Born in Israel in 1980, Itamar has been a tour guide in Israel-Palestine since 2008, co-founder and Israeli coordinator of Combatants for Peace (2005-2009), a flamenco guitar player, and is currently working on his M.A in Anthropology from Haifa University. 

Itamar focuses his attention, study and tour guiding on the interplay between large scale politics and the individual experience that connects us all to systems of beliefs, institutions, and collective action. In Israel-Palestine conflicting historical narratives shape the present of society, politics, and the arrangement of public and private space. Tours with Itmar ask us to question how these spaces are organized and how the people of this land act, think, feel and express themselves in them. He seeks to engage as many points of view as possible to understand this conflictual place from a critical yet compassionate point of view. The Jerusalem Old City Walking Tour is the one tour where all the above – history, politics, points of view and public-space arrangement – can be captured, and is one of Itamar’s favorite tours. 

Itamar’s experience serving as a combatant soldier in the Israeli military during The Second Intifada (2000-2004) has been a catalyst in shaping his political and historical understanding and led him to publicly refuse to continue to serve the Israeli military oppression of Palestinians. Joining Breaking the Silence (2004-2011,  Itamar drew on his experiences to represent the NGO in Israel and abroad, calling for pressure on the state of Israel to halt its supremacist policies.

Co-founding Combatants for Peace (2005-2009) and leading its Israeli side for a year created connections with Palestinians struggling for freedom. Refusing to go to war in Lebanon (2006), Itamar sat shortly in jail and quickly after, he started guiding in Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust Museum) focusing on processes of collective memory and its manipulations. After 3 years (2009) he was sacked from Yad Vashem for discussing the way Holocaust narratives in Israel are used to hide and erase the memory of the Palestinian Nakba, and other current policies such as locking millions of Palestinians in Gaza for years. After participating in The Jewish Flotilla to Gaza (2010), Itamar created an alternative tour of Yad Vashem focusing on the shaping of the collective memory of the Holocaust.    

Itamar’s B.A in Palestine Studies (Eretz-Israel Studies) in Haifa, graduating with honors in 2019, formalized his historical knowledge and brought him to research political activism and collective memory for his M.A., focusing on the southern West Bank. At the same time, flamenco guitar playing takes him to Spain to play and perform, and spend months soaking up the oh-so-different atmosphere there.