There are guides who show you a city, and there are guides who introduce you to a living, breathing character you will never quite forget.
Jerusalem, in the hands of Tzachi Samiya, is very much the latter.
Our delegation’s first morning in the city began, as such things often do, with coffee, security checks, and the slightly jaded expectation that we were in for “another political briefing and walk through the Old City.” What we received instead was a lesson in how love, knowledge and storytelling can turn stone and history into something almost painfully alive.
Tzachi is, on paper, an unusual combination: lobbyist and tour guide – “your expert guide to the corridors of Israel’s Parliament and the alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City,” as one description neatly has it.
In practice, that dual vocation is precisely what makes his voice so compelling. He moves effortlessly between the Knesset and the Cardo, between coalition maths and Second Temple archaeology, between present-day policy and three thousand years of longing.
Even his name feels strangely apt. Tzachi – crisp, bright, staccato on the tongue – suits a man who has a positive gift for clarity. Samiya carries, to my ear at least, an echo of elevation – appropriate for someone who spends his days walking the high places of the city and lifting other people’s understanding. He does what the best namesakes do: he makes the name mean more by the way he lives it.
From the moment we set off, he refused the easy clichés. Jerusalem, for him, is neither a postcard nor a battlefield of slogans. It is a palimpsest – layers of faith, empire, poetry and blood written one atop the other, never quite erasing what came before. He points, not just at the famous skyline – the golden Dome of the Rock, the grey domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the pale stones of the Western Wall – but at the human choreography beneath it: ultra-Orthodox men hurrying to prayer, Christian pilgrims clutching rosaries, Muslim families headed to the Haram, Armenian shopkeepers, secular Israelis walking their dogs, all flowing through the same narrow streets.
With Tzachi, Jerusalem is always two cities at once: the one already under your feet, and the one that exists in the text and memory of the Jewish people. He will show you a stretch of exposed stones and, with a few carefully chosen sentences, transform it into the City of David; he will stand you before a view of the Temple Mount and quietly remind you that here, on this hill, two Temples once stood – the First, raised in Solomon’s day and destroyed by the Babylonians; the Second, rebuilt by the returning exiles and later expanded by Herod, only to be burned and torn down by Rome in 70 CE. From that destruction, he explains, came not only ruins but a revolution: Judaism without a Temple, carried in texts, rituals and a daily turning of the body and the heart towards Jerusalem.
Ask any Jew, he says, what direction they face when they pray. Ask why a wedding is concluded with the breaking of a glass and the words “If I forget you, O Jerusalem.” Ask why, at the end of every Passover, every Yom Kippur, the same line is spoken: “Next year in Jerusalem.” The answer is not sentimentality; it is structure. Jerusalem is not a backdrop in Judaism. It is the axis around which the tradition turns.
And yet, for all that, he never allows the city to be reduced to a single narrative. As we walked along the ancient stones, he spoke with obvious warmth about the many faiths that move within the walls. He showed us where Crusader knights carved crosses into pillars, where Ottoman inscriptions still speak in calligraphic Arabic, where Armenian artisans fire their distinctive tiles. He described the Armenian genocide and its refugees, the Christian denominations that share – and sometimes squabble over – the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Muslim custodianship of the Haram al-Sharif, the status quo that has somehow held despite wars and intifadas.
In lesser hands, this could descend into a bland catalogue of “diversity”. In Tzachi’s, it becomes something richer and more honest: an acknowledgement that Jerusalem is holy not only to Jews, but that for Jews it is home in a way that is simply different in kind. Other faiths cherish it; Judaism is built around it. That distinction, delivered without apology and without aggression, is part of what makes his guiding so rare. He refuses to lie to please fashionable sensibilities, but he equally refuses to hate.
His background as a lobbyist – a man who knows the “corridors of Israel’s parliament” as intimately as the tunnels beneath the Old City – adds yet another layer. He can stand in front of the Knesset and explain how coalition politics actually works, how laws affecting Jerusalem’s future are made and unmade, how debates over security, heritage and sovereignty play out in real time. Then, twenty minutes later, he will have you in the Jewish Quarter, tracing with your fingers the cracks between stones laid by hands that never heard the words “Left” and “Right”, but knew all about exile and return.
There is, running through all of this, an unmistakable love for Israel – not the brittle, defensive love of propaganda, but the kind that has looked unflinchingly at the country’s flaws and still chosen to stand, to guide, to explain. He is generous with his criticism where he feels it is justified; he is equally generous in defending the city and the state against libels, lazy analogies, and the grotesque misdescription of Jerusalem as a place of “apartheid”. On our tour, he did not flinch from difficult subjects: 1948, 1967, neighbourhoods contested and lives uprooted. But he insisted, correctly, that complexity is not a crime and that history does not arrange itself neatly for the comfort of activists’ placards.
What struck me most, perhaps, was the way he read people as effortlessly as he read stones. The same “unique ability to read human interactions” that makes his virtual tours so engaging was on display with us in person. He knew when to let silence speak at the Western Wall, when to lighten the mood with a wry joke in the Muslim Quarter, when to pause a political explanation because someone had quite visibly just realised, for the first time, what it meant for Jews to return to a city they had prayed for over two millennia in absentia.
It is no small thing, in a world as shrill as ours, to teach without hectoring, to persuade without bullying, to love a place without turning it into an idol. Tzachi manages it. His tours – including the virtual ones he offers to people who may never set foot in Israel – make good on the promise on his website: an opportunity “to learn and engage with a truly special place,” to bring “the rich heritage of Jerusalem to life for people all over the world.”
For those of us on this delegation, that first walk with him through Jerusalem set the tone for everything that followed: Sderot and Haifa, Nova and Nir Oz, Tel Aviv and the Knesset. He had reminded us, at the very beginning, what all of this is ultimately about: a small, stubborn people and their impossibly old, impossibly young capital; a city where prophecy, politics and daily life jostle each other on every corner; a place where the past refuses to stay neatly in museums because it is still recited in prayers and lived in the present.
Jerusalem will outlast us all. Empires have discovered that to their cost. But the way we see her – as battlefield or as home, as abstract slogan or as the intricate, fragile reality we walked through with Tzachi – is not fixed. It is shaped by voices like his, by people who know how to take you by the hand and say: “Look. Listen. Feel. This is what it means when we say Yerushalayim.”
If you have the chance, take his tour – in person or online. Let him show you the corridors of power and the stones of the City of David, the many faiths that brush past each other in the Old City, and the thread that ties it all back, always, to the Jewish heart that has beat for Jerusalem since before there were domes on that hill.
In a world determined to flatten Israel into caricature, a few hours in Jerusalem with Tzachi Samiya is a small act of resistance – and a quiet, unforgettable gift.
