Israel as Museum?

Is it cheating to say all of Israel is a museum? Is it over-using the term? Consider these points.

A professional tour guide lead our exploration of the Golan, just as a tour guide at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust leads our visitor groups.
The tour guide brought us to different historical locations. Each of these locations could easily be considered an exhibit that helped make real the information the tour guide imparted.

We moved through a defined physical space.

Do the obvious differences disappear? Does it matter that in a physical museum one walks, in Israel-as-a-Museum (“IAAM”) we drove and walked? Does it matter that one is well defined and contained, and the other is expansive?

Perhaps there is one truly different significance. In our museum, as in any finite museum, someone has deliberately organized the exhibits and the information presented – a curator, generally.. In IAAM there was no curatorial mind at work. The sites are the sites, literally the facts on the ground. The tour guide then serves as curator, selecting which sites to visit and editing the information presented. For this reason IAAM is truly a Museum one can visit an unlimited number of times, and have a different experience each time. At the least, IAAM’s infinite nature sets a challenge to a museum creator: can one create a finite space as infinitely renewable?