It's the laziest cliché in the travel-writing book to describe a place as a country of contrasts.
Speaking of travel guides, don't bother trying your local national chain bookstore for an Israel guide from either Frommers or Fodors, you likely won't find them.
My father bought a travel guide to Israel before our trip this fall without reading it first. I forget which company it was from, but it was one of the major ones. We were both rather shocked at how Christian it was. It contained detailed information about churches and Christian sites, but barely anything on Jewish sites. Even the Jewish sites it mentioned it discussed with a remarkable degree of offensiveness -- in talking about one chair in a synagoge in Tzvat (I think) that has traditionally been used for circumsions for hundreds of years, the guide said something about how "disgusting" it would be to sit there.
The Insight Guides (part of the Discovery Channel) have pretty decent ones on Israel and Jerusalem.