With Israel’s travel season now in full swing, Israel educational programs are adjusting to ongoing flight cancellations, which have become the new normal in Israel travel. 

Israel’s tourism ecosystem has been struggling since 2020, when Israel closed its borders to non-citizens and pandemic-related regulations limited flights globally. Following Hamas’ Oct.7 attacks and the onset of the Israel-Hamas war, the situation has worsened.

On-again and off-again service to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport from non-Israeli airlines has been a struggle for many in the field, leading to a heavy reliance on Israeli airlines, said Anna Langer, vice president for North American Israel strategy at Jewish Federation of North America and acting executive director of the Israel Educational Travel Alliance (IETA). 

IETA represents a swath of nonprofits that facilitates Israel educational nonprofit programs — among them Birthright, Honeymoon Israel, Passages and Christians United for Israel. In the year after the Oct. 7 terror attacks, these programs brought 35,000 participants to Israel, said Langer. This year, they ramped up their offerings to support a projected 60,000 participants.  

Throughout March and April, many airlines started to resume flights. But after a Houthi missile landed within the grounds of Ben Gurion Airport, the resumption dates for many major airlines were rolled back or cancelled. “As soon as we understood that there was going to be a problem here, we set up a mechanism to help the field immediately,” said Langer. “However, we were already aware that access to flights was representing a core barrier to the field.”

In January, IETA hosted a summit in Jerusalem, alongside representatives from the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, to preempt the issue. By deepening relationships with Israeli airlines, said Langer, the alliance has been working on long-term solutions to support Israel travel. “If we can’t get on flights, if we can’t get there, we can’t do the rest of the work. So we see this both as immediate, short-term support, but also part of the necessary conditions for supporting our field,” she said. 

IETA has had more limited communication with non-Israeli airlines, said Langer, as legal parameters are primarily what’s keeping them from flying to Israel, and IETA’s market share is often a drop in the bucket for larger European and US carriers. “When we’re thinking about these U.S. carriers, there are other conditions beyond my and often their control that we cannot modify and change,” she said.  

But IETA has encouraged Israeli government officials to communicate with the airlines and analyze the factors they’ve named as barriers to flight resumption. 

“We have also encouraged them to look at some of the barriers and challenges that the American and European air carriers have named in the past [to the Israeli government] as being barriers or limitations in their ability to return, and ask them to really keenly look line by line, to consider what is possible and to reconsider what the purpose of those regulations are at a moment like this one,” Langer said.  

In response to the immediate issue, IETA has established systems to manage cancellations without sending organizers scrambling to react, reschedule and reroute, said Langer. Starting with an intake form for those who were booked on non-Israeli airlines, Langer and her team often map the initial itinerary against availability on El Al and Arkia. Depending on the level of need, they’ll also advocate for the airlines to add flights or flight segments. 

“How exactly we solve for the problem depends on the specific organization’s needs, but we are not only building the fail safe, but we’re also directly providing services to our nonprofit partners to ensure that they make it to Israel and can see to fruition the hard work that they’ve been planning for for such a long time,” said Langer. 

The alliance has had to be creative, she said, incorporating longer layovers, exploring the possibility of chartering flights and — though it ultimately didn’t come to fruition — looking into bringing participants to Israel on boats from Greece. 

“We are very much at the start of the summer trip season, and because of that, what we’re really trying to do is to build the models and mechanisms so that trips know that they are going to go,” she said.

According to Noa Bauer, Birthright Israel’s vice president of global marketing, Birthright’s summer season was able to persist despite flight cancellations — albeit with some longer travel routes. 

“We remain optimistic that all airlines will resume full operations by July 1. Thanks to proactive planning, Birthright Israel’s 2025 summer season was not impacted by flight cancellations,” Bauer said in a statement. 

Still, a lull in Israel travel could create long-standing issues for Israel educational travel, warned Langer, as without support for the required infrastructure — tour guides, busing companies and more — that infrastructure might fade away, bringing tour planners back to square one. That concern has contributed to IETA’s persistence in tackling the issue, she added. 

“We represent a growing percentage of the Israeli tourism market. We were close to about 5% in a pre-Oct. 7 environment, and now we’re closer to 15%. That shows a dogged commitment, an ahavat Israel [love of Israel] that is not going away,” Langer told eJP.