Summary
Founder and former Director of Bustan, quoted at length in Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin on the design of its Negev Unplugged tours (2 July 2007) (PDF p.201-202).
Details
- Brous emphasizes that emotion and education are key to the tours: tourists are in fact students, and once a student learns something they will want to go out and “use” that information (PDF p.201).
- “Most of those on the tours are Jewish… we use English… there are two narratives, you can’t just show the bedouin narrative. You have to allow the Jewish leadership to have their say. It doesn’t serve us to demonize them” (PDF p.202).
- She describes the format as “citizen diplomacy” giving access to governmental offices and “real experiences here, not contrived ones”, and notes the tours’ self-selectivity and non-mainstream position (PDF p.202).
- Facilitating the 12 July 2007 tour’s Hura debriefing, she pressed participants from listening to suffering toward action: “Tell others! … don’t just experience this one day. You must act upon what you have experienced” (PDF p.205).
Related pages
Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, Bustan, Voluntourism