Canceled flights, high prices: Is the golden age of American Jewish travel to Israel ending?

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.

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 — further dampening their desire to travel here, or to send their kids in the future.

After nearly three years of warfare following October 7, Honeymoon Israel co-founder Avi Rubel described would-be participants worrying about paying a “social cost” for travel to Israel.

“We hear a lot about people being nervous about telling their friends or talking about where they’re going,” he told The Times of Israel. “That’s very worrying and that’s difficult. And that’s mostly because Israel means something different to a lot of people now after all these years.”

An El Al plane takes off at Ben Gurion International Airport, outside of Tel Aviv, March 5, 2026. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)

Despite the interim deal, as of this writing, many major US carriers have no plans to resume landing at Ben Gurion anytime soon. United Airlines and Delta have canceled their flights until September. American Airlines won’t be flying to Tel Aviv until 2027.

Changing itineraries and destinations

In light of the uncertainty, some organizations have taken steps to move beyond Israel. Last year, RootOne offered vouchers for Jewish teen tours to destinations in Europe, Latin America and beyond. That summer, the Foundation for Jewish Camp allocated $2 million for camps contending with canceled Israel trips, some of which sent participants to South America or Europe. Honeymoon Israel now also offers journeys to Argentina, though co-founder Rubel called them a “stopgap.”

“There’s still an interest in traveling to Israel,” he said. “Every time we’ve seen safety and security become less of an issue, we see a very significant uptick in registrations.”

Still, Honeymoon Israel — Like RootOne and Birthright — has had to scale back its expectations. Before COVID, the organization ran 40 trips to Israel per year. In 2025, only a handful of trips were made, and in 2027, Rubel is shooting for 20. Birthright is reportedly hoping for 10,000 participants this summer, rather than the 20,000 who had been expected to come.

The traditional pitch for such trips may also be losing its potency. Rather than winning over otherwise unaffiliated teens, many trips may be filling up largely with those who already feel connected to Israel.

“Not surprisingly, over the past few summers, it’s really been the more engaged and the more connected teens that have been traveling to Israel,” Charles said.

Rubel described a similar situation. “Our population of couples that are coming are a little bit more engaged in Jewish life than before October 7,” he said. “So to that extent, we are attracting people who are a little bit more already, closer to the center of Jewish life than before.”

Passengers check-in for the first outbound flights since the closure of Israel’s airspace on February 28, at Ben Gurion Airport on March 8, 2026. (Courtesy of Israel Airports Authority)

While this is one of the most sustained periods of disruption for Israel travel in the country’s history, it isn’t the first. During the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, teen tours had to recalibrate their itineraries, treading lightly around crowded areas liable to be hit with suicide bombs and limiting their participants’ free rein in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

During the COVID pandemic, getting to Israel from abroad was so difficult that activists called for the country to make a special effort to allow Diaspora Jews in. That call was endorsed by then-Diaspora affairs minister Nachman Shai, who lamented that “Israel has closed its doors repeatedly to the Jewish people time and again, without taking into account the consequences of Israeli policy on the fabric of relations, on our future.”

‘They’re probably not going to sign up’

One difference now is that in addition to there being fewer airline seats available, the value of the shekel has spiked, further jacking up costs.

“If these conditions continue, the field risks losing some of the range that allows Israel educational travel to reach different participants in different ways,” Anna Langer, executive director of the Jewish Federations’ Israel Educational Travel Alliance, said in a statement accompanying the study showing a 55% cost increase. Maintaining the trips, she said, will “require advancing practical solutions that keep high-quality, transformational Israel travel opportunities operationally possible.”

Organizations are addressing the “social cost” as well, taking measures to address participants’ discomfort with Israel or the heavy subject matter they’re sure to encounter once they land. Honeymoon Israel has emphasized exposing participants to a diversity of speakers, including Arab Israelis and Palestinians, and has trained its staff in group facilitation for when conversations get tense.

But while Rubel stressed that the organization always has enough applicants to fill its trips, he added, “There probably is a percentage of people who are lost to this right now. Israel is too toxic for them, and they’re probably not going to sign up.”

The Phoenix group from one of the pilot Honeymoon Israel trips gathers in Jerusalem, May 2015. (Courtesy/Honeymoon Israel/JTA)

Of course, there’s no guarantee that traveling to Israel (or the territories it controls) will lead people to support or like the country. Depending on the itinerary or narrative lens, it’s demonstrably easy to show visitors an Israel that conforms to many of the worst criticisms leveled against it.

The author Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose latest book includes a harsh indictment of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, was inspired to write it after a trip to Israel and the West Bank guided by writers associated with the Palestine Festival of Literature as well as activists from the left-wing anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence. New York Democratic congressional candidate Effie Phillips-Staley, who accuses Israel of genocide, told the anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker earlier this year that her criticism of the country stems from a trip she took here.

“You can see for yourself the situation on the ground and act as a ‘multiplier’ by returning and talking to others, formally and informally, about what you’ve seen,” reads a webpage on the site of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

That sentiment wouldn’t seem out of place in a Jewish organization’s Israel travel brochure. But the question, as Israel tiptoes toward an uneasy peacetime after years of bloodshed, is less what people will want to see, and more whether they’ll want to come at all.