TEL AVIV/RAMALLAH (dpa) – More than a year after the begin of the bloody Palestinian uprising and two months after the terrorist attacks in the United States, tourism in the Holy Land is on the verge of ruin.
The stream of pilgrims who usually provide the income for hotel and restaurant owners in Israel and the Palestinian territories over the autumn and at Christmas has more or less dried up owing to people’s fear of unpredictable violence and flying.
“It is an absolute catastrophe,” said Rafi Wiener, manager of the Sheraton Concern in Israel. “The whole industry is more or less finished.”
In the Palestinian territories between eight and ten employees in the tourist industry are without a job. After the record “holy” year of 2000 more than 40,000 people were thrown out of a job, according to official figures. That is two per cent of the entire working population.
In the first seven months of this year the number of tourist arrivals fell by more than 50 per cent to around 790,000. Since the start of the Intifada the industry, which had an income in 2000 of around 4.5 billion U.S. dollars and contributed 10 per cent to gross domestic product, has lost around 2 billion dollars.
Since October 2000 more than 30 hotels in Israel have gone out of business. Many of them, especially the small guest houses are in “suspended animation”, said Wiener with often only the family of the owner able to keep business ticking over. Room tariffs have been slashed in some cases by more than half. Hotel owners are calling it the “Arafat discount.”
“Since September 11 everything has got much worse,” said Wiener. “First there was the Intifida, then the terror in the U.S., then the Siberian airliner shot down by the Ukraine, it’s simply horrific.”
In September room occupancy sank by 81 per cent compared to the year before. In Jerusalem, the holy city at the centre of the conflict between Jews and Arabs, the situation is worse still. Here more than half of all hotel employees have already been given notice.
Even in the Red Sea resort of Elat, far away from terror and violence, the influx of tourists is ebbing fast.
Numerous restaurants have had to close or else face financial ruin. In Jerusalem alone half a dozen popular bars have shut up shop for fear of becoming terrorist targets.
Airline travel has been particularly badly hit and most carriers started cutting the number of flights to the Holy Land months ago. The U.S. airline Delta cancelled all its flights to Tel Aviv and others like Air France have seen trade on the premium route slump by 60 per cent since September. Germany’s Lufthansa is one of the few to so far escape the most serious effects of the slump.
The Palestinian areas reflect the decline of an entire sector in Israel and for the Palestinians it is the business that has been hit the hardest. The central statistics office estimates losses in from October 2000 to July of this year alone totalling 250 million U.S. dollars. Eight of every ten employees in the once thriving tourist trade has lost a job.
Aiman Abu Haseira, a hotel owner in Gaza, said bookings have more or less dwindled to nothing. “I had 18 people working in the hotel and I had to sack 11 of them because I can’t pay their wages anymore.”
In the Grand Park Hotel, the top address in Ramallah, bookings are said to have gone down by 80 to 90 per cent. “The tourists used to come from Jordan, Israel and the United States, today it’s just a trickle of businessmen,” said marketing manager Hadr Aad.
The Palestinians put the blame for their dilemma on Israel’s sealing-off of their towns and the closure of borders to the Arab neighbouring states of Jordan and Egypt as well as the fears of foreign holidaymakers.
At the same time tourism has ground to a halt. The violence has frightened off many foreign investors, according to a report by the Palestinian news agency Wafa and created losses of 50 million dollars.
The Palestinians live from tourists who visit the holy sites of Christianity, Islam and those of the Jewish faith in Jerusalem or Bethlehem, where Christians believe Jesus was born. In Bethlehem Israeli troops retreated, leaving behind a trail of destruction.
