These are two major airlines that will bring a high increase in tourism back to Israel. Siting sources from both Delta Airlines and Air India, both airlines will start bringing a few flights a day and then increasing it to many more per day. This has brought hope to many tour guides including myself who have been hit hard by the ongoing war. Not only are tour guides extremely excited and relieved by this news, but also many other businesses that suffered a lot because of the lack of tourists buying their products and services. Hotels and hostels are also welcoming this good news. They too have lost a lot of business during Israel’s longest war.

But now finally there is a spark of hope to help heal this amazing nation. Other major airlines are set to resume flights to and from Israel in September, October and November such as Ryanair Airlines and British Airways. United Airlines, Wizz and Air France have already resumed flights in July. Even though Israel has now decided to conquer Gaza City, which would potentially make many people scared to travel to Israel now, I think most people understand that this is an ongoing war that is likely to end soon. And the fighting is mostly restricted to the Gaza area, and the rest of the country is safer. Bibi Netanyahu and Trump also gave a time frame of 4 months to the end of the conflict in Gaza; this was almost a month ago already. Usually, Bibi and Trump’s predictions have been very accurate throughout the war.

After talking to officials in the Ministry of Tourism and in the Knesset, they are predicting that things will be back to normal including tourism by March 2026 at the latest. I have lived in Israel for almost 13 years and have been a tour guide for 9 years and I was a lone soldier in the IDF and was in Israel for 3 major conflicts (2009, 2014 and now October 7^th 2023), and I can tell you that even now, Israel is one of the most safest countries in the world, especially for Jews. I was born in New York City and grew up in South Africa and I can tell you that Israel has always seemed safer than both those places, and many others that I visited.

I always ask my tourists if they feel safe being in Israel and they all tell me that it is the place where they have felt the safest. There are thousands of Israeli soldiers all around, you can walk down a dark alleyway in Tel Aviv and not have any fear at all being mugged because that stuff hardly ever happens in Israel. Whenever I sit in the coffee shop and need to use the bathroom, I just ask someone to watch my computer for me, and it has never been stollen in 13 years of living here. If someone did that in New York City, it would be gone in a second. All in all, Israel is one of the safest places on Earth, I can tell you this from first-hand experience and many others who have been here can as well.

Despite the biased rhetoric that Israel gets from most media companies, people who have been to Israel can attest to the fact that it is very safe in Israel.

Written by Jonathan Jacobson