There are no tour guides left in Israel. There are only job seekers with guiding licenses, waiting by the phone for a tourism industry that has not come back.

I am one of them. My calendar used to be full, booked with the ancient sites people flew across the world to see. Masada. Jerusalem. Caesarea. Now it holds almost nothing, and when the phone does ring, the request is always the same two words. Not Jerusalem. The Gaza envelope, and Nova.

I don’t think the world has noticed this reversal, and I’m not sure we have either.

For the twenty years I have been a tour guide, people came to Israel to go deep. They came on pilgrimage to holy places. They came to stand on ground where ten civilizations sit one on top of another, to feel the oldest parts of their own story under their feet. Depth was the whole point. It was the narrative I told, and it was true.

In those years, no one ever asked me for the western Negev. Not because it isn’t beautiful. Because, in the shorthand of the trade, there was nothing to see there. The communities along the Gaza border were young, the first settlers arrived only in the 1940s, and the land held none of the ancient layers that people crossed oceans for. It was farmland and kibbutzim. You don’t fly from Ohio for farmland.

Now that farmland is the only ground anyone wants to walk. And the deep places, the layered stone and the holy hills, sit empty. There is,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)