Uprising Triggers a Crisis in Israel Tourism Industry

The poster depicts a well-manicured hand holding out a pink daisy with a tiny Israeli flag attached to its stem.

“Meet the Israeli in his home,” the poster advises, and adds, in smaller print: “Israelis of all walks of life will open their homes and hearts to you. Enjoy their hospitality for a friendly, relaxed evening, and really get to know them.”

The poster is the work of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, and underlying its warm invitation is what government officials and private businessmen alike are calling a tourism crisis, brought on by the Palestinian uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

It is a crisis whose dimensions are only now becoming clear, five months after the unrest began last Dec. 9.

In the first three months of this year, foreign tourism to Israel increased despite the uprising, by 12% over the same period last year. According to Moshe Amir, director general of the Israel Hotel Assn., people had made down payments on their trips and didn’t want to lose the money.

Moreover, the Christian Easter holiday and Jewish Passover celebrations, which traditionally draw thousands of tourists to the Holy Land, overlapped this year and came early, helping to inflate the first-quarter figures.

But now, hotels are reporting unusually low occupancy, tour operators are canceling bookings, and airlines say passenger loads are down significantly. It is still too early for precise figures, but tourism experts say business in the current quarter may be off by a third or more from last year, and the outlook for the summer is equally bleak.

Figures just released for April show a 30% drop in tourism compared to the same month in 1987, which more than wiped out the gain recorded in the first quarter.

“In all the years I’ve been active as a representative of 30 charter companies here, I have never seen cancellation statistics like the present ones,” said Menachem Laufer, director general of Laufer Aircraft. He said that Western European charter companies he represents have canceled 407 flights to Israel in the last few weeks--40% to 50% of all the flights they normally schedule.

Occupancy at the Jerusalem Hilton is currently 42%, down from a normal 70% to 80% at this time of year, and an executive of the Dan hotel chain predicted “a tremendous drop in occupancy” for the current quarter “compared to our original forecast and also compared to last year.”

El Al, the Israeli national airline, has switched from jumbo jets to smaller planes on some of its overseas routes. And tour guides say their business is suffering as well.

‘For Better Times’

Even singer Rosa Howden, who appears at a five-star Jerusalem hotel, has been affected. Because of cutbacks, her employer said he could no longer afford to pay her. And to “keep my foot in for when better times come,” she accepted a season pass to the hotel pool in lieu of a paycheck.

Tourism Minister Avraham Sharir calls his area of responsibility “Israel’s No. 1 export.” That may be an exaggeration, but tourism certainly is important as one of the country’s top foreign-currency earners. It brought in about $1.6 billion last year, roughly double the country’s agricultural exports and roughly comparable to Israel’s arms sales abroad. About 60,000 local residents--both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs--make their living from tourism.

The industry has had its ups and downs before, but this slump is different. In 1986, for example, there was a 16% slump in tourism after terrorist attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports and the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. There was a particularly disastrous 47% plunge in the number of tourists arriving from the United States as a result of the terrorism scare and the plummeting dollar.

‘Don’t Like Us’

“This time it’s a different story,” the hotel association’s Amir said in an interview, “because the problem now is not the personal safety of the tourist. The problem is the image of the state of Israel in the American media. People are not afraid to come to Israel. They just don’t like us today.”

Sharir makes the same point in remarks prepared for delivery Tuesday to the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. “We are facing a phenomenon we haven’t known in the past,” he says in an advance text of the speech. “It is not only serious terror acts which are preventing regular tourist movement, but now there is a trend to want to avoid people presented on television with hostility and hate.”

The Tourism Ministry poster inviting visitors to “meet the Israeli in his home” reflects the perception here that the problem is not so much fear of coming to Israel, but opposition to the government’s policies in trying to suppress the Palestinian uprising.

Jews Revising Plans

Ironically, it is Jews who are revising their plans to visit Israel more than non-Jews. “Unfortunately--and this is a surprise even to me--the Jewish tourists are the first to cancel their trip,” Amir said.

The falloff in tourism that is just starting to be felt is particularly sharp among American visitors, three-quarters of whom are traditionally Jews. By contrast, there have been fewer cancellations among European tourists, the great majority of whom are usually Christian.

A Massachusetts rabbi, in a column published by the Jerusalem Post last Tuesday and based on information from the El Al office in Boston, wrote that of 70 tours to Israel booked between December and March, 40 were Jewish. Of those, 29 canceled, while none of the 30 Christian tours did so.

Informed sources here say that the number of American Jewish parents planning to send their children to Israel this summer as part of various programs to familiarize them with their heritage has plummeted.

At an emergency meeting with Sharir on May 1, tourism industry officials discussed what should be done about the crisis. According to an Israel Radio account, they asked Sharir to establish a minimum price base to prevent a price war among the hotels, a step the government has opposed.

Sharir announced instead the creation of a $500,000 fund to promote domestic tourism as a way of offsetting the expected drop in the number of foreign visitors. The money is to be used to advertise the benefits to Israelis of staying home for their summer holidays rather than traveling abroad.

The ministry also plans a joint advertising and promotion campaign with private tourist firms to try to counter what they see as Israel’s negative image abroad. One proposal is to bring in 25 groups of “decision-makers”--rabbis, heads of Jewish communities, tour operators, journalists--hoping they will go home and promote tourism to Israel.

Nevertheless, according to Yehuda Shen, a spokesman for the Tourism Ministry, it seems clear that the industry will fall well short of its original goal of attracting up to 1.8 million foreign visitors in 1988, a figure that would have been a record.

Given the lead times in the industry, the hotel association’s Amir noted, the stepped-up advertising campaign is really aimed at next winter’s tourist season.

In the meantime, Shen said, “things are really fragile.”