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Source: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/no-one-comes-to-israel-for-jerusalem-anymore/
Tourists Now Come to Israel for the Gaza Envelope
(Times of Israel) Ari Melnik - 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. My calendar used to be full. Now it holds almost nothing, and when the phone does ring, the request is for the Gaza envelope and Nova, not Jerusalem. In those years, no one ever asked me for the western Negev. It was farmland and kibbutzim. Now that farmland is the only ground anyone wants to walk. Now I guide people through history that is still bleeding. This new ground is sacred. I guide it with my voice low. To stand at Re'im among the photographs of the murdered, to walk the route people ran, is a duty, and I expect to perform it for the rest of my working life. The day after this seemingly endless war ends, we will have to show the world more than our wounds, real and undeniable as they are. We will have to show what we are proud of. How many people abroad know that when the envelope was emptied, ordinary Israelis opened their own homes to strangers, free, for as long as they were needed? That families in Tel Aviv cooked in their kitchens and sent the food south? That in my own neighborhood we went door to door collecting bicycles, so that children moved to hotels near the Dead Sea would have something to ride? The world was shown a response, but only a military one, and much of even that through false libels. It was never shown the quiet, beautiful resilience that I doubt any other society on the planet would manage. And every visitor who does finally land here says the same thing on the drive in. Look at all the cranes. Look at the roads. This is not a country that has given up on tomorrow. I recently understood that everything I want the world to see lives in the very place that once had nothing to see. The envelope holds the courage the communities showed on Oct. 7. The place with no history laid down, in a single day, a layer of it as deep as anything in Jerusalem.