HOW ‘DUAL NARRATIVE’ PEACE TOURISM TOURS TAKE TRAVELLERS DEEP INTO COMPLEX RELATIONSHIPS
Mejdi Tours takes groups to places like Uzbekistan and Israel led by pairs of locals with opposing religious, political or ethnic views
In 2005, Aziz Abu Sarah - a Palestinian then living in east Jerusalem - met a Jewish friend who was visiting Israel from the United States.
Although it was the tail end of his tour, his friend had not met any Muslims or Arabs on his trip, and he was harbouring anti-Palestinian views.
"He was so one-sided, even though he knew me," Abu Sarah says.
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It was a revelation that planted the seed for Mejdi Tours, a tour operator intended to bridge the divide between two populations at odds with each other.
It would take four years, and the collaboration of Jewish-American co-founder Scott Cooper, to create the company.
At Mejdi's heart is a "dual narrative" philosophy, meaning that each tour group is guided by a pair of locals who represent opposing religious, cultural, political or ethnic perspectives.
For years, Mejdi ran more than 300 annual trips to Israel that took this approach. But after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the company's business all but ground to a halt.
The founders - both former employees of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution - have since mostly focused on global speaking engagements, online workshops and virtual tours, "as well as both online and in-person meetings for our guides' community to discuss current events and explore ways to support each other", Abu Sarah says.
While this has been a slow period for travel to Israel, the team at Mejdi has not been resting.
Instead, it has been planning and activating the next steps in its efforts to scale dual-narrative travel to other parts of the world, including South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and the Balkans.
Mejdi's first dual-narrative tour in Uzbekistan includes meeting a Russian immigrant and a local Uzbek who talk about the complicated relationship between the two countries, in addition to taking tours of spice markets and traditional teahouses.
The first tour sold out in two days; additional nine-night tours are now being offered for October 2025 and May 2026, from US$2,995 per person.
And in October, a new 10-night itinerary called South Africa - A Journey of Transformation and Reconciliation will focus on the history of apartheid as told by guides and residents of various racial backgrounds. Guests will also go on a safari game drive and a sunset trip to Table Mountain (from US$4,995 per person).
Cooper and Abu Sarah are not alone in their approach to educational tourism in the Middle East - or in their new-found desire to scale it globally.
Another such outfit is the 11-year-old Pomegranate Travel, which has a similar focus on tourism for peace in Israel and is now expanding to Saudi Arabia, Rwanda and beyond.
Take Pomegranate's 10-person luxury group tour of Morocco in April, which will take guests to the country's key historic and cultural cities of Rabat, Fez, Ouarzazate and Marrakech, from US$11,250 per person.
The itinerary includes plenty of the usual fun sightseeing: a visit to Casablanca's enormous Hassan II Mosque, cooking workshops in Fez and ATV rides across Erg Chebbi's desert dunes.
But it also includes visits to the Jewish quarters of Marrakech and Fez - where some 250,000 Jews were corralled after periods of forced expulsion from other parts of the country - and meetings with Muslim preservationists who maintain now-abandoned sites of Jewish significance to honour the country's history.
"It's really impactful when Jewish people see Arab Muslims caring about Jewish culture in an Arab Muslim land," says Pomegranate founder Hannah Blustin, who herself is Jewish, as are most of her customers. "Right now, that really matters; there's so much misunderstanding and fear."
More tours like this are coming online throughout the year. In April and September, Mejdi is taking groups to the Balkans, with both Serbian and Bosnian guides, to hear from war refugees and members of the Sufi community. There will also be wine tastings in the historic hillside town of Pocitelj and a few leisurely days on Croatia's Elaphiti Islands nearby.
And Pomegranate is soon to begin trips to Saudi Arabia, with a focus on the evolution of women's rights and roles in society.
Resuming tours in post-war Israel
Having two tour guides of different perspectives on every trip encouraged participation and led to frank conversations, Abu Sarah says, with guests emboldened to ask questions they might not have felt comfortable articulating elsewhere.
Among the queries Mejdi fielded most frequently were: is Islam a religion of violence? Why cannot Palestinians just move to a different country? Did the Holocaust really happen?
When trips to Israel do resume in 2025, Mejdi and Pomegranate will have to be prepared to deal with steeper challenges and more dangerous misconceptions, with social media having fuelled countless false narratives.
To address the evolving situation, Abu Sarah says Mejdi is already updating its itineraries to reflect the events of the past 15 months. That means incorporating relevant experiences and speakers, including those who will join from Gaza via Zoom, as well as from Jewish communities in the "Gaza envelope", or parts of Israel close to the border with Gaza.
Both Mejdi and Pomegranate have remained in contact with their guides, keeping at least some of them on staff. But finding and training new ones may be harder than it once was, Abu Sarah says.
"There's definitely a growing opposition to joint work in the region - more anger and even hate," he concedes. But he remains hopeful.
Despite the growing resentment, he says, "we continue to collaborate with dozens of organisations in both Israel and the West Bank that are committed to peace-building".
Fortunately, he says, "there is also a rising number of individuals who recognise that without Israelis and Palestinians working together, we will keep returning to the same point of war".
It is not just staff who recognise this. Guests have the potential to become some of the world's most thoughtful advocates, he adds.
"Travellers have more power to impact the world than diplomats," he says. "With over 1.5 billion people travelling internationally this year, the potential to foster a more peaceful world is immense - travel transforms both visitors and hosts, making us all citizen-diplomats and storytellers."
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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.
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2025-02-13T20:40:39Z