Fodor’s Travel Guides - Fodor’s Essential Israel

Fodors Recommendations

Everything in this guide is worth doingwe dont cover what isntbut exceptional sights, hotels, and restaurants are recognized with additional accolades. Fodors Choice indicates our top recommendations. Care to nominate a new place? Visit Fodors.com/contact-us .

Trip Costs

We list prices wherever possible to help you budget well. Hotel and restaurant price categories from $ to $$$$ are noted alongside each recommendation. For hotels, we include the lowest cost of a standard double room in high season. For restaurants, we cite the average price of a main course at dinner or, if dinner isnt served, at lunch. For attractions, we always list adult admission fees; discounts are usually available for children, students, and senior citizens.

Hotels

Our local writers vet every hotel to recommend the best overnights in each price category, from budget to expensive. Unless otherwise specified, you can expect private bath, phone, and TV in your room. For expanded hotel reviews, facilities, and deals visit Fodors.com .

Restaurants

Unless we state otherwise, restaurants are open for lunch and dinner daily. We mention dress code only when theres a specific requirement and reservations only when theyre essential or not accepted. To make restaurant reservations, visit Fodors.com .

Credit Cards

The hotels and restaurants in this guide typically accept credit cards. If not, well say so.

EUGENE FODOR

Hungarian-born Eugene Fodor (190591) began his travel career as an interpreter on a French cruise ship. The experience inspired him to write On the Continent (1936), the first guidebook to receive annual updates and discuss a countrys way of life as well as its sights. Fodor later joined the U.S. Army and worked for the OSS in World War II. After the war, he kept up his intelligence work while expanding his guidebook series. During the Cold War, many guides were written by fellow agents who understood the value of insider information. Todays guides continue Fodors legacy by providing travelers with timely coverage, insider tips, and cultural context.

Within its small perimeter Israel packs in abundant riches, from cherished religious sites and well-preserved archaeological treasures to spectacular natural wonders. Holy land to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, this is where biblical place-names like Jerusalem and the Galilee come vibrantly alive. Here, too, you can party by the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv, float in the super-salty Dead Sea, and explore cool mountain waterfalls or sweeping desert landscapes. Whether youre in a shrine or on a hiking trail, Israel is a place to renew the spirit.

Israelis are at once warmly hospitable and feisty. The countrys ethnic, religious, and political mix, endlessly fascinating, can be exasperating as well. But, with legendary resilience, Israelis thrive on complexity, and life between the headlines is astonishingly normal.

A Vibrant Economy

Israels founding fathers were socialists and its early economy largely agrarian. Thats history, though. Agriculture today is sophisticated and technology-based, but its share of the countrys exports is less than 3%, as the economy has burgeoned and reinvented itself.

With few natural resourcesbeyond newly discovered natural gasthe human factor was always crucial. Diamond cutting, an early initiative of Jewish refugees from wartime Holland and Belgium, supplies some 40% of the worlds cut and polished stones and 20% of all Israels exports. Tourism is big, of course, with 3.5 million visitors a year, mostly Holy Land pilgrims and Jewish roots travelers. The discovery of underwater gas fields off the coast of Haifa has Israel poised to become an energy exporter to Egypt and Jordan.