Arnie Weissmann
Six years ago the industry nonprofit Tourism Cares and the Jordan Tourism Board created the Meaningful Map of Jordan. Most points of interest highlighted on it are off the beaten tourist path; the initiative was intended to draw visitors to little-known and underappreciated social enterprises reflective of Jordanian culture. Tour operators that have visited some of the places added them to their itineraries, bringing benefits to travelers and hosts alike.
It would appear that meaningful travel is on the rise: 24 additional destinations have joined the project and are filling in what is hoped to one day be a global meaningful map.
I've written before about Mejdi Tours, which also has origins in the Middle East, and which provides a different type of meaningful travel. The cofounders of Mejdi, one Palestinian and one Jewish, pioneered the concept of "duel narratives." They design tours for travelers who visit countries experiencing intercommunal tensions, letting residents tell their perspectives about complex political landscapes during a series of meetings that expose visitors to multiple -- often conflicting -- partisan viewpoints.
These days, it seems that political polarization is so widespread that Mejdi won't be able to cover every country experiencing heightened tensions. I wondered whether there was a way for an independent traveler to try to gain insight into situations while also achieving another of Mejdi's goals: gaining simultaneous understanding, and even empathy, for multiple viewpoints, including ones that are diametrically opposed to each other. Even for Mejdi, whose founders have a deep background in conflict resolution, to accomplish that is just this side of magic.
In conflicts with high political voltage, the work of constructing a listening tour is, I believe, best left to experienced professionals like Mejdi's trained guides. Listening without expressing one's own opinions about a foreign domestic conflict, especially one covered extensively in media, is simply too difficult for the average traveler.
But absent a hot conflict or one where the traveler may have already formed opinions, I think it's likely possible to solicit different points of view in the course of one's travels. My favorite person in the world to talk politics with lives in the U.K.; he and I are on different sides of the left/right center point, but when we talk about domestic issues that may be controversial in our own countries, neither of us has already established a knee-jerk reaction to the positions of the other. As a result, we ask each other questions, actually listen to the answers, then ask more questions. Before we know it, it's 4 a.m. and a bottle of Scotch is gone.
In countries with complex issues that we may have formed opinions about, we can still try to listen, though I'd venture most people would find it difficult, if not impossible, to hold their tongues about what they think.
Someone pointed me to a recent blog post on Substack by Robert Reich, who worked in the Ford and Carter administrations and was secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His politics can be polarizing, but this post sought to be the opposite and perhaps points to a dialectic process to help visitors look at a difficult political situation through a lens of empathy.
Reich met with a group of students, some Jews and some Palestinians, to discuss the war in Gaza. He sought to discover if there were moral grounds, stripped of political context, that they could agree on.
As a result of his moderation of the group, they ended up agreeing on seven points, all on the basis of a shared understanding of morality. Some of the points of agreement were critical of Hamas, some critical of Israel. But some also transcended the details of the conflict and addressed more generalized principals, such as it's wrong to murder and kidnap innocent civilians or to urge genocide against any group.
I don't think it would be a good idea for visitors to a country to try to organize a session with opposing political viewpoints to try to find common ground, as Reich did. Mejdi Tours' approach is to withhold judgement while speaking with partisans rather than having a debate with them.
But in reading Reich's post, I thought his search for universal agreement on near-universally accepted ideas of good and bad behavior might help visitors to deal with just how complex local politics can be in a foreign land. I suspect they'll find that, in most situations, the issues are thornier than they had thought and come away with more humility and empathy as well as appreciation for the fact that few, if any, political causes -- even ones you may agree with -- will pass a purity test against one's own professed moral beliefs.
When politics are in this way stripped of righteousness, a step toward reconciliation has been taken.