Food tours offer visitors a new taste of Middle East life
LEADIN:
Tourists are being targeted through their stomachs as part of special tours of Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The Breaking Bread Journeys project offers visitors the chance to meet Israelis and Palestinians by cooking and eating with them.
STORYLINE:
This is a Middle East tourist tour with a difference.
Here in Nablus, visitors are busy peeling turnips and cutting other vegetables in a kitchen tucked away in the centre of the West Bank city of Nablus.
They've stopped by at the Bait al Karama Women's Centre - to prepare and eat food with a group of Palestinian women.
The tourists have signed up to the eight-day Authentic Food and Culture tour - part of the Breaking Bread Journeys project.
The idea behind it is to connect travellers with both Palestinians and Israelis, not only through food but also by visiting landmarks with the local people who live near them.
The project is the brainchild of Elisa Moed, a Jewish Israeli woman and here business partner Christina Samara, who is Palestinian Christian.
To get to know people is to get to know their food. And we both felt very strongly that that's really what we wanted to provide. We wanted to give people an opportunity to get to know all the people, all the types of people that you find here, explains US-born Moed, who is also the founder of travelujah.com - a website that provides resources for Christians travelling to the region.
You know, coming to this region is kind of like peeling away the leaves of an artichoke: you keep doing that until you reach the heart.
After helping to prepare local specialties like stuffed turnips (lifit), soup and fattoush salad, those on the tour share a meal with locals at Bait al Karama, the first Palestinian cooking school entirely run by women.
Lunch is then followed by a henna session, where visitors get their hands traditionally tattooed with flower decorations.
In Nablus, there's also time to visit a city centre market - offering the chance to smell the dozens of spices of the Al-Breik Spice Shop and buy local specialties like knafeh, a sweet pastry made of syrup and cheese.
While food is the focus, the itinerary also includes stops at sites like as Mount Gerizim - where you can get a bird's-eye view of the city.
A church built over the site where Christian tradition locates Jacob's Well is also included.
For many Breaking Bread Journeys participants this is a rare chance to explore and go beyond more traditional routes like Jericho and the Dead Sea.
Terri Freeman, a US citizen who lives in Israel with her husband, says that this is the first time she's ventured into the northern West Bank.
I've always wanted to travel in the West Bank. I don't do a lot of that on my own. I usually try to go every week and take different ladies with me to different places, she explains.
So the opportunity to come to Nablus was really something that I had looked forward to for a long time. And to see it from the perspective of food and the cultures and the people and the religions and ideas is just fascinating.
With improved security in recent years, tourists are said to be slowly returning to Nablus.
Samara, who is also the managing director of a travel agency, says that Breaking Bread Journeys is a project which is responding to traveller aspirations.
The tourists have expressed that they would like to know more about the Palestinian heritage because for the longest time they are not familiar with it, so we have given them a chance through our tours to go into areas that have not been visited before, she explains.
Travelling away from Nablus, two days later the Breaking Bread Journeys group gathers at the home of Ahuva, an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman living in Jerusalem.
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