Say you chose to use the vacation portal on the Guardian’s website to plan a long deserved get-away for you and your family, and you’re considering a certain 8,000 square mile modern state off the Mediterranean, in order to enjoy this country’s unique variety of cosmopolitan urban areas, beaches and mountains, as well as the unparalleled variety of religious landmarks in the land where monotheism was born.

So, you go to the Guardian’s Holiday Offers page, and use the search function to find your preferred country. 

Except, well, you can’t quite find your destination of choice.

You find a few of its neighbors, such as Egypt, and, further see 110 nations represented, yet not the precise place you’re looking for, despite the fact that you’re pretty confident its’ been around for 63 or so odd years.

Then you happen to come across what seems to be a new nation which, based on your understanding of the world, you thought designated an entire region rather than a sovereign state.  It’s called “Middle East”. 

So, hoping that this will lead you where you want to go, you click the link which takes you here: a destination known as “Jerusalem, Galilee & the Dead Sea”.

This seems to be the country you want to visit, and the description helpfully notes that the tour takes you to Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee.

Then you click on the “Included” tab, and this is what you see:

Again, getting warmer: Tel Aviv, Caesarea, Acre, Masada, the Western Wall, the Dead Sea, and Yad Vashem.

And, while the itinerary in the next tab helpfully outlines your day-to-day excursions to the places above, all in all, in over 1100 words of text describing this exotic excursion, there’s strangely no mention of the nation you’re visiting.

No doubt, this curious omission must simply represent an honest editorial oversight.

So, “Middle East” / “Jerusalem, Galilee, and Dead Sea”, or whatever to call this dynamic oasis in the desert, here I come! 

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