Our hostess's exasperated voice crackled into the cellphone: "My husband will meet you at the gate." Click. For the past two hours, we'd been driving through Israel's Negev desert, on a pitch-black highway, searching for a guesthouse that had come highly recommended. But its address didn't register on our GPS, and our only landmark was a gas station, leaving us no choice but to call our hostess-to-be several times from the road. Her growing annoyance had begun to show.
Turning left at the station, we proceeded down a narrow, unlighted road, looking for "the gate." Ahead, the road terminated at a severe metal gate illuminated by two floodlights that bathed our rental car in a stark-white glare. Peering through the windshield, we made out a compound complete with a guard's post, heightening the feeling that we'd arrived at the entrance to a prison rather than a gateway to a guesthouse.

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“Amid the Turmoil of Israel, Guesthouses Offer Hospitality,” The Washington Post

By now, countless articles have been written on Israel. But leave it to Write Elements to find the one angle that hadn't been explored before. Published the summer Israel turned 60, the following story offered an unexplored look at Israel's guesthouses — and became the first article on the subject published in any major U.S. media outlet.