Lonely Planet Guide : Israel & the Palestinian Territories

I am no Middle East expert and I do not know who is right and who is wrong in the conflict - but in any event, I do not want my guidebook to preach to me. I buy guidebooks for travel, accommodation, eating and sightseeing information - and this part is only so-so. The guide has some helpful info (for example, about passport stamps and about beating the bureaucratic system - or at least minimizing its impact). The book has not been researched sufficiently and choices of hotels, for example, often feel they have been picked at random.

There is one thing you realize after reading about a dozen Lonely Planet guides: a very large part of the book is actually cut and pasted from one book to another. When you are paying for a Lonely Planet guide, you are paying for much less particular destination information than you imagine: there are pages and pages of generalities of no practical relevance. Why insult intelligence of a reader with gems such as "pack as little as possible but take everything you need"? I can think of no other reason but to artificially increase the volume of the book so it seems a better value for money.

As usual, information about "Getting there" is very, very poor. Same tired "advice" about buying tickets from discount travel agents (and you thought about buying them from your dry-cleaners, didn't you?), same behind-the-times feeling when it comes to internet (although now there is a reluctantly compiled list of travel sites, which conveniently excludes some of the biggest and the most helpful on-line travel agents, to which the authors are presumably opposed on ideological grounds).

Where sightseeing is concerned, the guide lack focus, descriptions are uninspired and don't feel particularly tempting.

There are many other guides to Israel, take your pick - but Lonely Planet is best left on the shelf, unless of course you want to have a full collection.


Bias Does Come Through   June 11, 2002
 19 out of 23 found this review helpful

Like most of the Lonely Planet books with which I am familiar, this one has a lot of good facts that are very useful for the traveler. The information on passport stamps, for example, is very handy if you plan on traveling in other countries in the Middle East.

However, I have to disagree with avalonwitch and agree with alfassa; the pro-Palestinian (or anti-Israeli; pick your poison) bias in this book is very strong and pervasive. Right from the beginning, one notices things such as the fact that B.C. and A.D. are used, rather than the Jewish or Muslim equivalents (or the widely-accepted B.C.E. and C.E.) There's a sidebar swipe at the Mossad, for example, that concentrates on their "bungles" (of which there are, of course, some) rather than such successes as the detection of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, the successful capture of Nazi war-criminals, and so on. This attitude is all through the book.

That said, there's some good stuff here. I just wish Lonely Planet's editors could have been more even-handed. After all, while Israel has certainly done some things that are pretty awful (e.g., Lebannon), the Palestinians aren't exactly free of blame, either (e.g., strapping bombs to themselves and going to discos to blow themselves up). An even-handed approach would have made this another excellent Lonely Planets guidebook.


Tough to bear only for certain people   December 30, 2001
 8 out of 39 found this review helpful

alfassa is angry because this book states things that are true and hard for him to bear looking at. It seems that even the smallest, slightest compassion towards Palestinians expressed anywhere on this planet draws the ire and vitriol of anyone who is pro-Israel and pro-Zionist. No one can deliver such attrocious treatment to peoples without drawing blowback in response. I think this book should have been titled Israeli Terrorist and Palestinian Terrorist. When a people are terrorized for 50 plus years by state funded terrorism, and those people are not allowed to have a military with which to protect themselves, what do you expect?? Individuals who react to military violence and state funded racism with further violence are then named terrorist themselves. I call it blowback. Stuff like this doesn't happen for nothing.

Of all the racism I've ever seen in the world, I've never seen it as bad as the Israelis have done to the Palestinians. And my taxes are fully funding this.


A Biased Pro-Palestinian Point of View   August 18, 2001
 16 out of 27 found this review helpful

Budget travelers frequently rely on the Lonely Planet series to guide them in thrifty and educated choices for journeys to exotic locales. Unfortunately, the series' Israel & The Palestinian Territories (3rd Edition) by Andrew Humphreys and Neil Tilbury (1996) is anything but edifying. The volume is filled with half-truths and innuendo, and displays a generally disagreeable attitude toward Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.

This decidedly biased tone pervades the book and colors the authors' rendering of historical detail. The legacy of Israel given in the `Facts about the Country' section reflects the traditional Arab version of events almost from start to finish. For example, rather than describing the newborn Israel as being attacked by five well-equipped Arab armies, as well as British-supplied Palestinian militia groups, the authors write that "fighting erupted between the Arabs and the Jews" and "Palestinian Arabs, primarily a peasant society, were no match for the Jewish immigrants with modern weaponry and strategy."

Israel's current security concerns are treated mockingly by Lonely Planet. In an explanation of the prevalence of weapons in the hands of Israel's youthful soldiers, the guide passes quickly over the terrorist threat the citizen army guards against to say that guns "double as crucial fashion accessories" and are worn in social settings for reasons of "narcissism." Military service is said to conclude when Israelis reach their mid-30s and "have finally grown out of teenage things like guns."

About Israeli airport security measures, designed to protect passengers against terrorist violence, the guide writes "middle-aged American couples with names like Weintraub can waltz through this in minutes ... everyone else ... ought to bring a long engrossing novel."

Myriad other inaccurate and offensive passages about Israel mar Israel & The Palestinian Territories and undoubtedly mislead thousands of tourists who make the mistake of relying on this guide.