Gay tourists flock to Israel

TEL AVIV, Israel — There is something incongruous about the stretch of two "specialty beaches" just under the Hilton Hotel's tall bluff.

The Hasidic beach, enclosed by an 8-foot concrete wall, features a polite sign at its entrance: Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays are women's bathing days; Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays belong to men.

It's the solution to the ultra-orthodox dilemma of how to body surf without breaking the Jewish law prohibiting unmarried members of the opposite sex from seeing one another in immodest dress.

At an adjacent beach, every day is men's bathing day. This is the unofficial gay beach.

Tel Aviv, with its warm climate, cosmopolitan feel and lively nightlife, has, in the past few years, become a hot destination for gay travelers.

But this is also a country where there is no separation between religion and state, and in which the majority of tourists come here for some form of religious experience — which all leads to an ambivalent official attitude toward the phenomenon.

According to Thomas Roth, president of Community Marketing, a gay market-research firm, gay travelers make up at least 10 percent of the travel industry.

Shai Doitsh, head of the gay-tourism department at Agudah, Israel's Association of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexuals, and Transgenders, says thousands of gay tourists have come to Israel this year, infusing millions of so-called "pink dollars."

Five years ago, the numbers were in the hundreds. A decade ago there was virtually no market at all, he says.

But David Katz, a Jerusalem travel agent, says evangelical Christians make up the single largest group of tourists to the country, followed by Jewish interest tourists.

"Dealing with gay tourism has to be done in an intelligent and sensitive way," says Yaniv Poria, a professor at Ben Gurion University. "It is wanted — it's just tricky. Like so many things in Israel."

Part of Israel's appeal, Roth says, is the perception that it's an open-minded country. Sodomy was decriminalized 20 years ago; there are equal-opportunity laws protecting workers against discrimination; gays can openly serve in the army, inherit their spouse's property and be legally registered as married.

But in contrast, Israel also has a history of intolerance. In Jerusalem, the annual gay-pride parade has to be protected by police. Last year, the 2,000 marchers were threatened and stoned by ultra-Orthodox protesters.

Also last year, the Tourism Ministry pulled its support for a campaign to promote gay tourism after dozens of religious members of parliament threatened to bring down the government over the campaign.

The government's solution to such sentiment has led them to take their support for gay tourism into the closet, so to speak. What this means, Poria explains, is that cities are free to market themselves as they see fit, while the country, officially, continues to market a far more traditional set of attractions.