In the Middle East, a dynamic region of multi-layered histories and geographies, and the crossing point for multiple cultures, identities and traditions, tourism is rapidly becoming a major economic phenomenon with complex and socio-cultural implications. For as well as the obvious movement of people, largely for leisure purposes, tourism is one of the foremost mechanisms for the transmission of knowledge, the circulation of ideas and imaginaries and material objects. International tourism in the Middle East does not work in a vacuum but is shaped by historically conceived binaries stretching beyond mere geographies to polarities around culture, language and religion. Formal and institutionalised narratives of tourism, exemplified by travel brochures, work on these binaries and fit within the much discussed notion of ‘orientalism’. This paper examines the ‘east-west’ binary framework in the context of tourism in the Mid- dle East and the ways in which tourism can contribute to the process of inter- cultural dialogue. It distinguishes between tourism as a structural development format on the meta level, and the intimacies of ‘being’ a tourist at the micro- level. It is argued that it is at the level of individual encounter between tourist and host, that moments are created, born out of angst in the face of difference, which allow, temporally at least, peoples to bypass the binary legacies of history and the contemporary visions of global politics, and engage instead in shared notions of humanity. In this way the act of tourism, or rather of ‘being a tourist’, is a vital transformative experience. The paper suggests that in the Middle East in particular, tourists require greater opportunities and spaces to interact with host communities. ‬