One of the cheesier keepsakes I’ve ever bought in Israel came, not surprisingly, from a touristy shop on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street. A fridge magnet, it shows a zebra on a grassy veldt under the slogan, “Hello from Israel!” Of course there are no zebras in the Holy Land, but you had to stop and think there for a minute, didn’t you? Aside from gags like that, you’d be hard-pressed to find visual surprises among Israel posters, souvenirs and postcards. You can probably picture most of them without even springing for a stamp: sober depictions of daveners at the Wailing Wall; shots of dusty ruins; sunset glinting off the Dome of the Rock; cartoon maps dotted with little icons showing camels in the Negev and snorkelers in the Red Sea and so on. Flip through a...

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