Multiple narratives

Wars and an increasingly polarized political landscape not only impact the countries where hot and cold conflicts exist but add a fraught dimension to all travel. While many travelers are content to keep an arm’s length from the domestic politics of their host country, others want a fuller understanding of the culture they’re visiting, including its civil divides.

Two men, one Palestinian and one Jewish, co-founded Mejdi Tours to provide a path to greater political awareness and insight for travelers. Aziz Abu Sarah and Scott Cooper had developed a deep friendship as co-directors of George Mason University’s Center for Reconciliation. They subsequently saw that travel offered untapped opportunities to promote peace and understanding by offering exposure to multiple political narratives during carefully curated tours.

The two were guests at the 18th annual Travel Weekly Consumer Editors Roundtable, joining top editors from Conde Nast Traveler, Afar, National Geographic, the New York Times, Robb Report, Town & Country and web-based Wonderlust. Travel Weekly editor in chief Arnie Weissmann moderated the discussion.

The roundtable was hosted by Acadia restaurant in Manhattan where chef Ari Bokovza, who is half-Tunisian and half-Israeli, features “a taste of the Levant.”

The original transcript has been edited for length, and the chronology has been altered to keep dialogue about specific topics together, though the topic might have recurred at intervals during the course of the conversation.

Arnie Weissmann, editor in chief, Travel Weekly: Aziz, what motivated you to begin these tours with Scott?

Aziz Abu Sarah, co-founder, Mejdi Tours: I didn’t grow up within an environment of peacebuilding or conflict resolution; I grew up in circumstances that were exactly the opposite. When I was 9, my older brother was arrested on suspicion of throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers and taken to prison. As a result of beatings he received there, he died. He was 19.

That shaped a lot of my understanding of the world then. I was very angry, very bitter, very focused on the idea of vengeance. I became politically active. By the time I was 16, I was editing a magazine and writing very angry articles.

I boycotted mandatory Hebrew classes in my school but needed the language to get a job, so I became the only Palestinian in a Hebrew class for new Jewish immigrants. That was my first real interaction with people who lived literally 20 minutes’ walking distance from my house. I often think that that’s the first real trip I’d taken in my life.

My teacher greeted me in Arabic and made me feel welcome. She encouraged everyone in the class to share their interests and cultures, which for me included country music and coffee. I became friends with my classmates. That informed my understanding of the work that, eventually, Scott and I began.

I realized that the biggest problem we have — and not only in Palestine and Israel — is that we build walls of ignorance and stereotypes and fear, and we’re unable to pass through them to see who’s on the other side. So, when I was 18, I decided that what I wanted to do with my life is figure out ways to break down those barriers.

Scott and I worked together on peacebuilding missions in Afghanistan, Syria, Colombia and Northern Ireland. And while doing that work, we realized we wanted to do something more sustainable toward peacebuilding. We wanted to reach many more people, and it occurred to us that people, when they travel, are more open to hear things they might never hear otherwise.

We came up with this concept called dual narrative. We thought, what if we had an Israeli and a Palestinian co-lead tours together, and in Northern Ireland, put in a Unionist Protestant and a Nationalist Catholic, and in the Balkans have both Serbian and Bosnian guides? And, on the tours, visit people with different positions, from different walks of life?

So, in Northern Ireland, we meet people who are for the Good Friday Agreement and those who are against it, people who lost family members and people who fought against each other. We want to hear everyone, including those still angry today and who think that the peace agreement wasn’t a good deal.

But we also feel that it’s important, in addition to meeting people, that we still have a lot of fun. And I think that’s key, because when people travel, they still want to have fun.

We’ve even done it in Washington with a Democrat and a Republican. But that’s the hardest one to sell. Americans want to hear dual narratives until it comes home. I’ve even heard Israelis and Palestinians ask, “Why can’t they get along?”

In addition to our own tours, we have been working with National Geographic Expeditions since 2012, and we run seven or eight trips a year for them in Israel and Palestine, though now it’s on hold because of everything that’s going on.

Mark Ellwood, editor at large, Robb Report: Tourism has restarted there to a degree — EasyJet flights are going back into Tel Aviv. You must be considering, is there a path to restarting the tours there, and if so, how?

Abu Sarah: We actually have restarted, though not yet with National Geographic. Our staff is very mixed; we have both Israeli and Palestinian staff, and the amazing thing is, they still work together. I just went on a trip in March, and we had an Israeli and a Palestinian co-lead it. We met with communities that lost hostages, we had people from Gaza who Skyped with us, and there were people who had just left Gaza. We met with people who are involved in the negotiations. Then we did some touring, but even that was very informed about what’s going on — we feel right now we can’t just go and do a normal tour.

Bob Guccione Jr., editor in chief, Wonderlust: Do you get the dark tourists, the war tourists?

Abu Sarah: We do get people who want to do that. But in restarting our trips to Israel and Palestine, we don’t want to be a company that’s saying, “Come and see war and hunger.” We’re not going to take people to see and take photos of raw suffering. We have people who say, “We heard there’s a protest, can you take us?” or “Can you take us to the front line?” We don’t do that, and we don’t want to do solidarity trips focused solely on one side or the other.

Rather, we approached restarting with the belief that people who would want to join us care about this place. They want to come and hear about it, they want to know what’s going on. We can arrange that.

But we decided, for example, not to visit the kibbutz that was attacked, which has become very popular for solidarity trips. I have friends whose parents were killed there, and it just felt too soon, too raw. Disrespectful, almost. But we did meet with a friend of mine, an Israeli guy who works in tourism, whose parents were killed on Oct. 7, and he talked about his family and how he’s supporting peace right now.

We always make sure we’re being respectful when we visit people. When we meet with refugees in Jordan, we’ll meet with a family and we’ll pay them for dinner, we’ll pay them just to have a conversation with them. I’m into photography, but sometimes we tell people to turn off your cameras and focus on the conversation. Maybe later, after there’s a relationship, and if the family is comfortable, we can allow cameras.

Weissmann: Scott, what drew you to this type of tourism?

Scott Cooper, co-founder, Mejdi Tours: I got into peacebuilding and conflict resolution about 20 years ago. I’m Jewish, and my younger brother ended up moving to Israel rather suddenly. I went there to try to understand why.

I was working in consumer banking and took a month off. I was really struck and saddened by what I saw there. I had never before visited anywhere where there was overt conflict. I saw kids my little sister’s age with machine guns, chain smoking, all these sorts of things. I’d never seen a country in conflict up close before, and it shook me to the core. It really, really bothered me, and my inclination was to try to figure out why is this happening and who’s trying to fix it?

I researched organizations working on solutions for peace, like the Parents Circle, which brings together Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children in the conflict. I stayed in people’s homes, on their couches, learning about what they were doing, and I saw all these people who were trying to make a difference. I made a vow that, when I returned to the States, I would do everything in my power to help.

I left my job in consumer banking. The Center for Reconciliation at George Mason was sort of dormant, so I went to the professor in charge of it and said that, for an internship, I’d like to try to take this nonfunctioning center and revive it. I looked for other peacebuilders, like Aziz, and we started working together.

I had also begun to learn about social enterprises and businesses that exist to create social change. Aziz and I wanted, explicitly, to make a positive change in the world using a business as an economic engine. We saw tourism as a way to create change through individual and communal relationships; those are the building blocks of social change.

Tourism is an amazing way to do that; there’s really no other sector where there are so many individuals and groups meeting local people. We’ve seen an increasing appetite for what we do, from study abroad to National Geographic to luxury trips. There’s a great opportunity to enable more people to get involved and take part in changing relationships. In any good peace process, you’re moving relationships from hatred, violence and dehumanization, and it’s a long, long process.

We don’t only go into places that are in the news or in conflict right now. Even in Northern Ireland, where there’s a peace process, it’s very fragile, and you need to continue to work on these relationships, because it can go backward in a second. We’re peacebuilding practitioners who ended up in tourism, and there’s no limit to how you can build something positive through travel.

Weissmann: How can you tell if meaningful change has occurred? Can you measure your effectiveness? I would think that people on these tours are already more interested in cultural interactions than the average traveler.

Abu Sarah: Not everyone is. For instance, in a lot of our study abroad trips, students will sign up simply because it’s an opportunity to travel. And even in our NatGeo trips, we’ve had people on the far left and on the far right on the same tour. And we want that. It’s a good thing because, suddenly, we’re having a dialogue within the tour.

I once had a traveler who, on day one of the trip, told me how all Palestinians should leave Israel because they had no right to be there. Very far right. And then, on day five, he was saying OK, maybe we need a binational state — a position that would be considered far left. He went full circle trying to figure out how to solve this.

Ellwood: I’m sure there are people on both wings of the political spectrum, but that’s not the point. They have to pay to do the trip, so why do people want to go?

Abu Sarah: I think people are interested in access. On these trips, you meet people you would never have access to. It may be a foreign minister, a cabinet undersecretary, members of parliament. On our last trip in Ireland, we met the head of the Senate. We can’t promise you’ll always meet that person, but we can always get somebody like this. And getting these incredible speakers is a result of building relationships over time. Our trips are fun and guests see what you’d expect to see when visiting that country, but you’re also likely to meet people you wouldn’t normally have an opportunity to.

Cooper: Intellectual curiosity is not something that is left, right or center.

Abu Sarah: We have no political agenda. We don’t say that, if you come, our goal is to make you believe X-Y-Z. We don’t try to convert people. We just want to expose them to many viewpoints, and our idea is, if we do that, people will leave with more empathy and compassion for everyone.

Cooper: We have people who want to speak to our groups from across a political spectrum because they know that, with us, we want that wide range of opinion expressed.

Abu Sarah: We once had a tour with a couple of synagogues who were more on the right, politically, when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Somebody in their group thought the trip was anti-Israel, and they went to the media. The reporter contacted one of our speakers who used to be a spokesperson for the Israeli military. He responded, “I might not agree with everything these guys do, but this is not anti-Israel. This is not anti anything.”

Having two tour guides in the field also helps guests know that their side, if they have one, is represented.

A Ph.D. student — she’s now a tourism professor — did research on people who had gone on our trips. She compared our tours with tours that had a political agenda. On tours where people were only exposed to the viewpoint they already held, their opinions were solidified. For our guests, 93% said they came out with more compassion for the side they didn’t know as well when they started the tour, which for me is a measure of success.

Weissmann: Have you ever found a partisan who doesn’t want to cooperate, doesn’t want to tell their side of the story?

Abu Sarah: Usually they want to tell their story. But there are some groups with strong political opinions who say, “No, we’ve seen you work with our enemy, and if you work with them, we don’t want to meet with you.” But the vast majority want to talk.

Jesse Ashlock, U.S. editor, Conde Nast Traveler: Are there places where you can’t go that you would like to?

Abu Sarah: There are places we’ve decided not to go. Recently, we were asked to do trips in Afghanistan. We both know Afghanistan really well because we worked there for three years on conflict resolution. But even though we could run a trip there, we decided to say no because we don’t feel it’s the right time, ethically, for us to be there.

Guccione: Why ethics? Not safety?

Abu Sarah: It’s actually probably safer today than it has been in decades. The Taliban is in charge, and they’re not going to bomb you. But to run a tour, you’d have to pay off the Taliban, and I don’t feel comfortable doing that. Scott and I have lost friends, colleagues who were killed by Taliban.

It might change in the future. I don’t mind working with authoritarian countries as long as I don’t have to pay off people who I think will do bad things directly.

Guccione: Where is too dangerous? Ukraine?

Abu Sarah: We haven’t yet run tours in Ukraine, though it is partially due to capacity. When we try to figure out what we have the capacity to do, we first ask, do we know people there? Most tour operators would work on logistics first — buses, hotels, etc. That’s the last thing we look into. When we put together the Balkans trip, our thinking was, who do we know there that might be interested in partnering with us? It turned out we knew two photojournalists who had covered the conflicts there and also covered culture and tourism. I met with them to figure out which were the voices that needed to be heard in Bosnia and Serbia. We learned about a Sufi tariqua in Sarajevo; we found former generals on both sides who had fought in the war; we met with soccer hooligans, whose activities immediately preceded the war. And after all that, we began looking at tourism sites and how to put it all together.

Starlight Williams, travel editor, National Geographic Traveler: Because you are working with people with strong opinions, is there training beforehand for guests so people can embrace these conversations without blowing up?

Abu Sarah: We meet with them online beforehand to prepare them, and then we prep some more on our first day about what to expect.

Billie Cohen, executive editor, Afar: Do you have an online conversation with every individual traveler or with the group?

Abu Sarah: With the group. We’ll say, look, you’re going to hear opinions you’re probably going to disagree with; that’s the whole reason we’re here. So, give it time, listen to all points of view, try not to get upset. It’s not set up to be pingpong, where someone’s going to say something and then someone’s going to respond. The idea is to understand where people are coming from.

Cooper: We have had people getting mad at some of the speakers, and we’ve had to speak with them afterward. But we prepare people to try to listen and suspend judgment as they’re listening, then share their feelings amongst themselves, in a smaller group. It does take some understanding of group dynamics.

Ellwood: Having been a tour guide — not in a conflict zone — interpersonal dynamics and friction is something you have to learn to handle. I had groups from the Deep South and New York traveling together for two weeks, and they had conflicting ideas about almost everything. And I remember I wished I’d had better training.

Abu Sarah: If possible, we recruit people who understand conflict resolution to lead tours, but in some countries that’s problematic because you need a license in order to guide. In Israel and Palestine, you have to go through two-and-a-half years of training. We have paid for people to do that; it’s easier to teach destination knowledge than conflict resolution. But before you can guide, you have to shadow a veteran guide who really understands what we do.

Williams: Do you ever vet the people who go on your tours?

Abu Sarah: No, they’re open to anyone. But a lot of our work is B2B — we work with a lot of universities, alumni and study abroad groups. Some might vet their own travelers.

Cohen: And do you keep in touch or follow up with your groups afterward to build community or track the influence of the trip and perhaps how its influence may have spidered out?

Abu Sarah: We try to some extent, but we don’t have, for instance, a checkup every three months. But we know it impacts people. One of our travelers who had been to Northern Ireland stayed in touch with their tour guide, who had a doctorate in conflict resolution, and asked him and me to speak to a meeting of communications directors for some of the biggest companies in the U.S. In another instance, after a trip in Palestine and Israel, members of a group started importing olive oil and olives from farmers they met.

Something that’s happening now is that people who worry that our tour guides are out of work have called and asked if they could make donations for them or hire them to do something online. So, we’re now doing online events for campuses and congregations, and it’s really good because it’s difficult for people in the U.S. to know how to talk about what’s going on in Israel and Palestine. It’s such a hard topic. Just this month, we’ve had 15 of these online events.

Cooper: So, you have an Israeli and a Palestinian, over there and in that environment, helping Americans talk to each other in their own communities.

Ellwood: I was talking to tour operators, hoteliers and guides in Israel. Their businesses, a bit like during the pandemic, were slaloming into drabble. And the guides I spoke to hadn’t made a penny for two or three months. The government was setting up the equivalent of a furlough scheme, but I think we’re increasingly going to see conflicts, and those poor guides get chewed up, professionally, in the conflict. That was so sobering, listening to them talk about it.

Abu Sarah: You’re absolutely right. That’s why you have to pivot. And if you’ve done trips where you’ve spoken about these issues, it’s much easier to go back to your former travelers and say, “Hey, do you want to purchase a conversation with me?” Or they can help guide people about where to donate things in Israel and Palestine.

After the explosions in that port in Lebanon, we collected $25,000 in a week to help rehabilitate houses that had been destroyed. We had volunteers going house to house to help. Our travelers feel so much more connected when something happens in a place where they had traveled with us. They care.

Weissmann: When I visited Northern Ireland 10 years ago, I went on a Belfast taxi tour, in which a driver gives a balanced, objective tour to sites connected to the Troubles. Has anyone else taken or come across a similar kind of reconciliation tour?

Ellwood: I’ve been to the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. Part of what made it fascinating was that the curation was outsourced to a third party.

Klara Glowczewska, executive travel editor, Town & Country: I was also there, a long time ago. It made an incredibly strong impression on me. I wasn’t on a reconciliation trip, but it was led by people very involved in the issues — NGOs who were working on education and health.

I was also in Israel right before the Second Intifada, and things were hugely tense; nothing happened when I was there, but, boy, it was at a strong simmer. My impressions as a traveler came from conversations with Israelis and Palestinians.

I’ve been to Cuba, and I was in South Africa during apartheid. I was very young then, in my 20s, but those trips, and a few others like that, were some of the most memorable trips. And conversations I had with people who had different views are, to me, the most exciting kind of travel. I am a huge believer in this kind of travel. Intellectual curiosity drives you to go to places where it’s not about luxury; there’s just so much going on, and there’s so much to talk about. What you both are doing,  it’s amazing.

Ashlock: I’d like to add that one thing that’s so curious to me is the constant confusion of people with their leadership. Like, the Palestinian people are Hamas, Israeli people are the Netanyahu government. Not true. You go to a place and try to get to know who people really are.

Abu Sarah: We understand that — when it’s about us. We don’t want people to judge the American people based on our leadership. But somehow, we easily do it to others.

What goes into Palestinian media is everything about the far right in Israeli politics. When the Israeli minister of national security speaks, however indirectly, about ethnic cleansing, that will make it into Palestinian news. And in the Israeli news, you hear everything that happened on Oct. 7 and what somebody from Hamas might say about doing it again. If that’s all we hear, we have a serious problem and are probably going to have terrible assumptions.

One project we started is a nonprofit sister organization to set up a museum focused on dual narratives. It’s online, for now; we’re hoping it might become traveling and permanent, where we can tell a more complete story.

Cohen: Do you see other travel industry companies responding to what you’re doing? Are any contacting you?

Abu Sarah: In multiple places. Initially, the reaction to dual narratives was, “This is stupid. Why pay for an extra tour guide?” But those same companies are now using our language on their websites, even ones that have a strong political agenda. Some companies want to spend one day of their tours with us, and we’re doing more of that. We’re signing a deal with a cruise line. The concept of having two guides is becoming much more popular in Israel.

We’ve also seen things that are not exactly our model, but with similarities. In Athens, there’s a company that has Syrian, Afghan and African refugees giving tours. In Barcelona, these guys from a synagogue are doing tours through the eyes of a refugee. In London, former homeless guys are leading tours.

Guccione: That’s a bit grim.

Abu Sarah: It’s not. It’s actually very powerful. They will talk about how an area may deal with homelessness, but it’s not the main thing they talked about. One of the tours is focused on music. I’ve heard that many people say it’s the best tour they’ve ever been on.

Weissmann: Tourism Cares, the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA) and the Jordan Tourism Board brought some people to Jordan because, basically, Jordan tourism has just fallen off a cliff as a result of the war in Gaza. I moderated a webinar with them after they returned. ATTA CEO Shannon Stowell said the only thing about the trip that gave him trepidation was how he was going to be received as an American in an Arab country in the Middle East. Do you ever see that sort of apprehension?

Abu Sarah: We recently had a few trips to Egypt where we had 20 people signed up for each. People began to postpone. They weren’t worried that the war would go to Egypt but about how people would react to them because the U.S. is perceived to be pro-Israel. It’s a real fear. But I spoke with [another operator] who brought Americans to Egypt, and he said the reaction among Egyptians was the exact opposite. His guests were warmly welcomed.

Ashlock: That’s because the people were interacting with them as Americans, not as right-wing avatars of the American government.

Abu Sarah: If anything, people are desperate right now for Americans. Economically, this is not hurting only Israelis and Palestinians; I’ve had trips in Spain with cancellations because people were afraid of protests there.

Glowczewska: I’ve heard Moroccan tourism is down terribly, as well.

Abu Sarah: We just had a Jewish group in Morocco also worried how they’d be received. When they got back, one person said they are telling every Jewish person they know, “You need to go to Morocco. You have nothing to worry about. We told people there that we’re Jewish and they said, yeah, thank you for being here.”

Ellwood: I think we forget that daily life returns in a lot of these difficult places. At a dinner, I sat next to a woman who was a luxury travel agent from Kiev and asked, “How’s your business?” “Pretty good,” she said. Of course, she’s not working with people in the east of the country. She was helping Ukrainians travel overseas. But some Ukrainians are living ordinary lives, including going to Rome for the weekend.

Ashlock: I met a Ukrainian hotelier who’s about to open a second hotel.

Ellwood: I just think about World War II, where we picture everyone constantly thinking about conflict. But when a conflict moves into a chronic phase, normal life returns because you can’t operate at that level. And people who want to live normal lives go on vacation.

Weissmann: Aziz, I don’t know whether you’ve come across a nonprofit called the International Institute for Peace Through Tourism. Because poverty can lead to conflict, they look for ways to bring tourism to poor communities. Have you seen examples of that happening?

Abu Sarah: Vietnam would be a good example. Tourism has had a huge positive impact on U.S.-Vietnam relations. If you talk to Vietnamese today, their perception of Americans is more positive than negative.

The economic piece is important. When Thomas Cook first started bringing people to Luxor in Egypt, the residents were extremely against it. The British assumed it was because the community was Muslim and the Brits were Christian, but it turned out that the people were upset because the tourism money was not going to local people. They felt they’d have to change their way of life, but they wouldn’t benefit from it. That’s still the case in some places today.

Weissmann: Aziz said he doesn’t mind working in countries ruled by authoritarians, though he draws the line with the Taliban. I’d like to get everyone else’s views about visiting countries that are widely viewed in the West as being repressive against their own people.

Ashlock: The two things that I think about most are: keeping people safe — physically and psychically — and where’s the money going? Those are key considerations. Assuming I’ve answered those questions to my satisfaction, then, yes, by all means go.

But I think another way of answering this question is to have a look at ourselves in the mirror. What do people say about this country and the way we treat our people? There’s a lot of hypocrisy that goes on in the West about these other places.

Guccione: Totally agree.

Ashlock: I don’t mean to treat authoritarian regimes lightly but, again, a government is not its people. Meeting people on the ground and finding out what they’re all about is what solves problems.

Williams: If you’re going to a place and you get to be a part of an experience aiding them, I feel like it’s a worthwhile experience.

Glowczewska: I always think one should go. At Conde Nast Traveler, back in the day, we often ran stories like, “Myanmar, yes or no?” I think that’s always the question one asks in travel, particularly in a country where problematic things are happening. But witness the American South; people from Europe go and are horrified about what they see and talk about apartheid in rural Alabama or Mississippi.

Guccione: Or Los Angeles, where the police have shot citizens.

Glowczewska: It’s everywhere [in America]. I do think there’s a huge benefit to seeing the reality on the ground, being educated and being a witness.

Amy Virshup, travel editor, New York Times: We shouldn’t kid ourselves about our ability to change the places we’re going. If you look at China, for example, there was the belief that China’s integration into the capitalist economy would somehow fundamentally change China. But look at what they’ve done in Hong Kong.

Guccione: I’m interested in going to repressive places. But I don’t want to go to Russia because I am personally offended and upset by the reaction of Russian people toward Ukrainians. To pretend they don’t know what’s going on is like what the German people did under Nazism.

Ellwood: I understand when people think, I don’t want to go somewhere because it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. Maybe I just feel like going on holiday, and I don’t feel comfortable going somewhere because it’s going to harsh my vacation vibe. I think our tone is a little crusading. Not every trip has to involve moral rectitude.

Photos by Steve Hochstein/Harvard Studio