ostensibly apolitical tour experience works to elide the structuring forces of the Israeli occupation and the broader settler colonial project of which it is an important part.

Conclusion

Although tourism is commonly understood as unrelated to forms of political violence, it provides a useful entry point for understanding the geopolitical dynamics of Israel/Palestine because its dominant modes align with the Israeli state project. In Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the tourist landscape is staged through the imaginative geography of Israel as Europe: Tel Aviv is positioned within a westernized geography that insists that Israel is not characteristic of its location in the Middle East. This assertion of exceptionalism is premised on the erasure of the history and ongoing dispossession of Jaffa’s Palestinians and on an Orientalist domestication of Jaffa’s landscape. Tourists are invited to accept Tel Aviv’s terra nullius origins and teleological narrative of progress, which enroll them into a geopolitical reality that obscures the settler colonial nature of the Israeli state. Meanwhile, the tourist landscape of the West Bank is based on the fragmenting of the most frequented destinations, presenting them through an imaginary of an alluring, unfamiliar space of “the Middle East.” The sites are staged to convey different understandings of the West Bank—as the biblical Eretz Israel, as a space of abstract geopolitical conflict, and as a sovereign Palestinian state—but these distinct narratives work together to conceal the extent of Israeli control, removing the military occupation from the ambit of the Israeli state. The settler colonial conditions of the occupation are naturalized and decontextualized in the tourist landscape.

Despite these differences, juxtaposing the tourist landscapes of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and the West Bank allows for new analytical insights. The seemingly apolitical practices of international tourism create and sustain fictions of Tel Aviv as a paragon of western liberal modernity in the Middle East and of the West Bank as something other than territory under Israeli military occupation. They reinforce the Israeli state project that is invested in the public secret, which casts the occupation of Palestinian territory as separate and distant from the Israeli state while also eliding the settler colonial dispossession that underpins all of it (Kuntsman and Stein, 2015). The dynamics of public secrecy structure the geopolitical imaginaries that are produced and enacted in the tourist landscapes, ultimately serving to preclude an understanding of how the Israeli regime structures life in both Tel Aviv-Jaffa and the West Bank (Azoulay and Ophir, 2012). Examining the different processes through which these two landscapes are staged reveals how public secrecy—merely one of the asymmetrical logics that shape international tourism to Israel/Palestine—can end up validating and sustaining Israel’s extension of its geopolitical power within and beyond the boundaries of “Israel proper.” The imaginative geographies with which tourists come away legitimize and naturalize the uneven power relations in Israel/Palestine, enlisting international tourists into the public secret even if they are not aware that there is something to not know. There is thus a lot at stake in the perception of tourism as apolitical: everyone who travels to Israel/Palestine as a tourist has a set of pre-imaginaries, pre-knowledges, about the place, and the way the landscape is staged for them plays a crucial role in giving these pre-knowledges a shape, a substance, and a force. Attending to the intersection of tourism and geopolitics ultimately opens space for critically unsettling the ways in which the ostensibly apolitical practices of international tourists are complicit in sustaining Israeli state violence.