CONFLICT TOURISM AND IDEOLOGICAL SHIFTS IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE: While political instability is usually associated with declines in tourism, for a subgroup of tourists, political upheaval can actually act as a tourist draw. I examine the growing industry of conflict tourism in Israel/Palestine with a specific focus on Jewish travelers to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Though some conflict tourists travel out of a relatively neutral desire to learn about a political situation, others travel to exercise solidarity with a particular side of the conflict. Both Israelis and Palestinians use this type of tourism to garner support for their respective political positions. The Israeli government and its supporting institutions consistently prioritize tourism as one of its top Hasbara, or propaganda, tools. Tactics such as “pink-washing” and fully funded trips to Israel for influential figures and young Jews (through the Taglit-Birthright program) are used to create outposts of political and financial support abroad. Palestinians on the other hand, subversively employ tourism to challenge Israeli dominance of external representations of the conflict. Through an intricate system of licensing and permits, Palestinians are effectively excluded from the formal tourism sector, and have thus turned to grassroots, alternative tourism projects to counter this suppression. While such solidarity tourism to Palestine is often plagued by issues of Western entitlement that disrupt local economies and cultural norms, its advocates insist on its transformative power to turn tourists into activists. In particular, I focus on the role of tourism in raising participants’ political consciousness through attitudinal shifts. Past research indicates mixed results as to the power of tourism to shift participants’ political thinking. By looking at a unique case study of Jewish-American tourists to the OPT I hope to shed light on the power of tourism to uproot deeply ingrained political sympathies and to inspire international activism.

TOURISM IN THE DOLDRUMS: THE CASE OF TUNISIA. After reaching 7 million tourists in 2007, Tunisian tourism has experienced a series of reversals. The decline began with the world economic recession in 2008. The Tunisian Revolution in 2010-11 brought a further decline as Libyan and Algerian visitors increased but European visitors began avoiding Tunisia, preferring to applaud the country’s democratic progress from a distance. The most recent blow came in Spring 2015, when Islamist terrorists killed European tourists at the Bardo Museum in Tunis and at a beach hotel near Sousse. As of early 2016, more than half of Tunisia’s nearly 570 tourist hotels had closed, many travel agencies had gone out of business, 80% of guides were out of work, and handicraft sales were stagnant. This decline has been a severe blow to the Tunisian economy, which for decades has depended on tourism for foreign income and to help reduce the country’s high unemployment through providing seasonal low paid hotel jobs. Will Tunisian tourism recover? We review policy changes that might help address the problem and examine alternative future scenarios, concluding that unless there is decisive government action to restore security and to restructure the bankrupt hotel industry, tourism in Tunisia is likely to remain in the doldrums for the indefinite future.

HERITAGE TOURISM VERSUS LEISURE TOURISM IN POST-2011 EGYPT (Notes on crisis management, resilience and strategic choices) The January 25 Revolution offered to the world a very different picture of Egypt, far from the usual idyllic travel postcards. More than that, it dramatically affected tourism, a strategic sector of the Egyptian economy. In 2010, 14.7 million foreigners visited the country and generated 12.5 billion dollars of revenue. In 2011, the number of visitors to Egypt dropped to 9.8 million—of which 7 million were European nationals and the hotel occupancy rate decreased by 80 to 90 percent in cultural tourism sites located in the Nile Valley. In 2014 and 2015, tourism activities showed a slight recovery, but the killing of Mexican tourists in the Western desert (September 2015), and the Russian plane crash in Sinai (October 2015) definitely ruined, both the image of Egypt on the international market, and the tourism sector. However, the Egyptian tourism sector demonstrated in the past a strong capacity of resilience to crisis. In the 1990’s, and especially after the Luxor attack in 1997, the sector managed to recover in very few months. In the 2000’s, Egypt was also hit by several terrorist attacks, without harming the sector. However, it seems that the sector is nowadays structurally affected, and the crisis factors cannot be only attributed to the political instability, the regional situation and dramatic events, but also to the consequences of a tourism development policy that the Egyptian government has pursued for the last 20 years. In two decades, international tourism in Egypt shifted from incentive heritage/cultural practices to leisure and seaside mass activities. Egypt has abandoned its “comparative advantage” (heritage sites) on the global market, to a more standard offer adjusted to the international demand, in accordance with a neo-liberal vision supported by international agencies. Moreover, the Egyptian strategy shifted from a qualitative to a quantitative postulate: offering more infrastructures along the coast would attract more tourists and more hard-currency revenue. In the meantime, heritage sites have been neglected, if not forgotten. Such a strategy did work for a while, but not anymore. Here we would like to discuss the political economy of tourism in Egypt in the last two decades and the consequence of neo-liberal choices on the sector and its primary resources (heritage, natural and cultural sites management), as a structural factor of explanation to the current crisis.

GEOPOLITICS AND TOURISM IN THE ARAB WORLD: In my intervention, I would like to discuss the issue of tourism within the context of the changing geopolitics in the Arab World and the MENA region. The rise (and fall?) of political Islam, the rise of the “new” regional powers of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Qatar, and the conflict of interest between them, as well as the rise of security issues, terrorism and military conflicts are redefining the regional spheres of influence and interactions. Tourism is becoming one of the major fields where direct and indirect influence on the economic and political developments is embedded in the strategies of international relations. The GCC countries are playing growing roles as out-bound markets for the Arab tourist destinations. Tourism is becoming a part of the official politics of international relations of the GCC countries. The travel warnings regarding Lebanon by Saudi Arabia and UAE and Tunisia and Egypt by Qatar, while simultaneously ignoring the security threats in Bahrain and Jordan by the same governments, show clearly the political core of tourism in changing geopolitical landscape. Re-thinking the various aspects of the so called Islamic tourism within the geopolitics of the post-2011 development, is one of the points of my suggested intervention. The adjustments of the tourist infrastructures in Egypt and Bahrain to match the demands and the lifestyle of Saudi Arabians, the main backers of the regimes in both countries, could be understood within the on-going building of regional political blocs. Libyan medical tourists fly to Jordan and the growing Qatari and Saudi leisure tourism has diverted to Turkey while the Iranian tourism which is now directed to Lebanon and UAE could be understood along the new geopolitical lines as well. The changing geographies of flight destinations and routes and the new visa-issuing regimes show interdependencies between tourist flows and geopolitical transformations.

DUBAI: AN EMERGING MEDICAL TOURISM HUB. Since the beginning of the new millennium, and particularly since the 2011 revolutionary uprisings, the Arab world has experienced unprecedented levels of political violence and disruption. However, against this bloody backdrop, a high-tech medical revolution has quietly unfolded in parts of the Middle East. Dubai, one of the seven United Arab Emirates, has obtained a growing global reputation as a hub of medical tourism. Hosting the region’s only “medi-city,” Dubai has been attracting medical travelers from many other countries and regions of the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe, and other parts of the Middle East. Dubai is becoming particularly famous as an emerging global “reprohub”—a transnational site in which infertile couples are able to access the latest forms of assisted reproduction. In Dubai, clinics catering to these medical travelers are characterized by “medical cosmopolitanism,” or the delivery of medical care across numerous national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural boundaries. Indeed, Dubai is capitalizing on its medical cosmopolitanism as a profitable form of statecraft; in so doing, it has quickly become one of Asia’s top-ten medical tourism destinations. In an interconnected world marked by increasing global movements of medical travelers across regional, national, and international borders, it is important to realize that the Middle East, too, is part of these new global medical tourism trajectories.