Spirit and Story

Yes, the Tourists are Coming: But is it Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews?

By Jacob Ner-David (Jerusalem, Summer 2004)

Thesis: The recent increase in tourism to Israel, of Jews and non-Jews, is at the same time deeply reassuring but also potentially disturbing. I posit that while we must welcome and encourage tourism, we cannot allow ourselves to become inured to the reality we live in.  We must promote tourism in spite of it, recognizing the daily pain and suffering on all “sides,” and working even harder to break the status quo and bring Peace to the Holy City and the region it inhabits.

In the late ‘90s, tourism in Israel, and specifically in Jerusalem, was at an all time high. In the wake of Oslo, a peace treaty with Jordan, and a booming economy around the globe, tourists poured into Jerusalem – our rush hour was dependent on how many tour buses were going from here to there. And then a domestic tourist broke upon a simmering, pent-up frustration from certain elements in Palestinian society.  

In September 2000, long before 9/11, Ariel Sharon toured the Temple Mount in a direct sign of confrontational claims of sovereignty, and helped to spark what became known as the Al-Aksa Intifada, or to many the longest war Israel has waged. Oh sure, there were awful, horrendous attacks by anti-peace terrorist forces during the ‘90s, but they were few and far between. From September 2000 forward we have been at war, both externally and internally. My children have grown up these past four years with this war as a brutal reality, on the front lines: armed guards at all the coffee shops, restaurants, and schools. 

As the level of violence increased, tourism plummeted. Except for some seriously dedicated supporters in the Orthodox Jewish and Evangelical Christian communities, people stopped coming. Conventions were cancelled, and community missions were delayed one, two, and three years. Bar mitzvah trips were postponed, and business meetings were moved to Cyprus, London or New York.  

To those of us living in Jerusalem, life did go on, even in the face of death. Did we feel a sense of abandonment?  Definitely. We felt as if we had contracted an awful, contagious disease (and were fighting within our society about the remedy) – and our family members were refusing to visit, perhaps legitimately, in fear of catching our disease, which in far too many cases is terminal. 

And remember – this was not just a case of bruised emotions between family members, who “stop talking” for years at a time (all too often we experience those situations as well). The abrupt cessation of tourism to Israel, by all of its real and potential constituencies, destroyed an entire economic pillar of Jerusalem. Until 2000 tourism accounted for approximately a third of the jobs in Jerusalem, and an even higher percentage of the infusion of “hard currency” (mainly dollars) into the economy. Consider just one very telling statistic – in 1999-2000 there were over 3.5 million hotel nights in Jerusalem, but in 2002-2003 there were less than 50,000. Yes, repeat those numbers a few times in your head – a wipeout of that segment of our economy. Thousands and thousands of families were left without a means of income, in both West and East Jerusalem. Palestinian cab drivers, hotel owners, souvenir dealers, tour guides, etc., were just as directly affected as their Israeli counterparts.  

Okay, with all that as background, what’s happening today?  Well, after four long years, tour buses are shaking off their dust, hotels are re-opening floors long closed, and restaurants are actually crowded, with what we long wrote off – tourists. The first to come back the past few months were the Jewish communal missions, but then came the bar mitzvah groups and, yes, the investors and business groups.

Tourism is up almost 100% from a year ago – still a long way to go to get to the late ‘90s, but a refreshing sight.  

Or is it? 

Growing up on Long Island, I often would hear people in my community discussing current events, even flip through a newspaper, with a single question: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews? Of course, I never quite understood what they meant by that question – if something was bad for Jews, wasn’t it bad for all people? And the reverse as well – if the mission of the Jewish ethic is tikkin olam (repairing the world), then something good for Jews should be good for the world!

 And then I came to realize that our stated mission as a people and our conduct as a people were not always in sync – at times we cast off our self-description of A Light Unto the Nations, and instead wanted to be “like everyone else,” a “normal people.”  To tell you the truth, looking at the history of peoplehood around the world, this does not seem like such a noble pursuit.

And now back to our city in the here and now. How could tourists coming back to Jerusalem be anything but good for the Jews, you say, and more so, how could it be bad for the world? Where, in short, is my question coming from?  Well, sometimes what is good from one perspective is morally debilitating from another, if recognition and respect are not paid to the immoralities that exist simultaneously.  

For four long years we (Israelis and Palestinians) have been caught in a daily conflict, a war if you will. From the Israeli point of view, Jerusalem has suffered the worst of the back and forth violence, with the majority of terrorist attacks taking place here. Waves of terror have swept across the city, at times a daily occurrence. Besides destroying the tourist economy, these waves have slowly chipped away at our moral and ethical outlook. We, the residents of West Jerusalem, became desensitized to buses and coffee shops blowing up, death and destruction becoming a fact of life. And to the East, Israeli security responses to the constant attacks on Jerusalem made life a horror for tens of thousands of Palestinians – with walls and roadblocks becoming their reality. (And while I am not at present considering the justice of those measures, they did “work”; terror attacks on Jerusalem have been radically reduced after those security measures were put into place.) 

What does it mean, over time, to accept a status quo that consists of death and suffering? It means that we have lowered our moral standards – we have started to integrate immorality into our moral being, and evil has lost its shock value.  

It was after a bus bombing a few blocks from my house back in February that this really broke into my consciousness. I was with my business partner on our way to a meeting, and we went straight instead of turning left, taking the more scenic route to our destination -- a hotel just outside the Old City. A few seconds after passing through the intersection we heard and felt a “BOOM” from behind us, and being veterans of this, we immediately knew what it was – but what to do? We were separated by several cars from the bus that blew up, and emergency services were already on their way. And we had a business meeting to attend. . .so we kept moving, and in under a minute we were walking into the hotel to meet an American business colleague from Texas. The sirens were coming fast and furious, heading back to where we came from.

We went on with our meeting, and then a little less than two hours later, I was back in my office.   I turned on the television to see that the bus which had blown up had already been removed from the area, that the intersection had been “cleaned up,” and that traffic was moving again. It was as if nothing had happened – but for the twelve people who died, and the dozens who were seriously injured, something had happened. But the soul of Jerusalem had become so battered already that this was simply a disturbance to traffic that lasted for less than two hours.  

“Gevalt!” I cried out to myself, after the network correspondent said to the anchor that what truly was horrible about the attacks, after three+ years, was that everyone knew his/her place.  Our response had become a well oiled machine, almost devoid of emotion.  

And it goes on and on. A quiet period in Jerusalem these days consists of a few months when we manage to stop most of the suicide bombers at roadblocks – in fact, just the other day a terrorist tried to get into the city, was stopped at a roadblock, and so set off his explosives there at the checkpoint, killing two Palestinian bystanders, and injuring over a dozen Israeli soldiers. That, my friends, is considered a success! 

So what to do – what do people who still have some humanity left tell their friends, family, the world, about coming to Jerusalem?  

A good friend of mine, a former Jerusalemite, Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, talks in these terms: When a family member, a close friend, is sick, really sick, perhaps even with a contagious disease, and is laying in bed – what do we do?  Ignore him?  Carry on as if nothing is happening?  No, we take some precautions, maybe a face mask, and we go and visit. Not because we can cure the physical sickness, but because nobody should be alone in a time of deep pain. Let me take Rabbi Gafni’s words and continue. These visits do not take place in a vacuum – we do not act as if our friend/relative was not sick – but rather we visit in spite of the sickness, and perhaps think about what can be done to remedy the ailment.  

My friends, Jerusalem has been, and still is, very sick. Let’s not forget that for a moment. And remember that even when the disease seems to be in remission, its causes are still there, every day, and the effects of the awful cancer are only being held back by a terrible set of measures, which in the long-term might be very bad for the body, but bring some short-term respite.  

Should Jerusalem be abandoned in its time of woe?  No, not physically, spiritually or politically. The world needs to be with Jerusalem in all ways, which includes being there in person. But we cannot become deadened to causes and effects. I have lived in big cities and seen thousands of “good” people walk straight past dozens of homeless people begging for some food and respect, only to be absolutely ignored. We know that in order to make a difference, to raise the overall quality of life of all humanity, we must not ignore homeless people in the street, or the causes of their homelessness.  

Theoretically, according to many media reports, the “Jerusalem” issue was and is one of the key blocking points to progress in the formal negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. The current Mayor of Jerusalem, Uri Lupolianski, says that the terrorist forces know that Jerusalem is the heart and soul of much of the world – and thus they strike out at Jerusalem. But what Mayor Lupolianski doesn’t always point out is that the terrorists strike at the earthly Jerusalem, while for much of the world – especially the politicians – the heavenly Jerusalem is more real. In order to live, we need to bring together the earthly and heavenly Jerusalems.  

So, I ask again, is the renewal of tourism in Jerusalem good for the Jews? Only if it is a journey with eyes wide open, recognizing the daily pains and sorrows of all the residents of Jerusalem -- Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. Look beyond headlines to the humanity of hundreds of thousands of people living with walls between families, to three hour checkpoint-filled journeys to school for ten year old children. And do not become desensitized to the hundreds of families who suffered horrible losses as a result of terrorist activity, and the thousands of “survivors.”  

If we promote tourism with an acceptance of the “status quo,” I believe that such an increase in tourism is very bad for the long-term health of the Jewish people and its God given mission. We did not pray for thousands of years to return to Jerusalem, we did not threaten to cut off our right hand rather than forget Jerusalem, only to look the other way or get “used to” a level of violence and terror.  

Every tourist to Jerusalem should be required to walk the walls -- not only the Old City walls, but the new walls that are being erected -- and decide whether the future of Jerusalem is to build more walls, or to ensure that there are gates in these walls. Going back to Mayor Lupolianski, he has been saying that the most important part of a wall is its gates, that we know the Old City by the gates in its walls. Mayor Lupolianski calls the new walls of Jerusalem “Gates of Life.” Yes, we need to secure the safety of the residents of Jerusalem – but we also cannot be cut off from our neighbors, families, and friends. Yes, there can be safety with humanity, there can be security and respect for human dignity. 

It is in our hands to show that Jerusalem can be a beacon of peace, not some old buildings in a war torn area, that manages to pull the heartstrings of foolhardy pilgrims. If there is any value to pilgrimage, it should be to increase peace – and that can only come about when tourists/pilgrims are fully aware and cognizant, and maybe even sometimes remind us, who live here, of the possibilities for a different tomorrow.  

I bless us that we soon reach an era when good news for one people is good news for all people.    

(Jacob Ner David is an Israeli entrepreneur and writer who was raised on Long island and lives in Jerusalem.)

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