Does Tourism Exploit

    Jerusalem is one of the few places where people travel from all over the world to see. The history and the culture within the ancient city leave visitors in awe. However, Poet Yehuda Amichai sees the city’s tourism industry slightly differently. Yehuda Amichai speaks about the potential exploitation of hardships throughout the Jewish community. In his poem Tourist, he conveys these feelings elegantly and with passion. 

The poem opens with Amichai saying how tourists flock to these Jewish cultural sites to witness things of great holiness or even great loss. He says how “they squat at the Holocaust Memorial” (Amichai 177) and “put on grave faces at the wailing wall.” (Amichai 177) He follows these two lines by saying how the tourists then laugh behind the curtains of their hotel rooms. All of this together shows me that Amichai believes the motives of these tourists are not always pure and that sometimes, these serious sites can be taken too lightly. 

Diving further into the poem, Amichai talks more about the exploitation of Jewish culture through tourism by stating how these tourists will take photos with their famous dead. They take pictures with the dead and take pictures at sites of great tragedy with no true sadness or feeling. It is easy to see how Amichai can feel, almost as if these tourists sometimes disrespect his culture when they only walk around taking pictures and not genuinely appreciating the history and culture behind some of these fantastic places. 

    Amichai then wraps the poem with a brief story of how a group of tourists walked around the city. In this story, Amichai is simply sitting at the steps of a gate, minding his own business, when the group focuses on him as a “target marker.” The group's guide then points out how close to Amichai is an arch from the Roman period. Amichai gets up and, as he is walking away, explains how the arch is not what is important. Next to the arch sits a man buying fruits and vegetables for his family; that is what is truly important. 

    This poem starts to make sense whenever Jerusalem's tourism level is put into perspective. For example, according to site touristisrael.com, 2018, Jerusalem had about 3.93 million tourists. This shows the massive number of people wanting to see this amazing place yearly. While yes, tourism is very good economically and for recognition, at what point are you sacrificing what you believe in to make money?

Citation:

Tourism 2018 Statistic

(https://www.touristisrael.com/jerusalem-named-worlds-fastest-growing-tourist-destination/29502/#:~:text=In%202018%2C%20around%203.93%20million,things%20to%20do%20for%20visitors.)

Tourists by Yehuda Amichai