Civilizing the Nation: Travel, Civility and Bourgeois Nationalism in Israel

This article reads The Lapid Guide to Europe, a bestselling Hebrew-language travel guide published from the 1970s to the 1990s, as a form of bourgeois nationalism enacted through everyday practices of behaviour. Written by journalist and Holocaust survivor Tommy Lapid, the guide operated as civic pedagogy, instructing Israeli travellers in restraint, discernment and cultural fluency in relation to Europe as both a civilizational benchmark and a site of trauma. Although formally addressed to a broad readership, it presupposed a secular, middle-class Ashkenazi audience, while Mizrahi traditions were rendered marginal and Palestinians structurally absent. Engaging debates on nationalism as social practice, tourism and civility, the article shows how national belonging can be articulated through routinized self-presentation rather than explicit doctrine, particularly where collective recognition is experienced as fragile or conditional. In a context shaped by post-Holocaust rupture and geopolitical marginality, civility emerges not as a path to secure inclusion but as a performative technique of provisional affiliation.