Crossing Boundaries (A Traveler's Guide to World Peace)

An award-winning peace activist who leads tours in some of the world's most strife-torn areas shows how socially conscious travel can help each of us create a more tolerant world.

How can we bring together a world divided by so many seemingly intractable conflicts? Through tourism?

Yes! Aziz Abu Sarah argues that one-on-one contact and relating to each other as human beings will begin to heal these divides. And he knows this firsthand. A former Palestinian radical who lost several family members to the conflict in his homeland, he now coleads tours of Israel and Palestine with Jewish travel guides, each sharing a different perspective. In this moving and powerful book, Abu Sarah relates his experiences of creating cross-cultural connections in places like Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Russia, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Readers are given a road map to engaging with the "other" and learning how to build mutual respect and lasting relationships. Travel can be so much more than museums and monuments. It can be a way of taking down the walls of anger that separate us, discovering shared values, and realizing that ultimately far more unites us than divides us.