Hantourism

Summary

Platform for community-based tourism in Palestine, named after the hantour (horse-drawn carriage), analyzed in Chapter 2 of Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine under the right to tourism as tourism (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.88-90).

It began with a guesthouse in Jericho as an environmentally friendly effort to add value back to the local community, pairing business with self-determination and reaching out to farmers, guides, guesthouse owners, businessowners, local chefs and other community members (PDF p.88).
An organizer describes incoming travellers’ sedimented image of Palestine as “only a place of trouble, of war”, and the platform as inclusive of a lot of other things, including but not exclusive to solidarity tourism (PDF p.88).
Rather than an umbrella controlling guides, buses and sites, it is a network connecting people across Jericho, Nablus, Nazareth, Ramallah and Jerusalem, with guides as local partners in a revenue-sharing model who share its values in fair trade employment and tourism benefiting local communities (PDF p.89).
It wants to recuperate the idea of “a nice evening in Bethlehem” against guidebooks that parrot NGO language (PDF p.90).

tags
aliases