Israeli, Palestinian join forces to offer tours with two viewpoints

JERUSALEM—The tour begins on a windswept hill overlooking East Jerusalem.

To the left and right are the Palestinian neighbourhoods of Issawiya and Atur. Straight ahead in the distance are the rolling hills of the Judean desert.

Between Issawiya and Atur is a barren valley.

“The Israeli government has announced this year this valley is to become a national park,” says Aziz Abu Sarah. “The real reason is to stop the expansion of these Palestinian villages.”

Over Sarah’s shoulder, Liel Maghan chimes in.

“Actually, this is one of the few remaining green open spaces in Jerusalem,” he says. “It’s a good location for a park.”

Sarah and Maghan are the unlikeliest of tour guides. For the past three years, they have been running a startup called Mejdi Tours. In a part of the world where Muslims, Jews and Christians have dramatically different ways of interpreting their histories and cultures, Mejdi offers “dual narrative tours.”

That means both Palestinian and Israeli tour guides accompany groups on excursions through Israel, offering their own takes on recent and ancient history alike.

“We talk about everything from every side, like in 1948 (when Israel became a state) how the Palestinians view that as a sad time when they became refugees while the Israelis see it as a great day when they became a country,” Sarah says.

The tour points out how politics even impacts language here. Jewish communities in the West Bank are typically referred to as settlements, although Israeli media usually refer to them simply as villages, towns or cities.

“You say the word soldier and an Israeli thinks protection while a Palestinian thinks fear and apprehension,” Sarah said.

Maghan, 27, and Sarah, 32, are friends, although both grew up hating the other side. It’s doubtful the tour could work if both hadn’t softened their views.

The company recently began a partnership with National Geographic to promote its tours, which also allow visitors to speak with locals, including rabbis and imams, former Israeli soldiers, political leaders and Holocaust survivors.

After a stop at the Mount of Olives, Sarah and Maghan moved with some visitors to Jerusalem’s Old City. They looked out at a derelict East Jerusalem neighbourhood known as Silwan, where Sarah said Palestinians often build illegally because it’s nearly impossible for them to obtain proper building permits.

Sarah also mentioned an Israeli soldier who was captured on closed-circuit television shooting an unarmed Palestinian man. “He said he was being threatened,” Sarah said.

“You have to understand that even if it’s a boy throwing a single stone, that represents more to Israelis,” Maghan said. “It’s connected to a baggage of horrors for us, to people who have tried to kill us as a race.”