Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Guide : Israel & the Palestinian Territories

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

...and less on campaigning, it could have been an excellent guide. Alas, alas. It would be unreasonable to expect neutrality and even-handed approach from Lonely Planet (although they almost manage it sometimes; the best I've seen was Canary Islands, by the way). Israel guidebook is one example where they feel their political opinion is so valuable that it has to be offered on almost every page.

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.

I purchased the Lonely Planet Guide, the Knopf Guide to the Holy Land, and the Insight Guide for Israel. All are excellent resources, and really seem to serve different needs.

The Lonely Planet Guide is way ahead in providing helpful info about the day-to-day details of your trip. It has more restaurant and hotel listings and tells you about the feel of the place. It provides suggested iteneraries, which I find especially nice. Finally, it gives details on getting from place to place, which can really help reduce vacation stress.

The Knopf Guide to the Holy Land is a truly beautiful volume which manages to capture the people and history like nothing else. It has fold-out views of the Via Dolorosa and its coverage of all the sites is amazingly detailed and really prepares you to get the most out of your visit.

The Insight Guide's color pictures are nice and I like their presentation of the history, but the Knopf Guide really excells in this, so I find myself using the Insight Guide just as another opinion on which sights to see.

We'll be carrying the LPG to get places, but the Knopf Guide will be our reference once we arrive.

All in all, the Lonely Planet Guide is the must-buy book in this category. Buy the Knopf Guide second.

I have a number of Lonely Planet guides and this is the only one that goes out of its way to make political statements about the country. Along with that is the poorly researched information about what to see and where to stay.

Shame on Lonely Planet. They are unquestionably the best guide books around except for this one.

I am a LP fan, but after been living in Israel for almost 3 years I have to say that this guide is very superficial. It could be much better ... for example, there are restaurants that everybody know in Israel, very popular, very nice that are not mentioned in the guide. I would expect something more from LP ... sorry :(

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.

I buy a guide book to learn about the country I am visiting, preferably through a reasonably sympathetic eye. I don't want cheerleading or rose-colored glasses, but I don't expect open hostility or overt political bias. But the Lonely Planet Guide to Israel and the Palestinian Territories is full of just that. The author is overtly anti-Zionist in his tone, unnecessarily political, and to me outright offensive. I DO begrudge one's political views in a travel guide! If I want a political text (and I read voraciously about Israel, from a variety of viewpoints), I will buy one.

This is a terrible guide. You can do much better, and at the time of this writing, I would suggest the Frommer's Israel Guide, just released in October 2006. Anything would be better than this.

There are so many guides to Israel.

This is one you can do without.

The author Matt Rees blames Israel for Arab terror without describing Arab hatred of Jews and Israel. He equates Israel with Arab terrorists like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, fails to mention Jews murdered in Arab Riots of '29 and '36. He denies the holiness of the Temple Mount to Jews and only mentions the mosque built on top of it to co-op Jewish culture. I could go on with other examples but they are rife and there is not enough space to write about all his partisan opinions. His editorializing is apparent throughout the book and gets tiring. Israel is a very exciting place that is at the core of Jewish life. Rees' arabist opinions have no place in a guide book.

Don't waste your money on this book. The loneliness in the title is for the absence of truth in this guide.

I am sorry I bought this book. It is not a terrible book, and it came recommended, but it was disappointing. I wanted something different than the usual books, but simply put, the more widely known guide books are better and more 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.

I have read and enjoyed a wide variety of Lonely Planet guides during my travels. But by far ISRAEL & THE PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES is my favorite. I picked it up before a planned trip to Israel and couldn't put it down. When I finished it, I couldn't wait to get the plane to check out this legendary country for myself. And then the trip was cancelled. I was devastated.

Though I cannot address the accuracy of restaurant, hotel and shopping recommendations here, I can say this book offers a fantastic selection of information about the history of the area, its peoples and peculiar challenges.

Reading how other reviewers have detected an anti-Israeli bias from authors Paul Hellander, Andrew Humphreys and Neil Tilbury surprised me. I noticed none of this when I first read this book, but opening it again I see it on every page from an inset box about Israeli rudeness to another that goes on and on about the challenges for Orthodox Jewish gays. I see no mention here about the "challenges" gays face in Islam.

Perhaps I was too captivated by the authors' accounts of things like "Jerusalum Syndrome" to notice the authors' political bent. And that's fine. I do not begrudge the authors their opinions.

In fact, though I am far from anti-Israel, generally speaking I prefer a point-of-view to bland, allegedly "objective" information.

-- Regina McMenamin