Photo: Ben-Gurion International airport near Tel Aviv on Aug. 29, 2023. Photo courtesy of Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90.
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (JNS)
Amid Israel’s ongoing war with the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip, tourism is in a state of collapse with a 90% drop in visitors in November, according to Israel’s Tourism Ministry.
The precipitous plunge comes just as ministry officials had been expecting a near-record year for tourism following the global recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
A mere 38,000 tourists entered Israel in November, compared to 370,000 during the same period last year, the ministry’s figures show. Sixteen thousand came from the United States and nearly the same number from Europe.
The war, which broke out during the busiest tourism quarter of the year, which includes the Christmas holidays, has stunted annual tourism figures, which had been previously expected to reach 4 million this year, just half a million shy of the 4.5 million who visited in the record-breaking 2019.
Nearly 3 million tourists had come to Israel through the end of November this year, down from over 4 million in the same period in 2019 but still up from 2.5 million last year, the figures show.
“We were getting close to the 4 million figure, but then the war came and stopped everything,” Tourism Ministry spokeswoman Anat Shihor-Aronson said. “Now we are getting ready for the day after [the war]”
She noted that no date had been set yet for “the day after,” and that everything was dependent on the security situation.
Hotels Not Empty
In the meantime, hotels in Israel are mostly filled with some 80,000 Israelis who had to evacuate from both the south and north of the country.
In all, about 200,000 Israelis have evacuated because of the war, including 130,000 by government order.
Of the 130,000 who were instructed to leave their homes, some 80,000 are staying at hotels on the government’s dime. Three thousand are staying in government-subsidized short-term rental apartments and the remainder are staying in various communities with a per diem stipend that comes to 18,000 shekels ($4,912) a month for a family of four, the Ministry spokeswoman said.
The stipend was initiated by Tourism Minister Haim Katz as part of an effort to get the evacuees back to work.
However, for now, the majority of the country’s 56,000 hotel rooms are being used to house the evacuees, with the government paying the hotels over 1 billion shekels ($273 million) a month for the services.
The Day After?
Even as tourism remains insignificant now, the ministry remains in close contact with its marketing agents abroad as well as with the Jewish community in the diaspora and the largely supportive evangelical Christian community with an eye to the day after the war, the ministry spokeswoman said.
She noted that Lufthansa is scheduled to resume flights to Israel next month, along with its subsidiaries Swiss and Austrian Airlines, making it the one of the first major international carriers to announce a resumption of service in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Delta is also likely to resume flights this spring, she said.
Keeping Workers Working
In the meantime, efforts are being made to keep the tourism industry’s 200,000 workers, including employees at Ben-Gurion International Airport who are working on reduced shifts.
“Sooner or later we will need them,” she said.
“We have had crises in the past, and although they were shorter and smaller in scope, we will overcome,” she said. “The uniqueness of Israel as a tourist destination will always prevail.”
