El Lobo’s incarnation of the Book was created in 1986, Dorit recalls, just one month after her restaurant opened. Four Israeli backpackers came in and asked, “Where’s the Book?” When she looked mystified, they explained that they meant a book where people could leave recommendations and warnings for other travelers. They went out and bought a blank journal and donated it to the restaurant, complete with the first entry, in Hebrew, about a remote jungle town they thought other Israelis might like.
The Book predated the Internet—it actually started in Israel in the 1970s—but even in today’s world of blogs, chat rooms, and instant messaging, this primitive, paper-and-pen-based institution is still going strong. El Lobo has become a regional Book hub, with six volumes: a successor to the original Book started in 1989, along with separate Books for Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, and the northern part of South America. There are other Books stationed throughout Asia. While the original was written only in Hebrew, today’s Books are written in a wide array of languages.
“The polyglot entries were random, frustrating, and beautiful, a carnival of ideas, pleas, boasts, and obsolete phone numbers,” Outside magazine reported on the venerable 1989 volume. “One page recommended the ‘beautikul girls’ [sic] in a certain disco; the next tipped a particular ice cave as ‘a must’ (at least until someone else scrawled a huge ‘NO!’ over that entry). This was followed by a half-page in Japanese and a dense passage in German, with bar charts of altitude and diagrams of various plants. . . . After that there was a full-page scrawl devoted to buying a canoe in the rainforests of Peru’s Manu National Park, with seven parentheticals and a postscript that wrapped around the margins sideways; a warning against so-and-so’s couscous; and an ornate four-color drawing of a toucan named Felipe.”
Though it has become internationalized, the Book remains a primarily Israeli phenomenon. Local versions of the Book are maintained and pop up wherever the “wave”—what Hebrew University sociologist Darya Maoz calls the shifting fashions in Israeli travel destinations—goes. Many young Israeli trekkers simply go from Book to Book, following the flow of advice from an international group of adventure seekers, among whom Hebrew seems to be one of the most common tongues.
A well-known joke about Israeli travelers applies equally well in Nepal, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Peru, Bolivia, or Ecuador. A hotelkeeper sees a guest present an Israeli passport and asks, “By the way, how many are you?” When the young Israeli answers, “Seven million,” the hotelkeeper presses, “And how many are still back in Israel?”
It is hardly surprising that people in many countries think that Israel must be about as big and populous as China, judging from the number of Israelis that come through. “More than any other nationality,” says Outside, “[Israelis] have absorbed the ethic of global tramping with ferocity: Go far, stay long, see deep.”
Israeli wanderlust is not only about seeing the world; its sources are deeper. One is simply the need for release after years of confining army service. Yaniv, an Israeli encountered by the Outside reporter, was typical of many Israeli travelers: “He had overcompensated for years of military haircuts by sprouting everything he could: His chin was a wispy scruff and his sun-bleached hair had twirled into a mix of short dreads and Orthodox earlocks, all swept up into a kind of werewolf ’do. ‘The hair is because of the army,’ Yaniv admitted. ‘First the hair, then the travel.’ ”
But it’s more than just the army. After all, these young Israelis probably don’t run into many veterans from other armies, as military service alone does not induce their foreign peers to travel. There is another psychological factor at work—a reaction to physical and diplomatic isolation. “There is a sense of a mental prison living here, surrounded by enemies,” says Yair Qedar, editor of the Israeli travel magazine Masa Acher. “When the sky opens, you get out.”
Until recently, Israelis could not travel to a single neighboring country, though Beirut, Damascus, Amman, and Cairo are all less than a day’s drive from Israel. Peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan have not changed this much, though many curious Israelis have now visited these countries. In any event, this slight opening has not dampened the urge to break out of the straitjacket that has been a part of Israel’s modern history from the beginning—from before the beginning.
Long before there was a State of Israel, there was already isolation. An early economic boycott can be traced back to 1891, when local Arabs asked Palestine’s Ottoman rulers to block Jewish immigration and land sales. In 1922, the Fifth Palestine Arab Congress called for the boycott of all Jewish businesses.[58]
A longer official boycott by the twenty-two-nation Arab League, which banned the purchase of “products of Jewish industry in Palestine,” was launched in 1943, five years before Israel’s founding. This ban extended to foreign companies from any country that bought from or sold to Israel (the “secondary” boycott), and even to companies that traded with these blacklisted companies (the “tertiary” boycott). Almost all the major Japanese and Korean car manufacturers—including Honda, Toyota, Mazda, and Mitsubishi—complied with the secondary boycott, and their products could not be found on Israeli roads. A notable exception was Subaru, which for a long time had the Israeli market nearly to itself but was barred from selling in the Arab world.[59]
Every government of the Arab League established an official Office of the Boycott, which enforced the primary boycott, monitored the behavior of secondary and tertiary targets, and identified new prospects. According to Christopher Joyner of George Washington University, “Of all the contemporary boycotts, the League of Arab States’ boycott against Israel is, ideologically, the most virulent; organizationally, the most sophisticated; politically, the most protracted; and legally, the most polemical.”[60]
The boycott has at times taken on unusual targets. In 1974, the Arab League blacklisted the entire Baha’i faith because the Baha’i temple in Haifa is a successful tourist attraction that has created revenue for Israel. Lebanon forbade the showing of the Walt Disney production Sleeping Beauty because the horse in the film bears the Hebrew name Samson.[61]
In such a climate, it is natural that young Israelis seek both to get away from an Arab world that has ostracized them and to defy such rejectionism—as if to say, “The more you try to lock me in, the more I will show you I can get out.” For the same reason, it was natural for Israelis to embrace the Internet, software, computer, and telecommunications arenas. In these industries, borders, distances, and shipping costs are practically irrelevant. As Israeli venture capitalist Orna Berry told us, “High-tech telecommunications became a national sport to help us fend against the claustrophobia that is life in a small country surrounded by enemies.”[62]
This was a matter of necessity, rather than mere preference or convenience.
Because Israel was forced to export to faraway markets, Israeli entrepreneurs developed an aversion to large, readily identifiable manufactured goods with high shipping costs, and an attraction to small, anonymous components and software. This, in turn, positioned Israel perfectly for the global turn toward knowledge- and innovation-based economies, a trend that continues today.
58
Aaron J. Sarna,
59
Chaim Fershtman and Neil Gandal, “The Effect of the Arab Boycott on Israeclass="underline" The Automobile Market,”
60
Christopher Joyner, quoted in Aaron J. Sarna,