In 2005, Aziz Abu Sarah—a Palestinian then living in east Jerusalem—met with a Jewish friend who was visiting Israel from the US. Although it was the tail end of his tour, his friend hadn’t met any Muslims or Arabs on his trip, and he was harboring anti-Palestinian views.
“He was so one-sided, even though he knew me,” says Abu Sarah. It was a revelation that planted the seed for Mejdi Tours, a tour operator intended to bridge the divide between two at-odds populations in a country the size of New Jersey.
While this has been a slow period for travel to Israel, the team at Mejdi has not been resting. Instead, it’s been planning and activating exciting next steps in its efforts to scale dual-narrative travel to other parts of the world, including South Africa, Rwanda, the United Arab Emirates and the Balkans.
Take Pomegranate’s 10-person group tour of Morocco in April 2025, which will take guests to the country’s key historic and cultural cities of Rabat, Fez, Ouarzazate and Marrakech. The itinerary includes plenty of the usual fun sightseeing: a visit to Casablanca’s enormous Hassan II Mosque, cooking workshops in Fez and ATV rides across Erg Chebbi’s desert dunes.
“If this ceasefire turns into a more permanent agreement and travel restrictions in the West Bank ease, we expect a significant return of travelers,” Abu Sarah says. When trips do resume in 2025, Mejdi and Pomegranate will have to be prepared to deal with steeper challenges and more dangerous misconceptions, with social media having fueled countless false narratives. In the US alone, those types of theories were behind more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents between October 7, 2023, and Sept. 24, 2024, according to the Anti-Defamation League—a spike of more than 200% year over year.
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