Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Listen for church bells and the call to prayer as the golden light of late afternoon illuminates Jerusalem, p. 88.
Dig your feet into the sand at a Tel Aviv beachside bar, p. 175.
Tend organic vegetables and fertilize your mind at Kibbutz Lotan, p. 344.
Start a conversation in the West Bank - how do you pickle olives? p. 295.

Six authors, 234 days of research, 12 army roadblocks, countless falafels.

History and Environment chapters by renowned experts.
The only guidebook with detailed coverage of the West Bank and Gaza.
You asked for it, we researched it: more sustainable travel experiences than ever, from eco-hotels to hiking trips.

Rating : - The "we don't care for Israel" guide
Having used Lonely Planet Guides on three continents and been pleased with the quality of their information, I can only describe this guide as generally disappointing. Information on many major sites is incomplete or inaccurate, including museums and ruin sites. Tremendous amounts of space are taken for political commentary, most of which reads as if it were cut and pasted off of anti-Israel websites. If people want such digressions they can easily find them, but in a guide book? People wondering where to do laundry in Haifa will come up empty, but they can instead read about Israel's UN record, not that this will clean your clothes. The failure to include a map of Akko's new city makes walking to the new city difficult, and long passages about Palestinian grievances are no substitute.

Even where the guide offers good suggestions, the incomplete information often proves maddening. The suggestion to go to the Bedouin Weaving Center near Beer'sheva should be welcome, but I challenge anyone to get there with the information given (you won't be able to). Where much space goes to items like Israeli-Arab relations (with no surprise as to who is the "aggressor" and who the "victim") and mocking comments on the lives and practices of religious Jews (surprising since LP Guides I've used in Egypt, Mexico, and South-east Asia where always unfailingly respectful in their explanations of the traditions and beliefs of those nations majority faiths) perhaps it should come as no surprise that so many interesting sites appear on this guides maps as "20 km that way" with an arrow, rather than actual directions.

In areas of controversy a guide should either avoid the issue, or better still, present both sides. But one will be hard pressed to find that here. Israeli positions are either dismissed or simply ignored. Even in positions where you might expect Lonely Planet to feel pressed to the "wrong side," such as Israel's high desirability for Gay travel in contrast to the very real dangers of physical harm for Gay tourists in the West Bank, Palestinians receive a full and complete pass. Likewise history receives a heavy dose of shading, where the massacres of Jews at Arab hands over the past century and half are given passing references and Jewish children murdered receive hardly even a word. A travel guide main purpose certainly isn't to brief the traveler on every detail of the destinations history, but it should at least strive for a balanced overview that encourages further reading. Readers with backgrounds in Middle East history will here only be annoyed and those lacking will wonder if they should reconsider their travel plans.

All of which takes one to the most egregious problem with this incomplete, often inaccurate, problematic guide. If you are like me you read guides partially to engage with authors with an infectious love of your destination. Over and over reading this guide one gets the feeling that these writers just don't care for Israel and feel it to be an unpleasant burdensome stop on the way to Gaza and the West Bank. Backhanded compliments and insults abound. Wonderful destinations are disparaged. Israeli society time and again comes in for a scolding that sounds a bit like 19th century Englishmen discussing unpleasant practices in colonial India. Where I can highly recommend other Lonely Planet Guides, those traveling to Israel should take a pass on this one.