Guest Post: My brother's guide to Israel
My brother recently asked me to edit a guide to Israel he wrote for a visitor. This isn’t the style of something I would write, but it struck near enough to how it felt growing up there (especially the part about Jaffa, which is ironic because unlike my brother I’ve never lived in Jaffa) that I decided to publish it here.
This isn’t a piece I would or could write myself; I’m more sparse and more systemic, and when I am emotional I do it differently. I always look for context, a baseline to compare things too; this just is what it is, a piece by someone who grew up and lives in the same place and hasn’t spent half his life moving around the world. Because of that half, I couldn’t write this piece. But there was another half of my life before that, and that half feels too much of this. If I didn’t have a piece like this published, the writing here would be missing something.
A Journey Across the Spine of Memory
This pamphlet is not only a travel guide. It is a reflection, a tracing of lines between place and self. These are not merely sites to visit, but pieces of the puzzle that made me: stones I walked over barefoot, alleyways that knew my secrets, beaches that cooled down my sunburns, cities that shaped the rhythm of my thoughts. Every chapter of this journey is, in some way, a mirror: To a market that taught me chaos, or a desert that taught me patience and freedom.
I invite you to walk through these places not just with your feet, but with your eyes open to memory and contradiction. What you will find is not only a country. You find the place that made me.
Tel Aviv – "Chutzpah" carved in concrete and sand
If you want to understand the pulse of the country, Go to Tel-Aviv. It is the Heart: Fast, warm, restless. Pumping blood and oxygen to the whole body. Founded in 1909 with seashells drawn in the sand to divide land, it becomes the first modern Hebrew city: Born from imagination, planning, and a kind of radiant stubbornness.
1909, the lottery to divide the land. Story goes the guy on the said yelled at them: "Crazy people! You’re building on sand!"
And for me, it is my favorite. The crown jewel of the Zionist project. A city that faces west, not just geographically but philosophically: Toward the sea, toward the setting sun, toward possibility. A city stubborn enough to be born from a dream and make it real. Tel-Aviv lives in the moment; it gazes to the future. It stands for secularism, for liberalism, for human invention. It is where art blooms, startups rise, and strangers speak freely. It's a place where one can create, rebuild, and love people - and life itself.
It shimmers with a strange, white light- from the Bauhaus balconies, from the Mediterranean, from the sheer kinetic energy of youth and techno parties. Tel-
Aviv boasts the largest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world, earning it the name "The White City" and a UNESCO World Heritage designation.
Cafés overflow with the clamor of voices: Hebrew, Russian, English, Arabic. The air buzzes with argument and espresso. Conversations spill from high-tech offices into bike lanes and wine bars. It’s a city of late arrivals and unshakable libido, where the future is not just hoped for, but expected. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel from a modest house here.
But Tel Aviv never stands alone. A few minutes south, Jaffa - older, quieter, deeper - anchors it. And here, the past still breathes.
Jaffa – A Port City Dreaming in Layers
Once, I lived here. After the heaviness of Jerusalem — with its sacred dust and its centuries pressing down on every stone - Jaffa felt like exhaling for the first time. I arrived not with fanfare, but with a quiet hope. The sea greeted me with its salt and
breeze, and the light - oh, the light - was a different kind of language. In Jerusalem, shadows speak. In Jaffa, everything glows.
I lived in a small flat with access to a big rooftop, overlooking the clock tower and the sea. The call to prayer drifted 5 times a day in the salty air, and the scent of basil and clean laundry drying in the sun curled up from the alley below. I wandered its streets with the sense that the stones were not watching me, but walking alongside me. Here, nothing demands reverence — but everything earns it. The air was lighter, the past gentler, the city so close to the sea it leans into it. Every alley told me of sailors, conquerors, merchants, and other immigrants who lived here or went through the city, leaving a mark.
It was not a long chapter, but it etched itself deeply. I still miss Jaffa, like one misses a lost lover who lives just a few towns over, and yet remains completely out of reach. I pass it sometimes, on the way to somewhere else, and feel a sharp kind of silence and nostalgia settle inside me.
"I long for Jaffa.
I dream of oranges in the alleys,
and the sea breeze rising through the window shutters,
and my mother’s voice calling me to eat.
Jaffa is not a memory. It is the breath between verses."
— Mahmoud Darwish
Jaffa was, before 1948, a thriving Arab city — a cultural and economic center known for its citrus groves, its publishing houses, and its vibrant port. During the 1948 war, much of the Arab population was displaced, and the city was eventually merged into Tel Aviv. But unlike other depopulated towns, Jaffa’s buildings were not razed. The Ottoman stone houses, the narrow alleyways, the mosques and churches — they remain, layered with history.
You don’t walk through Jaffa. You drift. The alleys curve with intention, the buildings stand in quiet defiance of time. Jaffa, mentioned in Egyptian sources from the 15th century BCE, is one of the oldest ports in the world — more than 4,000 years of conquests, legends, and salted trade winds shape its walls.
Napoleon arrived in 1799, fought the Ottomans, and according to legend, stood weeping over his plague-stricken soldiers. Jonah supposedly boarded his ship to escape God's call here, and the Greek myth of Andromeda's rock is tied to its coast.
Jaffa is not a museum. It breathes. Arab and Jewish residents live side by side, unevenly, uneasily, but undeniably. It is a place of markets and Mosques, hipster bars and centuries-old minarets, contemporary art and ancient stones. It is layered with contradiction and tension, and therefore, with truth.
"This is Yaffo my girl this is Yaffo,
it seeps into your blood just like wine"
Judean Foothills – Where the Hills Whisper Secrets
There are landscapes that declare themselves with immediacy - cliffs that fall into the sea, snowcaps that pierce the sky. And then there are those that withhold themselves, that unfold gradually, modestly, that require the traveler to pause before they can be understood. The Judean Foothills belong to this quieter category.
Here, between the highlands of Jerusalem and the wide breath of the coastal plain, lies a soft band of limestone ridges. They rise not with drama but with persistence, as if patiently shaping the course of centuries. The land rolls, not in arrogance but in memory.
At eighteen, I spent a year volunteering here. A young guide with a pack on his back and dust in his mouth, speaking to younger kids while learning, all the while, to listen. That year, just before my military service, I learned how to read a landscape. Not as background — but as biography. The vegetation was not lush, yet it lived with restraint and certainty: Carob trees, their limbs bent with time; dense patches of Mediterranean scrub, with spiny broom and aromatic sages woven into every slope. The earth crumbled underfoot, and beneath it - in silence - the past waited, whispering, humming.
Two millennia earlier, these gentle hills became the theater of desperate defiance. During the Great Revolt against Rome, Jewish fighters carved into the rock to form elaborate hideout systems — narrow escape tunnels, storage chambers, secret
trapdoors. At Horvat Midras, Beit Guvrin, and Hurvat Burgin, these burrows remain: Dark, silent, and astonishing. They do not proclaim glory; they whisper survival.
But this land's story stretches long before the revolt. In the northwestern corner of the Shfela rises Tel Azekah, a mound that watches over the Ellah Valley, as if appointed guardian to a moment that shaped history and myth. It was here, the Bible says, that the Philistine Goliath stepped forward, and where David, a shepherd boy not yet touched by kingship, took up a sling. The stones he picked were local. The valley is still there. So is the breeze that moves through the wheat, unchanged.
Stand on Azekah, and you see a landscape spread like a scroll: Fields of barley and sunflowers, hedgerows, and quiet villages. But layered beneath the hush are the cries of armies, the thunder of myth. What happened here shaped the imagination of a people. And it still does.
Even today, the Ella Valley remains wide and open, a natural corridor between the highlands and the coast. Its geography made it a perennial battlefield — not because it asked for it, but because it could not avoid it. Those who control the valley, control movement. And so, its history is lined with Egyptian chariots and foot soldiers, with prophets and Roman generals, with silence that came too late. Beneath every almond tree, behind every collapsed stone wall, something remains, waiting patiently for a traveler, an archeologist or a shepherded to find it and shed light on it.
And perhaps that is what I came to love most during that year — not the history itself, but the way it breathes. Not the ruins, but the patience with which the land lets them remain. The Judean Foothills do not demand awe. They offer it, quietly, to those who are willing to kneel and look closely.
But even amid that heavy historical burden, the Shfela is not a tragic land. For me it's where I can always find inner peace. It grows vines again. It shelters jackals and porcupines. It offers shade and stories. And it reminds me of the better part in myself, and of modest beauty and simplicity that wait for me to return to them.
The Judean Desert – scripture in stones
When you enter the Judean Desert, leave behind your expectations of a landscape. This is not a postcard desert. It's a fractured, chalk-pale wilderness, carved by wind, flash flood, and the patient tectonic forces of the Dead Sea Transform fault line. It begins just past Jerusalem’s eastern hills and drops rapidly, shedding height and vegetation until only rock and sky remain.
The Judean Desert is part of a larger geological story — a sloped desert
running along the Syrian-African Rift, where rainfall is rare and silence is absolute. Wadis (dry riverbed) twist through stone like veins through bone. Rain falls briefly, violently, sculpting the land into steep gorges and hidden pools.
Before I ever set foot in the Judean Desert with a map and compass, I feared it. A somewhat childish fear of ghosts and nightfall, but also disturbing unease stirred by its hard cliffs and deep canyons - a world carved downward, not upward. The edges were sharp. The drops were real. And in that silence, nothing softened your thoughts.
But this was also the place where I became a hiker — not through airports or cities, but in footsteps and solitude. My first trails were drawn here, along the broken paths of Nahal Qumeran and the winding descent of Wadi Qelt. My first night hikes, under stars that didn’t blink and a bright moon, happened between the echoing walls of dry riverbeds. I learned to listen to the land, to know its moods by the wind.
The Judean Desert shaped me. It taught me to carry only what I needed, to walk with both patience and urgency, to find water in places others missed. There is a kind of apprenticeship in returning to the same terrain again and again, not because it changes, but because you do. You climb the cliffs here, only to descend - From Jerusalem’s 800 meters above sea level to the Dead Sea’s 430 meters below. Every step pulls you deeper into something older than time. Among the most remarkable places are Birket Zfira, a high desert pool perched on the edge of an 80-meter cliff, and Rahaf Canyon, perhaps Israel’s most beautiful canyoning route.
In this desert, human presence is marked not by monuments but by paths — David, when he was just a shepherd boy and far from becoming king, Nabatean traders, Judean rebels, monks, soldiers, pilgrims. The Qumran Caves, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, lie in its northern reaches. This desert doesn’t ask to be admired. It asks to be endured, understood. It is not the background. It is scripture.
Just north of here lies Ein Gedi a place that shouldn't exist, and yet does. A spring-fed oasis cradled in the unforgiving stone of the Judean Desert, where water flows and life blooms defiantly. For thousands of years, people have come here not just to survive, but to thrive — cultivating gardens, pressing dates, and, most famously, distilling a scent unlike any other. The balm of Ein Gedi — known in ancient texts as persimmon or afarsimon — was no ordinary perfume. It was sacred, luxurious, reserved for temples and kings. Roman emperors coveted it, priests guarded its secrets. The recipe is lost to time, but the myth of its fragrance remains: Rich, spicy, floral, a scent that carried the soul of the desert in it.
Ein Gedi is life where there should be none. Ibex scale its cliffs. Hyraxes bask in the sun. Date palms bend in the breeze above sweet water that emerges, impossibly, from beneath the rock. It is not lush in the way of northern valleys — its beauty is sharper, earned. It reminds you that even in the harshest conditions, something soft can grow.
"There are people who cannot live in this place. / It’s too yellow for them, too quiet — the kind of quiet that can drive you mad. / There are people for whom God feels too vast in this desert. / People who get frightened when they hear the stars at night. / But there are others who cling to this silence, / and cannot part from it again. / People like that stay here."
-Chaim Guri
The Dead Sea – Float Like a Cork, Glow Like Cleopatra
Now you arrive at the bottom of the world. Literally. At 430 meters below sea level, the Dead Sea is the lowest exposed point on Earth. The water is ten times saltier than the ocean. You float without effort, the body lifted like a leaf. There are no boats. No fish. No sound beyond your own breath. The minerals - magnesium, bromide, potassium - cling to your skin, your lashes, your tongue. DO NOT OPEN YOUR EYES OR PEE IN THE SEA.
This basin has been a retreat for centuries. Cleopatra allegedly seeks its mud. Herod the Great builds fortresses overlooking its shores, most notably Masada, where Jewish rebels made their last stand against Rome in 73 CE. Roman generals praise its healing properties.
Cover yourself in black mud, and let it dry in the sun, then wash it away and feel the desert begin to whisper. Watch salt crystallize on driftwood like snow in a place where it never falls.
But this place is vanishing. The water recedes by a meter each year. Sinkholes blossom overnight. The land is shifting, and the sea is drowning. Go now, while there is still a shore to stand on.
Jerusalem - of Gold, Copper and Light
"Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity."
-Yehuda Amichai
From the depths of the Dead Sea, the road climbs sharply, stubbornly. And then, between curves and cliffs, Jerusalem rises with towers and gravity. To be born in Jerusalem is to inherit a weight. You do not choose it, but you carry it. The city does not offer much comfort. It offers meaning, and meaning is not always kind.
It takes time to realize how much attention this city receives. How the entire region seems to tilt toward it. How others speak of it with awe or longing, while for me it is the backdrop to first heartbreaks, teenage boredom, the scent of jasmine and burnt pita.
Pilgrims weep here. They arrive barefoot, trembling, their eyes scanning the stones, almost expecting them to whisper. They touch the walls, the tombs, the water fonts, and something releases. Something old, and holy. Down the street, I buy cheap beer with a friend, the golden sunset at our backs. For me Jerusalem is the scenery for first loves, for adolescent doubts, for slow Saturday walks and the sound of church bells mixed with car horns. It is not less sacred for that — only more human.
This city is many things to many people. A promise. A burden. A symbol. For some, it’s worth dying for. For others, it’s a reason to stay alive. Journalists circle it. The entire Middle East glances at it as if waiting for a signal. It is the focal point of the Arab — Jewish conflict.
The Old City occupies less than one square kilometer and holds more claims, tears, and footnotes than entire continents. The Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher — each no more than a ten-minute walk apart, each echoing with centuries of longing and conflict. Herod builds here. The Romans
destroy. The Byzantines rebuild. The crusaders invade. The Ottomans wall it. The British map it. Jews and Arabs fight over it still. No one forgets it.
Tourists \ Yehuda Amichai
Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.
Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Tower,
I placed my two heavy baskets at my side.
A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch
from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!"
I said to myself: Redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: But next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."
Modern Jerusalem spills outwards: To the Knesset, to Mahane Yehuda market, to neighborhoods that speak in Russian, Amharic, Yiddish, and
Arabic. Here, you argue about God over eggplant. You sip wine near tombs. You forget the day of the week and remember what century you’re in only by the call to prayer.
Iron, Lion, Zion
“By the rivers of Babylon where we sat down
Yeah, we wept when we remembered Zion”
For almost 2,000 years, Jews have sung the name of this city in prayers, broken glasses in weddings for it, and faced its direction in mourning and in hope. Jerusalem is not merely geography in the Jewish imagination — it is destiny itself. The word "Zion" — once the name of a particular hill in the city — became a symbol of longing, of promise, of spiritual return. Generations who had never seen it spoke of it as if they had. In exile, they said: "Next year in Jerusalem."
For the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, the city is home, memory, and wound. The call to prayer rises over the Old City’s stones. Markets buzz. Children play soccer in alleys beneath minarets. And beneath it all, there is a quiet persistence — to live, to remain, to endure despite the hardships of conflict. For Palestinians, Jerusalem is not just a spiritual capital, it is a claim to identity. A right. A longing held in poems and protests. And it's not just them- the whole Muslim world longs for the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where according to tradition prophet Mohammad was brought to in a miraculous night journey. This was where he left earth to meet Moses, and then God himself up in the heavens, and to this day it is the 3rd holiest place to Islam- and the most sensitive of them all.
And finally, last and least: For the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem — the Haredim — the city is not merely important, it is central. In neighborhoods like
Mea Shearim and Geula, life flows by different rhythms. Yiddish fills the air, not Hebrew. Time bends around Shabbat, holidays, and centuries-old customs. To walk through their world is to witness a deep, insular devotion: A people waiting for redemption, living as though it were always near. These are the Jews who chose to stay in exile.
Haifa – The City That Never Announces Itself
If Jerusalem is gravity and Tel Aviv momentum, Haifa is balance. It stretches up Mount Carmel from the port like a quiet mosaic — faith, labor, and sea foam layered into a single frame. This is where my grandfather arrived, A child escaping Germany with yesterday's world collapsing behind him. He disembarked in silence and built a new life, which started here.
This city is one of labor and humility — the third-largest city, yet never boastful. The British run their Mandate rail from here. The Technion gives it industry. The port gives it rhythm. But its soul remains quieter than its role. Haifa was also the launching point for many of Israel’s socialist pioneers and early maritime trade. In Wadi Nisnas, you taste coexistence: Manakeesh beside burekas, Arabic poetry on the walls beside Hebrew street signs. The Bahá’í Gardens, whose golden dome is visible from land and sea, descend in perfect symmetry. The German Colony below hums with coffee and cardamom.
Here, synagogues, mosques, and churches share a skyline. Coexistence is not a poster. It is an old man and his neighbor sitting at the same bakery every morning.
Carmel – The evergreen mountain
Mount Carmel is not dramatic. It does not rise sharply or blaze with snow. It looms with calm. A limestone ridge, 25 kilometers long, cloaked in pine and legend. Canaanites, prophets, monks — all find sanctuary here.
This is also a Druze country. The Druze, a small and ancient religious community with roots stretching back to 11th-century Egypt, have made their homes in the Carmel’s folds for generations. Their faith is a closed one — a blend of Islam, philosophy, and mysticism — known only fully to the initiated. But their hospitality is open, and their identity uniquely poised between tradition and the modern state.
In Israel, the Druze stand apart. Unlike most Arab citizens, many serve in the military, and their villages — like Daliyat al-Carmel and Isfiya — are full of both patriotic pride and quiet complexity. Their loyalty to the state sits alongside
deep ties to Lebanon and Syria, where fellow Druze live separated by borders but not belief.
In Ein Hod, artists drink espresso among olive trees. In Daliyat al-Carmel, Druze hosts serve labneh and coffee sweet enough to bring you to silence. Elijah stands here, calling down fire. The caves - some dating back 500,000 years - still hold the breath of early humans. The Carmel Caves are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The forest, regrown after devastating fires, speaks in hushes.
This area was also the background to the Aliya B- Ha'apala: The code name given by Jewish institutions to the illegal immigration of Jews during World War two. These trails saw thousands of men, women and children, who managed to escape the fire and tried to reach a safe haven. Some succeeded, some were caught by the British and arrested, and many others drowned on the way, the Carmel being the last piece of land they saw in the horizon.