In 2019, Masada had 840,000 visitors. In 2024, there were 20,000, a drop of 98 percent. The situation isn’t much better at other Israeli tourist sites this year: Caesarea counted 13,000 tourists this year compared to 571,000 in 2019. Qumran, by the Dead Sea, had 15,000 tourists this year compared to 447,000 in 2019. Nobody has visited the Banias nature reserve in the Upper Golan or the Hermon Spring Nature Reserve this year because they’re closed.
All of about 100,000 tourists visited Israel’s national parks in 2024. At the peak five years ago, there were 3.7 million. All the fond hopes in that gay year of 2019 have crashed. Amidst of a war that has gone on for over a year and whose end isn’t in sight, almost no tourists are coming to Israel. Some visitors (Elon Musk and Jerry Seinfeld) are suspected of being weirdos or some kind of statistical error. Why should anyone want to come as a tourist to a country at war, under missile attack, hurting, mourning and sad?
Tens of thousands of [Jews] have been left without a livelihood and with little reason to get up in the morning. “Tourism” is a vague concept. As the war continues, bus drivers have nobody to drive; tour guides are left without customers and souvenir shops along the pedestrian street descending from Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate to the Western Wall are sitting idle.
What are the employees of the museums catering to tourists doing? What about the park employees? Workers at the Hula Nature Reserve, which is closed for the second year in a row? What are the restaurant owners who fed tourists eating? What about the man with the camel at the Lido Junction near Kibbutz Kalia? And how are the launderette owners, who laundered the sheets for Tel Aviv hotels, making a living?
Chef Haim Cohen described it accurately this week in an interview with Eitan Leshem in Haaretz. “There are no tourists, people aren’t in a good mood, there’s a decline of about 50 percent in the restaurants, many of which can’t survive even with a 30 percent decline.”
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“We’re now getting cancellations of groups of Christian tourists from the United States for 2025,” Peleg says. “These are groups that postponed in 2024 and are now canceling entirely.” Even if the war were to end tomorrow, recovery takes time. It won’t begin before 2026, she adds.
Leopold von Mildenstein and Kurt Tuchler must be rolling in their graves right now.
If your family wants to go, go to Jordan instead and enter Palestine from there, but don’t cross the Green Line, and don’t touch a shekel. Also, watch out for fanatics; they’ve attacked tourists before!