Paper short abstract:

In Biblical tours, Jewish-Israeli guides and Protestant pilgrims draw on shared practices of viewing landscape and history to transform a contested Israel/Palestine into Bible Land, while marginalizing Palestinian Arabs. Such performances may also change identities of both pilgrims and guides.

Paper long abstract:

In Biblical tours, Jewish-Israeli guides and Protestant pastors become co-producers in a mutually satisfying performance which transforms often contested terrain of Israel-Palestine into Bible Land. These tours, organized by churches and marketed by Christian tour agents often lend the environmental bubble typical of group tours moral value as microcosms of Christian fellowship. By examining common narratives and practices of Jewish-Israeli tour guides at outlook points, archaeological excavations and nature sites, I will demonstrate how guides' performances of the Bible textualize the landscape, collapse time, sanctify new or marginal sites and grant significance to visitors' movements and actions which constitutes them as pilgrims.

Although guides may choose from a variety of interactive roles within the guided tour frame, they very frequently will adopt, in coordination with the group's pastor, the role of 'spiritual mentor'. This role provides the guide with the greatest social capital and is familiar to Israeli guides from the tour models experienced in the Israeli school system, as well as from guide school training. The professional authority of the guide is increased by his position as 'reluctant witness' to Christian scriptural truth, and facilitated by drawing on historically transmitted practices of viewing, classifying history and orientalizing shared by Protestants and Zionists. Through guiding performances, Zionist and Protestant understandings of the land become naturalized, while Palestinian Arabs and Muslims are marginalized.

While touring performances generally succeed in reaffirming shared, pre-existing meanings assigned to the land, guiding narratives may be contested by pastors, pilgrims and/or Palestinian vendors or spokesmen. Furthermore, although many Jewish guides will go to great lengths to accommodate the desires of the pilgrims they guide, many express ambivalence or resentment towards Christian missionizing, while some draw subtle lines as to what faith language they will avoid (Son of God, our Savior) or which acts of ritual participation they consider out of bounds. Finally, both pilgrims' and guides' identities may undergo change through pilgrimage. While Evangelicals may come to understand their faith in more historicized terms, Jewish guides performing their Judaism for the Protestant gaze may come to reformulate their Judaism in terms borrowed from Christian frameworks of belief.

E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed