Inter Bellum News spoke with tour guides, former participants, and organisations involved in arranging so-called study/Taglit trips to Israel. What emerges is a picture of carefully curated itineraries that highlight Israel’s history and modern achievements while minimising or excluding Palestinian realities. Organisers such as CIDI declined to answer detailed questions, but the testimonies of those who joined or guided the tours reveal a consistent pattern: these trips are less about education and more about shaping perception.
The alleys of Jerusalem’s Old City were bustling with life, but the group on the “educational tour” did not notice. Their guide led them through narrow backstreets, carefully steering them away from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, avoiding the golden dome of Al Aqsa Mosque, and skipping the centuries-old Armenian quarter altogether. To the participants, it might have felt like a normal guided walk. Only later, when one of them returned on his own, did he realise what had happened.
“They were actively trying to avoid all the non-Jewish stuff,” said one former participant, who asked to remain anonymous. “We did not go near Al Aqsa, we did not go into the Christian sites, we skipped Jericho, and we were kept far from most of the West Bank. The tour showed us a very rosy picture of Palestinian citizens of Israel, but ignored the rest completely.”
The apartheid on the ground, was a completely different reality from what the trip organisers wanted us to see.Anonymous source
For him, the realization was radicalizing. “I went into the trip already skeptical of Israel, but I came back thinking the country needed to be dismantled. What I saw on my own, Hebron on Nakba Day, Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral, the apartheid on the ground, was a completely different reality from what the trip organisers wanted us to see.”
These trips are not ordinary sightseeing holidays. According to one guide familiar with their design, their purpose is explicit: to reconnect young Jews from around the world, especially from North America and Europe, with Israel and the so-called “Ancient Jewish Homeland.”
The best-known of these programmes is Taglit-Birthright Israel, founded in 1999. It offers free ten-day trips to Israel for Jews aged 18 to 26, funded by a mix of private donors, the Israeli government, and Jewish organisations abroad. Over 800,000 participants have joined these tours worldwide. Smaller programmes run by groups like CIDI and Christenen voor Israël offer similar “study trips” for politicians, clergy, and opinion leaders.
Participants are taken to the City of David, presented as the site of King David’s ancient rule. They stroll down Tel Aviv’s beaches, enjoy nightlife in modern Israel, and visit curated historical landmarks.
What is absent is just as telling: the Palestinian reality of checkpoints, demolished homes, refugee camps, and the devastation of Gaza.
The guide explained that the conflict is “barely discussed, if at all.” Palestinian perspectives are rarely present, if they appear at all. “The purpose is to give participants a positive idea of Israel,” he said. “Many of them go on to make Aliyah under the Law of Return. Reality hits later, when they discover Israel is not the same as a two-week tour, and Israelis are nothing like Americans or Europeans.”
Organizers often stress that their itineraries include Palestinian voices, usually in the form of brief meetings or a stop in Ramallah. Yet both guides and participants suggest these encounters are carefully selected and rarely representative.
“When we met Palestinians, they were all ’48 Arabs, Palestinian citizens of Israel,” the former participant explained. “It is not that life is easy for them, but it is still nothing like the West Bank or Gaza. The tour gave us a polished image and ignored everyone else.”
Entire cities are skipped. Jericho, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, is absent. Hebron, where Israeli settlers live under heavy military protection while Palestinians face daily harassment, is kept off the programme. Gaza is entirely invisible. Even in Jerusalem’s Old City, groups are steered away from Christian and Muslim holy sites.
The result is a curated story: Israel as both ancient homeland and modern liberal state, Palestinians as a tolerated minority, and the conflict as an unfortunate backdrop rather than an urgent reality.
The participant who ventured out on his own described the contrast: “I saw something worse than apartheid in the West Bank. And in Israel proper, I saw a society in denial, people living comfortably while ignoring everything happening just a few kilometres away.”
For many, the tours achieve their intended purpose. Thousands of young participants return home with renewed pride in Israel. Some migrate permanently, making Aliyah under Israel’s immigration law. They become future defenders of Israeli policy in political debates, workplaces, and communities abroad.
But not all participants leave convinced. The staged experience can backfire when participants step outside the official itinerary. Seeing the raw reality of Palestinian life, in Hebron, at funerals, at checkpoints, exposes the gap between the glossy narrative and the lived truth. For some, like the participant quoted above, the tour did not build loyalty but destroyed it.
“I learned a lot about Israel and Israelis,” he said. “But most of it was not what the organizers wanted me to learn.”
To test the balance of these trips, Inter Bellum News contacted CIDI, the Dutch organization that advertises and organizes such study tours for politicians, journalists, and clergy. Over the phone, CIDI initially indicated it would respond. In writing, however, it declined to answer any of the questions.
The refusal is telling. An organisation that describes itself publicly as a trusted source of “honest and reliable information” for journalists and policymakers chose silence when asked how balanced its tours are, which Palestinian voices are included, and why certain sites are consistently avoided. Christenen voor Israël, another organiser of religious tours, has also been asked for comment.
This silence, against the backdrop of carefully staged itineraries, underscores the sensitivity of the subject. When even the organizers refuse to defend or explain their own programmed, it raises the question of what exactly they are afraid to admit.
For most Europeans, Israel and Palestine feel far away. Yet these trips are one of the most direct ways Israeli narratives are exported into European politics, media, and civil society.
Politicians return from such trips and cast votes on resolutions in Brussels or The Hague. Journalists publish coverage shaped by the limited perspectives they were shown. Clergy return to their congregations with stories of biblical destiny and modern Israel’s resilience.
The effect is subtle but powerful. By controlling what visitors see, and what they do not, Israel and its partner organisations shape the frames through which Western audiences interpret the conflict.
The refusal of organisers to answer critical questions only reinforces the suspicion that these trips are not about education, but about propaganda. They are designed to limit perspective, not expand it.
The Old City of Jerusalem is a mosaic of religions, cultures, and histories. Yet on these tours, participants are guided through alleys that hide more than they reveal. Churches, mosques, Palestinian homes, and contested quarters are edited out of view. What remains is a narrative of Jewish heritage, modern liberal Israel, and coexistence by omission.
The trip was an obvious lobbying effort. But it had the opposite effect on me.Anonymous source
For one participant, that experience ended in disillusionment. “The trip was an obvious lobbying effort,” he said. “But it had the opposite effect on me.”
And that is the truth at the heart of these journeys: what is carefully hidden often says more than what is shown. For Europe, where politicians and opinion leaders continue to take part in such tours, the stakes are clear. The stories they bring back shape public discourse. The omissions they never see are just as powerful.