JERUSALEM — Israel’s Ministry of Tourism is investing millions of shekels in discounted domestic travel this November, betting that Israelis themselves can carry an industry that foreign visitors have not yet fully returned to. Israeli Tourism Month, now in its second year, will offer residents roughly 1,000 guided tours and hundreds of cultural, culinary, and outdoor activities for 18 shekels each, about $5.
The program runs in four regional waves, starting the weekend of November 4th and continuing through the weekend beginning November 25th. Licensed guides will lead two-hour walking tours, including stretches of the Israel National Trail, at the subsidized rate. Participating hotels, restaurants, and attractions will add discounts of more than 25 percent off their regular prices during their region’s designated week, backed by paid promotion from the Ministry.
“The success of Israeli Tourism Month last year proved that there is great demand among the public for quality and accessible tourism experiences in Israel,” said Michael Izhakov, Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism. “This year we are expanding the initiative, strengthening cooperation with tour guides and with the thousands of businesses that make up Israel’s magnificent tourism industry. Domestic tourism is a significant anchor in the industry’s resilience, especially at a time when inbound tourism is still in the process of recovery.”
That recovery has been long and uneven. Israel recorded 4.55 million international visitors in 2019, its highest total ever, generating roughly $8.46 billion for the economy that year. COVID-19 erased nearly all of it within months. Arrivals collapsed 82 percent in 2020 and bottomed out at fewer than 400,000 visitors in 2021, the lowest count in decades. A recovery took hold in 2022 and 2023, with international arrivals climbing back to around 3 million by the end of 2023 and tourism receipts reaching roughly $5.95 billion.
Then came October 7. The Hamas-led terrorist attack on southern Israel and the war that followed froze the recovery overnight. Airlines suspended routes, foreign governments issued travel warnings, and tour groups pulled out en masse. By 2024, international arrivals had fallen to about 961,700, a 68 percent drop from the year before. A ceasefire in late 2024 allowed airlines to gradually restore service, and 2025 closed with approximately 1.3 million international visitors, still less than a third of the 2019 record but a meaningful gain over the wartime low. The United States remained Israel’s largest source market in 2025 with about 400,000 visitors, followed by France with roughly 159,000 and the United Kingdom with about 95,000.
Domestic tourism carried much of the industry’s weight through the war years, and Israeli Tourism Month is built on the premise that it will continue to do so. Israelis logged more than 13 million hotel overnight stays by the end of the third quarter of 2025 alone.
The stakes for the broader economy are significant. Before the war, tourism accounted for roughly 3 percent of Israel’s gross domestic product and supported close to a quarter of a million jobs directly and indirectly, according to Ministry and World Travel and Tourism Council data. Hotels, restaurants, tour guides, and transportation operators across the country, particularly in the periphery, depend on visitor spending to stay afloat. Izhakov has described the Ministry’s wartime strategy as fighting on two fronts at once: managing an active crisis in the tourism sector while investing in the infrastructure, marketing, and entrepreneurship that will let the industry expand once travel advisories lift further.
Christian visitors have historically been the backbone of that industry. In 2019, roughly 2.5 million of Israel’s 4.55 million visitors were Christian, more than half the total, and Christians have outnumbered every other visitor group to the Jewish state in most years since the Six-Day War in 1967 reopened Jerusalem’s holy sites to unrestricted access. Christian arrivals fell sharply during the war years along with everyone else’s, though the Ministry’s 2025 survey found pilgrimage travel specifically climbing back to 9 percent of visitors as tour groups slowly resume.
What draws Christian travelers to Israel has not changed in two thousand years: the physical ground where the events of the Bible took place. Jerusalem’s Old City holds the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Via Dolorosa, the traditional route of Jesus’s final walk. Bethlehem, in Judea, marks his birth. Nazareth holds the site of the Annunciation. The Sea of Galilee and its shoreline towns, Capernaum, Tabgha, and the Mount of Beatitudes, mark the center of his ministry, and the Jordan River draws Christians for baptism at Yardenit near where it exits the Sea of Galilee. Farther south, Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, offers visitors direct access to the oldest surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible.
The pull is not incidental to Christian faith. It is built into the Bible itself. The Torah commands pilgrimage three times a year: “Three times a year all your males shall appear before the Lord your God in the place that he will choose” (Deuteronomy 16:16). The Psalms of Ascent, Psalms 120 through 134, were sung by pilgrims climbing toward Jerusalem for those festivals, and Psalm 122 opens with the pilgrim’s own joy at the journey: “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’ Our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem!” (Psalm 122:1-2). The prophet Zechariah extends the pilgrimage beyond Israel to the nations themselves, predicting a future in which the whole world will travel to Jerusalem to worship: “Then everyone who survives of all the nations that have come against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Booths” (Zechariah 14:16). For Christians who see Jerusalem’s pull on the nations as prophecy already unfolding, every planeload of pilgrims landing at Ben Gurion Airport is itself a small fulfillment.
Israeli Tourism Month will not, on its own, bring Israel’s tourism numbers back to their 2019 peak. But it reflects a bet the Ministry has made throughout the war: that an industry built on foreign arrivals can survive on domestic demand long enough for the foreign visitors, Christian pilgrims especially, to come back.
