Levantine Travels

A trip to Israel and Jordan, with political insights from taxi drivers

Michal Rovner, Broken Time, 2009, in the National Library of Israel

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I just returned yesterday from two weeks traveling in Israel and Jordan. This was not a journalistic outing; I’m not an investigative reporter, and I’ve been on hasbara-oriented trips before and don’t need to do that again. I was in Israel primarily to see family and friends, and I was in Jordan purely on vacation. I was also traveling with my mother, wife and son, and was not inclined to ditch them to poke my nose here or there.

As a result, though, this post is going to be a version of the lowest form of column, the “I talked to my taxi driver on the way to the airport” piece that Thomas Friedman has written so frequently over his many decades as a pundit. I hope it isn’t completely without interest.

Our itinerary was quite limited; though we were away for quite some time, we didn’t cover that much territory. We were a few days in Jerusalem, where we spent Shabbat with friends from Brooklyn who made aliyah twenty years ago (they now live in Arnona, a very Anglo neighborhood south of the Old City). After Shabbat we visited the Old City and the archaeological park just outside it, poked around different neighborhoods and into some museums, and made one excursion outside of the city to a nearby winery and to visit friends. Then we were a few days in Tel Aviv, where we also did some neighborhood exploring and museum poking, getting an impromptu graffiti tour of Noga and Florentin from a Swedish clothing designer friend who has lived in Israel for decades. I could probably do a whole post about museums; what I’ll say here is that there’s a lot more ideological content to the museums I saw in Israel— such as the Bible Lands Museum and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv-Yafo City Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Anu Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv—than I am used to from America. Or perhaps the difference is just that the ideological axes being ground are different from the ones I’m familiar with; certainly American museums have gone through quite a bit of ideological overhaul in recent years, and some of them are getting another, very different one now under pressure from the Trump administration.

From our Tel Aviv base we also visited family in nearby towns like Ramat Gan, Netanya and Herzliya. Then we were a couple of nights in Akko (my son really wanted to revisit the city, one of his favorite spots from his last trip with his camp in 2018), visiting a nature preserve and a major archaeological site from the Canaanite and First Temple Israelite periods—Tel Megiddo—on the way there. Finally my son and I flew down to Eilat and crossed over to Jordan, where we spent time first scuba diving in Aqaba and exploring that city, then visiting Wadi Rum, and finally exploring Petra.

Tourism is, as you might expect, way down, lower than it would normally be at this time of year, which is already low season, and you can feel that not only in the lack of lines and some closed establishments but in a larger feeling of economic tightness. I don’t think that’s because people are staying away out of hostility; tourism is also way down in Jordan, a country nobody is mad at that I’m aware of. The primary reason people are staying away is fear of war. Even if you weren’t worried about personal danger (which I wasn’t), there’s always the risk of being stranded if the airport is shut due to missiles flying overhead. Slack tourism is only one reason for the pall on the economy, though, and not the most important one I suspect. The tempo of war has been a huge economic drag, both in terms of government spending and, even more, in taking so much of the workforce out of productive activity for long stretches of time. That’s undoubtedly having some political effect; one Jewish cab driver went on an extended rant to me about the burden on him and his three adult sons, and how angry it makes him to see the Haredim not only avoiding military service but getting paid to study in yeshivah while his kids had to pay their way.

But in a larger context, Israel is booming. There is construction everywhere, and the physical infrastructure of the country has developed massively since I was last there nineteen years ago, with new rail lines running between major cities and new tram lines being constructed within both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The population of Modi’in, a planned city between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, has more than doubled to over 110,000 people since last I visited the country (not including its suburbs), and is expected to double again. Cities like Netanya and Ramat Gan are also experiencing rapid growth and densification; high rises are going up all over. When we drove through older moshavim on our way to Akko I was startled by the low density. This construction boom is driven by natural increase, immigration and also the increasing wealth of Israeli society—there’s demand for larger and more modern dwellings. It’s not surprising that, in such a small country with such a large and growing population, so much of the construction is going into high rises, but it’s still interesting, particularly from a fertility perspective, since one of the shibboleths of the birth dearth crowd is that apartment dwelling depresses fertility. It’s notable, therefore, that Israel is a dramatic counter-example, in this way as in so many other ways.

Everyone we saw wanted to talk about the political situation, both domestically and internationally. I only talked to who I talked to, which was not any kind of representative survey, but I would describe the mood of those I talked to as ranging from calmly pessimistic, to disgusted, to despairing. At the former end, we had lunch with a couple I know from my finance days who live in a suburb of Modi’in just over the Green Line who I would describe as solidly right-wing (though they themselves demurred, saying in the Israeli context they were center-right—that in itself tells you a lot about the shape of the Israeli political spectrum). Their take on things, put simply, was that in the wake of October 7th it’s just no longer possible to live with the Arabs. I pointed out that Israel doesn’t really have a choice about that, so if that is so then the situation is hopeless. The husband agreed: it’s hopeless. Yet he wasn’t worried, neither about what might happen to Israel nor about what Israel might do as a consequence of that feeling of hopelessness. I admit, found that strange, and indicative of a deeper evasion that is far more widespread.

At the despairing end of the spectrum, a relative with young children who lives on the Golan Heights said she was working on getting a second passport somehow, so she and her family could flee if necessary. I pointed out that I knew people who were doing the opposite—fleeing to Israel to escape rising antisemitism and/or the threat of fascism. Yes, she said—but those people can always go back. If things get bad here, we have nowhere else to go. Another talked about taking her kids to Portugal and their kids panicking that there was no safe room in their hotel in Lisbon—where will they go if there is an attack? How, she wondered, can she continue to raise kids in a country where this is how they have to think? Meanwhile, another relative with adult children and a few grandchildren regaled my son with tales of sneaking into Gaza to bring ice cream to IDF soldiers on duty, making it sound like a lark (albeit one that he had to hide from his girlfriend until he was safely back).

I didn’t talk to anyone who supported the current government, not even the right-wingers I talked to. But nobody I spoke to was particularly optimistic about the possibility of change, nor was there any kind of consensus about what the alternative to the current government should or even could be. One woman, a friend in her 60s, confessed that back during COVID, when Israel was having an election every few months, she one time even voted for one of the Arab parties, just for a lark. Her thirty-something son said he liked Naftali Bennett, the most likely alternative to Netanyahu and also a right-winger, but he couldn’t really articulate why beyond that he thought Bennett would bring Israelis together. When I was riding with a Palestinian-Israeli cab driver—a fourth-generation Jaffa native—we passed a bus with an ad for Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party with the slogan “without Ben Gvir and without Ra’am,” meaning that he was trying to win votes by promising to refuse a coalition with either the extreme-right or the one Arab party that has expressed eagerness to join a coalition with Zionist parties (and which, in a historic first, joined the last non-Netanyahu government). I laughed that it was a bit of a funny strategy to say “vote for me because of who I refuse to sit with” and he replied, also laughing, that the ad should say “without Ben Gvir, without Ra’am, and also without Gantz.” So I asked him who his guy was, and he said: nobody; all the politicians are terrible. The Arab ones too? Yes, of course, the Arab ones too.

Multiple people expressed serious fears that Netanyahu would find an excuse to cancel or at least postpone the elections—the fear among opponents of the government that Israel was headed the way of Hungary or even Turkey was palpable. I pointed out to multiple people that the best way for Netanyahu to stay in office was for the opposition to refuse to coalesce; this business of refusing to sit with this party or that makes a return of the stalemate of 2019-2021, when Netanyahu was able to remain prime minister despite failing to win election after election simply because nobody else could form a coalition, much more likely. Nobody really disagreed—but nobody had a solution either. The divisions are real, not superficial.

Everyone wanted my opinion of Trump and of Mamdani. I think liberal or centrist Americans underestimate the degree to which even relatively liberal Israelis, and even Anglos, have warm feelings towards Trump because he got the last hostages back and brought about at least a nominal cease-fire. (I say nominal because Israel has been engaged in pretty much continuous military activity in Gaza even after the cease-fire went into effect, with hundreds of deaths, many of them civilians.) I also think it’s telling the degree to which Jewish Israelis—and not just Anglos—assumed that I would be afraid living with Mamdani as mayor. People were downright confused when I expressed my belief that Mamdani is, in fact, an extreme anti-Israel politician, but that I wasn’t actually worried about that, either for myself personally or for Israel.

I feel somewhat guilty that I didn’t go to Nazareth or any other Arab towns in Israel, and that I didn’t travel into the Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank to see life there. While in Jordan, we met multiple tourists from America, Britain and Australia who had made those kinds of visits, and I realized that I had shied away in part out of a kind of inchoate anxiety about how difficult it might be. I’ll approach the question differently next time. Meanwhile, I am very glad that we wound up spending a couple of nights in Akko, because that was our only substantial window into life in a mixed city—and the old city of Akko, where we stayed, is overwhelmingly Palestinian or Arab-Israeli. The city is clearly very depressed because of the lack of tourism, but it’s a beautiful area with a fascinating history and very friendly people—and great food. (The food scene in general is much improved in Israel from what I experienced before.)

And Israel’s Arab sector is where the most important current political developments are happening, in my opinion. While we were in Israel, growing grass-roots agitation over organized crime in Arab towns and neighborhoods finally burgeoned into a historic protest, the first of its kind to unite Palestinian-Israelis and members of the Jewish left and center-left, with tens of thousands rallying in Tel Aviv. As well, while I was there the major Arab parties decided to revive the Joint List, running on a unified slate that would maximize their collective representation in the Knesset. I’ll be returning to this subject in another post later this week—for now, suffice it to say that we could be on the brink of a development with radical potential, but also very significant risk of a dangerous backlash. We got a preview of both in the last government, when first Ra’am joined a broad coalition government, something that made me incredibly hopeful, and then inter-communal riots in cities like Lod fueled a massive vote for the far right that led to the current disastrous government.

I am very glad that we added a few days in Jordan to the end of the trip. I had been once before, in 1996, just for a day trip to visit Petra. All I can say by comparison to that trip is first, that Petra is absolutely spectacular and deserves at least a full day visit, not the couple of hours that I got in 1996, and that Jordan in general is a stunning country well worth a visit, either as part of a larger trip to the region or in its own right. I wish I’d had more time, so as to get up to Amman, Jerash and Madaba, but the trip was long enough as it was. I’ll probably have to go back.

I talked with people in Jordan as well, but I didn’t have friends or family there so it was just cab drivers and their equivalent. Universally, people were very excited when they learned that my name is Noah, and even more so that my son’s name is Moses, because both Noah and Moses are considered major prophets in Islam. Multiple people wondered whether we were Arab or partly Arab and hoped we might speak some Arabic, because of our names. Everyone was perfectly friendly to us as Americans and as Jews, but I didn’t get any sense that people we talked to actually knew much of anything about either America or about Judaism, even though America is a very important ally to Jordan and Israel is right next door (and a major source of tourist revenue for Jordan).

Jordan is a much poorer country than Israel; on a purchasing power parity basis, its GDP per capita is comparable to India’s or Morocco’s, and is 20% of Israel’s and 13% of America’s. But Aqaba is atypical for Jordan: it’s a special economic zone, Jordan’s only port, and its primary tourist hub, and consequently a magnet for foreign investment, particularly from the Persian Gulf. That means Aqaba feels much more prosperous than Jordan generally, but from the perspective of the locals it’s something of a mixed bag, as you might expect. In recent years the port had to be moved southward both to allow for modernization and to accommodate a massive new project Marsa Zayed, financed out of Abu Dhabi; as part of the deal, AD Ports Group took effective control of the port. I got quite an earful from the guides for our dives about all of this, about the loss of control that it implied, about the rise in prices, and about the threat of competition. It’s a very familiar set of complaints in situations of rapid development driven by foreign investment.

Jordan has done a remarkable job of maintaining a stable, orderly and peaceful society in a difficult neighborhood, absorbing huge numbers of refugees from Israel/Palestine, from Syria, from Iraq, and even from places further afield, without the aid of any significant natural resources. But its political system is severely underdeveloped, with parliament fragmented into dozens of parties, many of them organized around clan identity, with the consequence that the crown has remained the overwhelmingly dominant political force, and, with little accountability at the polls, successive governments have been marked by significant corruption. Twenty years ago, I might have ended by talking about what it might take to make the transition to a more modern, democratic system. Now, I fear that in both Israel and the United States, and in many other Western countries, fragmentation is leading to a reversion to this kind of corrupt and undemocratic politics, but with less broadly-popular figures of authority than the much-beloved Hashemites at the top. We may have less to teach than we think, and more to learn.