To Know Israel, You Have to Experience It.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what travel really gives us. Not the photographs we take or the places we check off a list, but something much deeper: the way it changes how we see people, places, and ourselves. Travel turns what was once distant into something personal. It replaces assumptions with conversations and certainty with curiosity. And there are few places where I have seen that transformation happen more profoundly than in Israel.

For years, through my work creating meaningful Israel travel experiences, I have welcomed families, communities and organizations from around the world. They often arrive with questions, expectations and sometimes uncertainty about what they will encounter. And again and again, I watch something shift. They leave with connections, memories and a more complicated, personal and human relationship with a place they may have thought they already knew. Because Israel is not simply a destination. It is a place you have to experience.

It is walking through the ancient streets of Jerusalem and feeling the layers of history beneath your feet. It is tasting food shaped by generations of traditions, meeting entrepreneurs building the future, farmers caring for the land, artists creating beauty, and families who open their homes and share their stories. It is discovering the Israel that rarely makes the headlines.

Over the past year, traveling to Israel has required more commitment than it once did. A mother and daughter recently arrived after three cancelled flights. They could have postponed their trip, and no one would have blamed them. Instead, they kept trying. They weren’t coming simply for a vacation. They were coming to reconnect with each other and with Israel. After everything that had happened, being here mattered enough to keep trying.

Another family faced a different disappointment when their son’s Israel program was cancelled. They could have waited for another year, when traveling felt easier. Instead, they decided to come anyway. Before their son left for college, they wanted him to experience Israel for himself, not through social media, not through headlines, and not through someone else’s perspective. They wanted him to walk the streets, meet the people, ask his own questions and create his own memories.

These families reminded me of something I have witnessed many times: you can learn about Israel from anywhere in the world, but there are things you can only understand when you are here. You understand something different when a restaurant owner welcomes you like family, when a small business owner shares not only the challenges they are facing but also their hopes for the future, or when a guide becomes a friend. Sometimes a conversation over coffee lasts much longer than expected because, somewhere along the way, you stop feeling like a visitor. These moments don’t appear in a news feed. They can’t be fully captured in a TikTok video or an Instagram post. They happen when we put down the screen and enter the real world.

Israel today is one of the most discussed places in the world. People who have never been here have opinions about its politics, its people, its history and its future. Those opinions are shaped by news reports, social media, conversations with friends and increasingly by algorithms that determine what we see. But Israel is too complicated, too diverse and too human to be understood from a distance.

This doesn’t mean that visiting Israel will give anyone all the answers. It won’t. Coming here doesn’t require agreeing with every policy, understanding every political decision or ignoring the enormous complexity of the country and the region. In fact, meaningful travel should do the opposite. It should make us ask better questions. It should introduce us to people whose experiences challenge our assumptions and make room for disagreement, curiosity and uncomfortable conversations. It should allow us to see both the beauty and the complexity of a place for ourselves. That is what travel at its best can do.

There is another reason visiting Israel matters right now: tourism is not only about the traveler. It is also about the people whose livelihoods depend on welcoming visitors. Every meal at a local restaurant, every night at a family-owned hotel, every purchase from a local artisan and every experience with an independent guide sends money directly into communities. When visitors choose locally owned businesses and independent guides, they aren’t simply having a more personal travel experience. They are helping sustain the people who make Israel what it is. After a period in which Israeli tourism has faced enormous challenges, choosing to visit can be a meaningful form of solidarity.

But I believe the greatest impact of travel is not economic. It is human. Something happens when we move from talking about people to talking with them, when a headline becomes a person, when an abstract place becomes a neighborhood where you had coffee, and when a country you thought you understood becomes a collection of people you know.

At a time when Israel is discussed more than ever but experienced by fewer people, choosing to come matters. Not because visitors are expected to leave with all the answers, not because a trip should be used to prove a political point, and not because seeing Israel in person means seeing only the beautiful or uncomplicated parts. It matters because meaningful relationships begin with showing up.

At a time when it is easier than ever to form opinions from a distance, perhaps we need more opportunities to sit together, listen, learn and experience the humanity behind the headlines. Travel won’t solve Israel’s challenges, but it can change the way we understand them. And once you have experienced Israel through its people, their stories, their hospitality, their disagreements, their dreams and their resilience, it is no longer simply somewhere you have been. It becomes somewhere you carry with you.

And perhaps that is the greatest gift of travel after all.