Israel's settlement tourism
Following a vast campaign designed to rebrand the West Bank settlements as tourist attractions with guided tours to biblical sites, and to open it up to the Israeli mainstream, the region has become popular with tourists from Israel and overseas.
In April, hundreds of thousands Israelis spent Passover touring the country, just as they do every year. Over the past few years, many Israelis have chosen to visit the sites of Judea and Samaria as their preferred holiday destination. This trend is no coincidence. After years of straddling the delicate boundary between legitimacy and illegitimacy within Israeli society, the people of Judea and Samaria decided to switch tactics. Instead of fighting for the diplomatic legitimacy of the settlement enterprise, they launched a vast tourist campaign to turn Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley into a legitimate tourist destination among the Israeli mainstream.
Publications in 2011 indicated that they have set their goal at half a million visitors in five years. The settlers' tourist campaign recruited at the time Ze'ev Revach, one of Israel’s most popular veteran actors, to represent it, and the main media outlets have also given special treatment to this new initiative.
And, indeed, Israeli public opinion changed rapidly. Visiting sites across the 1967 line has become more and more legitimate. Already before last Passover it was reported that "160,000 people had visited so far [in the last three years]."
This trend of visiting Judea and Samaria is not limited to national tourism, either. Many tourists from overseas also want to visit the area because of the region's rebranding as the Israeli “Wine Route,” the numerous mountain bike routes available and, of course, the biblical sites that draw many Christians.
