“Wakey wakey, gising na.”

It is not a line you expect in a Galilee accent, but it is a call over the bus microphone, delivered from the front row to a busload of Filipino journalists in varying states of consciousness. He had also picked up “kubeta,” deployed with real gravity before every long drive.

The delegation taught him the words. They taught him the song, too: by the end of the week a busload of Filipino journalists had drilled Sharon Cuneta’s “Bituing Walang Ningning” into an Israeli guide who has never set foot in the Philippines, and had bent one of its lines into a house joke. In the song, balutin mo ako is a plea — wrap me up, keep me. At a table with food still on the plates, it is what a Filipino says about the leftovers. The delegation meant it both ways, at nearly every meal.

In fairness to the delegation, there is a defense, and it is a good one. The itinerary was punishing — Jerusalem to the Dead Sea to Jaffa to the Galilee, with copy to file in between — and a press group that settles in for a long lunch is a press group that misses the next location. Food in a pack travels. Food on a plate does not. There is also the older reason, which any Filipino household will recognize without needing it explained: you do not leave good food on the table. Between the two, balot is less a running joke than a logistics decision with a conscience.

Somewhere in the trade — the alleys of Jerusalem in one direction, the Galilee shoreline where he grew up in the other — Maaravi stopped being the man with the microphone in the front row and became something the itinerary had no line for.

By the last day, the delegation he had been assigned to guide had a running proposal that everybody kept calling a joke and nobody was actually joking about: he needed an Instagram, for the Filipino community. He had the face for it, they said. The delivery. The stories. What they were really negotiating was a way not to say goodbye.

“It’s going to be very difficult to top this group from now on,” Maaravi said in an interview before the delegation flew home last week. “Other delegations will have to work very hard to make me feel the way I felt with this media delegation from the Philippines.”

It was his first Filipino press contingent.

The man in the CV, and the man in the alley

On paper, Maaravi is a licensed Israeli guide who has run his own operation since 2012 — historical, biblical and educational tourism, a TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence, and a client list that reads like a directory of the Israeli inbound trade: Sar-el, Travex, Eshet Incoming, Gate 1, Tlalim, Kenes Tours. He runs team-building programs for high-tech firms, leads church groups through the Holy Land, and handles educational delegations for I-Trek, MASA, Birthright and Passages. He was born in Kibbutz Hukok overlooking the Sea of Galilee, into a mixed family of Jews and Christians, and came home from his post-army travels with a vocation.

None of that is what the delegation will remember.

“I don’t see myself just as a tour guide,” he said. “I see myself as an educator. I see myself as a human being who wants to help other human beings understand this land better.” Leading people in the Holy Land, he added, “is more than just telling the story of this site or this building. It actually needs to tell the story of the people who live here.”

"We want them to interact with the truth"

The trip was not unremarked at home. Even while the delegation was still on the ground, other Filipino journalists were bashing it — as a junket, as a propaganda exercise, and as cover for what its critics call a genocide. Two of those charges were put to Maaravi directly.

His answer came faster and blunter than expected.

“I’m very worried that people will think that they’re coming to Israel and they’ve been brainwashed by people from the government,” he said. “I want them to really see that the Israeli mosaic of people is so diverse. Nobody is here watching them, or telling them what to think and how to think. We want them to hear different voices — from journalists, from the people, from the minority groups.”

The itinerary is on the record, because Maaravi published it himself when he got home. Over the week the delegation walked the narrow streets of the Old City of Jerusalem, stood at the Western Wall, visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Mount of Olives, floated in the Dead Sea, worked through Jaffa and Tel Aviv, and drove north to the Galilee. It also took in Bedouin hospitality, a welcome into a Druze family home, a visit to the Institute for National Security Studies, a meeting with George Deek — Israel’s Special Envoy to the Christian World — and dinner with Philippine Ambassador Aileen S. Mendiola-Rau.

“We talked about history, faith, conflict, politics,” Maaravi wrote afterwards, “and the incredible complexity of life in this small piece of land we call home.”

“We took the delegation to many different places because we want them to interact with the truth. And sometimes the truth can be challenging for the state of Israel. And that’s good. We want to be challenged. At least as a citizen of Israel, I want to be challenged as well.”

“I’m a friend, I’m a source of information — but I have my own opinions. And maybe I’m wrong.”

And they asked him anything — including the question that matters most in Manila.

Rice, gasoline, and a war eight thousand kilometres away

I pressed him on the part of this story Filipinos actually feel: prices. Rice, food, fuel. A conflict in the Middle East arrives in a Philippine household as a receipt.

Maaravi did not deflect, and he did not claim neutrality. He framed the war with Iran as a fight against a regime rather than a people. “We have no conflict with the Iranian people. We have no conflict with the people in Lebanon,” he said, drawing his line at the Islamic regime and its proxies.

He was blunt about the cost at home. “We are very much aware of the inflation and the financial crisis happening in Israel and around the world. Our economy is slowly growing, but we have new challenges because of this war.” And unsentimental about it: “The state of Israel doesn’t want to fight wars. We don’t want to send our children to war.”

His long view was almost academic. “In 30, 40 years from now, this war is going to be a case study in universities. I don’t think we need to be afraid — we need to embrace the change, but make sure it’s going to be a positive one.”

The business nobody puts on the news

Here Maaravi speaks as an owner rather than an ambassador. Israeli tourism has absorbed consecutive blows — COVID, then war — and the math is brutal: fewer tourists, cancelled routes, airlines pulling flights months in advance.

“I had to look at my wife, and many other of my friends who are in this business,” he said. “It was a great challenge for them, because at the end of the day they need to feed their children.”

“I decided that I’m not gonna quit. This is what I do. Maybe I will find a way to upgrade and change a little bit what I’m doing. But I will always lead people over here.”

He expects the routes, and the visitors behind them, to come back. And he makes a case for the industry that rarely survives a news cycle.

“Tourism in this land brings people together. By coming to the land of Israel, Israelis and Palestinians, Jews, Christians, Arabs, Druze, Baha’is — all the different groups are becoming one, because they are all part of this business.”

He is not speaking theoretically. “A lot of my Christian friends, my Muslim friends, my Palestinian friends are texting me almost every day, because they’re asking: so what’s the situation? They’re not coming back.”

“Tourism maybe is not big news, and it’s not as dramatic,” he said. “But in the Middle East, and especially in Israel, it brings the local population together, and makes them work together.”

It produced the line the delegation carried home: “By coming to the land of Israel and to the Holy Land, you’re bringing peace into the Holy Land.”

No curtains in between

Then there is the part that explains the Instagram account.

Most of Maaravi’s clients have come from the United States. The Filipinos were different, and he noticed within hours.

“When I work with people from the Philippines, there’s something so real. Right away, you immediately feel it. There’s no curtains in between.” No layers to take off, he said.

He listed the overlap like a man keeping score all week: straightforward, happy people who look for the bright side; families that stay large even when children are expensive, “because that brings joy and life into the family”; homes thrown open to relatives, to friends of relatives, to strangers.

“We see each other as brothers and sisters, and part of the family.”

It reframes what he is selling. “That’s what I define as success in my work. Not how much information I gave to the people. It’s the personal connection and the family connection.”

“I can’t wait to go back home and to hug my children and my wife. But I know that I’m also going to need a day or two, because I’m going to miss my Filipino friends that I just met.”

“So I have another family. We are always bringing more members to our family when we meet new people. And I believe that this delegation is part of my family now.”

"From your Kuya in the Galilee"

He was not just saying it for the camera. Six days ago, home in the Galilee, Maaravi posted the whole week to Facebook — a carousel that opens on the delegation mugging shamelessly for the lens in a Jaffa restaurant, scored to Sharon Cuneta’s “Bituing Walang Ningning.”

He chose the song himself. He knew exactly what he was doing.

“I thought I was going to show them Israel,” it begins. “Somehow, they ended up reminding me why I love it.”

“Traveling to the Philippines has always been on my list of destinations,” he wrote, “but after this past week, it has moved all the way to the top.”

He ran through the sites — the Old City, the Wall, the Sepulchre, the Mount of Olives, the Dead Sea, Jaffa, Tel Aviv, the Galilee — and then waved them off. “But Israel is much more than its famous places.”

What he wanted on the record was the other thing.

“Somewhere between all the conversations, questions, long days, laughter, and unforgettable moments, I realized that I was learning just as much from them. I learned about the Philippines, Filipino culture, their warmth, their incredible spirit, and most importantly, I discovered a group of people I never expected to grow so fond of.”

“I came to show them Israel. Instead, they gave me a little piece of the Philippines to take home with me.”

Then the ambition, stated plainly by a man who guides for a living and has just found a market that found him first: “I hope this is only the beginning. I look forward to learning more, visiting your beautiful country, and hopefully becoming a small bridge between the Filipino people and the Holy Land.”

And then the sign-off — which answers, without being asked again, the question the delegation had put to him on camera about whether he saw them as brothers or as something more polite than that.

“Until then, remember that you always have a friend in the Galilee.”

“From your Kuya in the Galilee.”

One hundred and seventy-five likes. Twenty-four comments.

And then, over WhatsApp, in the faintly sheepish register of a man who has just rediscovered the internet, a note to the delegation he had spent the week guiding:

“Posted on Instagram and Facebook for the first time in years because of you. Feel free to like and share 🙏”

Underneath it, the handle. kuya_henry_holyland.

Somebody should have warned him. Filipinos do not let go. Di ba Tristan?

Watch out for Henry Maaravi’s interview highlights on Open For Business.

Photo Credits: Joven Pinile

Malaking sinkhole, nadiskubre sa Bogo City, Cebu