Trickle of Americans help give a boost to the ailing sector -- if they can get a flight
By Zvi Smith | Photography by Yahel Gazit for WSJ
TEL AVIV -- Elan Weinstock hadn't given much thought to visiting Israel since the last time he saw relatives there a dozen or so years ago. The Hamas-led attacks in 2023 snapped him back into focus.
From his home in New Haven, Conn., Weinstock felt a swell of feeling for the country, but work commitments, flight prices and a worrying security picture prevented him from returning with his wife, Sarah Silverman, and their daughter. Then, after leaving his software engineering job last fall, he found himself with time, a bunch of airline points and growing confidence that the country was safe enough to visit after a brief 12-day war with Iran and the release of the last hostages from Gaza.
"Between the first Iran war and that winter, I started to feel like it was a good moment," he said. The result has been a three-week trip catching up with family and traveling around the country to hike, swim, shop and visit heritage sites.
Israel's battered tourism industry is showing rare flickers of life this summer. Cautious Americans are beginning to return following the fighting across the region that morphed into a series of tit-for-tat exchanges. Figures from Israel's Ministry of Tourism show that 32,500 Americans visited in June, a 73% increase from the same month last year, albeit that was when Israel's skies were closed during almost two weeks of war with Iran. Another 36,600 arrived from the U.S. in July, up 15% from last year and comprising a third of total visitors, according to the ministry and the Central Bureau of Statistics.
American-accented English is heard more often in Tel Aviv and around Jerusalem as visitors from the U.S. finally make good on long-delayed plans to visit family and friends. Mike Huckabee, the U.S.'s ambassador to Israel, met with tourism industry leaders earlier this month to see what can be done to encourage more to follow.
And not a moment too soon, people working in the business say.
Years of war, first in Gaza after the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and then with Iran, dealt the tourism industry a double blow, worsening a slump that began with the pandemic lockdowns.
"Since Covid, business has been falling and individual tourists stopped coming," said Zakariah Mashriqi, 47, who runs a family-owned antiquities shop in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. "It picked up after Covid, but October 7 brought it down again."
This year's war with Iran pushed tourist spending down still further. In the first six months of the year, foreign visitors spent around $700 million, said Yaron Ergas, the director of research and statistics at the Ministry of Tourism, putting the industry on track to vastly underperform its $3 billion haul last year. Excluding the Covid years, the number of visitors, meanwhile, is set to drop to the lowest number in half a century.
That makes the trickle of inbound Americans a positive sign. Historically, the U.S. sends more tourists to Israel than any other country, at around a quarter of the total, rising to over a third since 2020.
Ilana Butrimovitz, 39, a tour guide from Haifa, said this year is a significant improvement on last. "My entire summer is booked with American teen and Birthright groups," she said, referring to the program that brings young Jewish adults to Israel.
Those providing private tours are finding the terrain a little tougher.
"At one point I was booked through the whole summer, but when the war broke out, everybody but two families canceled," said Jeremy Collins, 43, a tour guide who runs his own business. "It's better compared to last summer, but that's going from 0% to 20% of how work should be."
This isn't necessarily a bad thing for those who do make the trip.
Walking through the colorful art galleries in the northern Israeli city of Safed, Weinstock said he appreciated having some breathing space from the usual crush of tourists, but felt bad that times were hard on locals.
"Several shop owners said they had closed for years and opened back up with the hope tourists would return, but it was a ghost town," he said.
There are some encouraging signs, said Elisa Schweizer, 50, from San Jose, Calif., including a nearly sold-out show in Tel Aviv for Israeli pop star Omer Adam, and a 4×4 tour her family took at a northern kibbutz that had recently opened after two years.
"The guides said they were grateful to finally see visitors returning," she said.
Some of the busier sites, such as Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, are mostly visited by pilgrims from Russia.
More Americans would come, said Michael Izhakov, director general of Israel's Ministry of Tourism, if more flights were available. U.S. carriers aren't scheduled to resume services to Israel until the fall at the earliest, meaning that Americans have to find other ways to get there, often transiting through Europe.
"It's all about the flights. Without flights, there's no way to come," he said.
Rabbi Josh Ross, executive director of the Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, a summer work and study program for Jewish American college students, agreed.
"We might be down a few spots this year, but that's not about the war. It's about airfare costs and where the shekel-to-dollar exchange rate stands right now, which makes the summer pricier for families," he said.
American visitors also said flights were a headache, often involving last-minute cancellations, schedule changes and winding itineraries.
It took Jon Rapp, 54, a clinical social worker from Pierre, S.D., 29 hours to reach Tel Aviv for his son's wedding, but he had to leave his son's stepmom and two half-siblings behind because their tickets on United Airlines had been canceled.
Rapp, who remembers shocking scenes from the Second Intifada such as the bombing of Jerusalem's Sbarro's pizzeria in 2001, said the security situation didn't deter him.
"If you don't come because you're worried about a security situation in Israel, you don't come to Israel."
Still, even some of the most committed struck a cautious note.
"We were on the fence about coming," said Schweizer, who regularly brings her children to visit. In June last year, they found themselves running to bomb shelters to avoid Iranian ballistic missiles.
This year, they hedged and met her Israeli husband's family in Greece to see how the situation in the Middle East was unfolding. "When everything seemed safe-ish, we bought a ticket," she said.
Many visitors, like Weinstock, who flew using travel points, had to buy tickets more than six months in advance.
"I probably wouldn't have bought the tickets a month ago, but since we already had them, I figured let's roll with it," Weinstock said.
"We were watching," said Craig Aframe, 48, a banker from Boston who came with his wife, Jamie, 48, a senior executive assistant at an investment bank, and their two teenage sons for a joint bar mitzvah trip they postponed two years in a row. They arrived shortly before hostilities between the U.S. and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz flared again.
"I figured we better come now, because you just don't know," Jamie Aframe said.
Most visitors to Israel, though, said they didn't feel less safe over the slow-burn conflict in the Persian Gulf and what that means for them.
"I didn't even know it had started back up," Jaime Aframe said.
"I'm zen about it," Weinstock said. "If I hear a siren, that might change my zen state, but for right now I don't feel any different."
This article is being republished as part of our daily reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S. print edition of The Wall Street Journal (August 15, 2026).