OCCUPIED
JERUSALEM, August 14 ( IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Immigration to
Israel was down by 27% in the first half of 2002, according to figures
released Tuesday, August 13, by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS).
The decrease was due in large part to a 46% drop in immigration from the
former Soviet Union, an Israeli based newspaper reported.
Some
8,400 former Soviet Union immigrants came in the first half of this year
compared with 15,500 in the first half of 2001, the Jerusalem Post
reported.
Mike
Rosenberg, director-general of the Jewish Agency's immigration and
absorption department, blamed the drop on the poor economy in Israel.
The
decrease came as no surprise to the Jewish Agency, which had predicted
that immigration would be down this year after the outbreak of the
Palestinian Intifada in September 2000.
The
CBS figures are higher than the Jewish Agency numbers, because the CBS
counts returning Israeli citizens and those who become Israeli citizens
while in the country.
According
to the Jewish Agency, during the seven months from January to July this
year, there was a 25% drop in immigrants, from 24,286 immigrants last
year to 18,179 this year.
Meanwhile,
Israel's once lucrative tourism industry sent reeling by almost two
years of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.
Israeli
tourism suffers a severe crisis, Hotel Association deputy president Rafi
Sadeh, predicted Wednesday August 14, that by next year it will be the
banks who will be running Israel’s hotels, said the Jerusalem Post.
Speaking
at an emergency press conference over what they described as the
impending total collapse of Israel’s tourism industry, Sadeh said that
the hotels were facing demands to repay loans amounting to some NIS 4
billion.
Association
president Avi Ella said that before the crisis, which began shortly
after the beginning of the current Intifada, some 33,000 people worked
in the country’s hotels. Now, he said, there were some 16,000 to
17,000 hotel workers.
After
the summer season and the coming holidays, during which many Israelis
stayed in hotels, another 3,000 to 4,000 workers were likely to be
fired, he said.
Ella,
who said that the hoteliers have yet to see any of some NIS 400 million
promised by the government in emergency loans, said the time for loans
had passed. Now they were asking for outright subsidies to keep going,
he said.
In
addition, there were now threats to abolish the ministry altogether,
making it perhaps a department in the Trade and Industry Ministry, a
possibility which Ella described as catastrophic.
Ella
said that as a result of the situation (according to the Central Bureau
of Statistics), the hotels had lost income of NIS 508 million in 2000,
of NIS 2.5 billion in 2001, and were likely to lose income of NIS 3.5
billion by the end of this year. The loss of profits was calculated at
NIS 196 million for 2000, NIS 790 million for 2001, and NIS 915 for this
year.
After
22 months of Intifada and continued martyr bombings inside Israel,
Israel has low expectations for the industry, once considered the third
major source of the state's revenue.
Now,
where a record two million people visited Israel in 2000, the government
hopes at best to attract between 900,000 and one million people in 2002.
Likewise,
where Israel generated 4.5 billion dollars in tourism revenue last year,
now it is struggling to raise 1.5 billion dollars in 2002, according to
Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The
numbers offer a bleak picture. Only 399,700 tourists visited Israel in
the first six months of this year, down 42 percent from the same period
in 2001.
About
50,000 people have lost their jobs in the tourism industry since
September 2000 when the Palestinian Intifada broke out, AFP reported.
Israel’s
atrocities and war crimes in the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin, and
recently in Gaza have further drawn worldwide condemnation and several
calls for boycotting Israel as a terror state
