For decades, the American Jewish community’s biggest organizations and funders treated travel to Israel like a silver bullet.
Summer camps, day schools and youth groups have run trips to Israel for decades. Birthright, founded more than a quarter century ago, has topped 900,000 total participants on its free trips and spawned a bevy of emulators, from Momentum (“ Birthright for Jewish moms ”) to Honeymoon Israel (“ Birthright for married couples ”) to programs facilitating longer-term stays, internships or travel for high schoolers.
The rationale for these trips was straightforward: An American Jew who has traveled to Israel, funders and organizers said, was more likely to stay Jewishly involved, marry Jewish and support the Jewish state than one who hasn’t.
Facing rising intermarriage rates and declining support for Israel among young people, the trip providers trumpeted study after study presenting Israel travel as the best defense. And they filled airplane after airplane: In 2020, a Pew Research Center survey found that nearly half of US Jewish adults had been to Israel at least once. One in four had taken the transatlantic trip multiple times. Overall, a record 4.5 million tourists entered Israel in 2019.
That was then. In the years that have followed, getting to Israel has been frequently arduous and increasingly expensive, if not downright impossible. First, COVID-19 all but barred entry into Israel. Then, airlines canceled flights en masse following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel and the start of the Gaza war. Subsequent waves of cancellations came after attacks by the Houthis in Yemen and during the two rounds of fighting over the past year between Israel and Iran.
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In 2024 Israel saw fewer than a million tourists. Last year the numbers rose slightly, to 1.3 million tourist entries . As flights have grown scarcer and the shekel more valuable, the cost of tickets has skyrocketed, with a recent study by the Jewish Federations of North America finding that educational trip providers are paying 55 percent more in operating costs than they did before COVID and the October 7 attack.
Getting to Israel is only part of the problem. A trip to the Holy Land is far less appealing when one considers the possibility of spending some of the time there in bomb shelters, as the ongoing conflicts continue to see intermittent bouts of missile fire from Iran, Lebanon or Yemen.
“Everyone is still very much in support of going, wants teens to come have these really rich experiences,” said Randi Charles, senior managing director for RootOne, which provides vouchers to teens for dozens of Israel trips. But, she added later, “RootOne launched its first summer in 2021 and between COVID and post-10/7 and Iran, I would say we haven’t had a full summer where we’re running at full scale yet.”
Calmer times will, presumably, return at some point, whether this week or further down the line. But it’s fair to ask whether, between the havoc and the high prices, the golden age of American Jewish travel to Israel is ending.
Passengers at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv after it fully reopened following a ceasefire agreement between United States and Iran, April 9, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Despite the interim agreement that was just announced between the US and Iran, it’s become nearly impossible to predict when day-to-day life will be tranquil enough for travelers and airlines to fly here at the same volume as they did seven years ago.
And regardless of how safe travel to Israel might be, the country has become so stigmatized by the war against Hamas in Gaza that it’s unclear how many people will still want to come, let alone shell out thousands of dollars for a round-trip ticket.
Increasing unpredictability, declining popularity
Among Jewish Americans ages 18 to 34 — the prime target of Birthright and other Israel trip initiatives — the country is especially unpopular. A recent poll found that most of them don’t feel attached to Israel, more than 70% oppose Israel’s conduct during the Gaza war and nearly three-quarters oppose the war with Iran. When the airways return to normal, how many of those people will want to board a plane?
An example of the ongoing unpredictability came last week, when a one-day flare-up between Israel and Iran sent Israelis again running for shelter — including at Ben Gurion Airport itself. The exchange of fire ended relatively quickly, and Israel didn’t close its airspace, but the conflict was enough for two European carriers to temporarily suspend flights. This week brought fears of another such flare-up, before the interim peace deal was announced.
The new status quo could lead to a feedback loop in which, because of the dearth of trips, young adults don’t get to see Israel firsthand. Those young adults may then feel a weaker affinity to the country…
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