Foreign investment in Israel plummeted almost 50 percent in 2014, a fact attributed to last summer’s assault on Gaza and the growing impact of boycotts.
How zion sees us
Foreign investment in Israel plummets by half since Gaza massacre
Foreign investment in Israel plummeted almost 50 percent in 2014, a fact attributed to last summer’s assault on Gaza and the growing impact of boycotts.
This week the UN’s trade and development agency UNCTAD released its annual World Investment Report on foreign direct investment (FDI) – a measure of money that investors from overseas put into a country to invest in businesses, build factories or start other economic projects.
According to the report, FDI into Israel in 2014 plummeted to just $6.4 billion from almost $12 billion in 2013.
The 2014 figure appears to be the lowest in more than a decade. Foreign direct investment into Israel averaged around $9 billion per year from 2005 to 2012.
“We believe that what led to the drop in investment in Israel are Operation Protective Edge and the boycotts Israel is facing,” Roni Manos, an Israeli economist who co-authored the report, told Israel’s Ynet.
“Operation Protective Edge” is the name Israel gave its 51-day assault last summer that devastated much of Gaza and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 chidren.
In line with global trends, FDI fell in other regional countries, but nowhere near as sharply as in Israel. FDI fell 1.7 percent in Turkey, 6.8 percent in Iraq, 4 percent in the United Arab Emirates and 9.6 percent in Saudi Arabia. But it actually rose by 6.6 percent in Lebanon.
Iran, which has been under brutal international sanctions, saw inward investment decline by about a third to just over $2 billion.
“The tourists have stopped coming”
The news that investors are fleeing is only the latest economic blow to Israel as a result of its attack on Gaza.
In May, Ynet revealed a dramatic plunge in visits to the country in an article headlined “Tourists have stopped coming to Israel.”
During the Gaza assault, Palestinian resistance organizations considered it a significant strategic achievement that they managed to force a shutdown of Israel’s main international airport for several days, dealing Israel a severe economic and reputational blow.
But it appears the damage may have lasted far longer than the airport shutdown.
“Despite the hopes for a recovery two or three months after last summer’s operation in Gaza, it seems the crisis is only getting worse,” Ynet reported, “the number of tourists is dropping, the number of hotel stays is declining and the number of organized tours has been significantly cut.”
Ynet cited figures from the Israel Hotel Association for the first quarter of this year pointing to a 28 percent drop in tourist stays, with some areas including the Red Sea resort of Eilat – heavily marketed as a seaside destination for Europeans – seeing a 51 percent decline.
The report quoted one tour operator saying he didn’t expect matters to improve next year. “We are only left with the pilgrims and Jewish tourists,” the tour operator complained, adding that Christian religious tourists spent most of their time in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.
Economic damage
This week, the UN Human Rights Council issued its independent report into the Gaza assault, and on Israel’s simultaneous violent crackdown in the occupied West Bank, finding evidence of numerous war crimes likely authorized at the “highest level” of the Israeli government.
The UN inquiry, citing Bank of Israel figures, also noted that “Operation Protective Edge caused a contraction of output in the tourism and manufacturing sectors” in Israel of about $900 million and caused “indirect damage” of another $440 million.
The economic damage Israel is doing to itself by continuing its regime of occupation, apartheid, siege and massacres of Palestinians may be mounting faster than previously thought.
This might also help explain why Israel is dramatically escalating its efforts to try to halt the momentum of the growing BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – movement.
Desertpeace 
haunebu7 said,
June 26, 2015 at 12:08
Reblogged this on Haunebu7's Blog .
legal eagle said,
June 26, 2015 at 17:29
You do not have to openly advocate BDS in order to make it work. Openly promoting BDS is slated to bring about the ire of Israel’s puppets in the various governments who are more loyal to that failed state than to their own people; the plan is to read the labels on everything. If a product says “imported” without specifying from where assume it is from Israel. If it has a 729 at the beginning of the bar code it is from Israel. Once you are armed with the education you can then make moral choices that go with the tenures of your conscience.
Imagine said,
June 27, 2015 at 01:38
Good! … Love it!
Laskarina said,
June 28, 2015 at 03:58
They can whine about the decline in tourism, but when they have more soldiers than believers in the church of the Holy Sepulcher on Orthodox Christian Easter when the Holy Fire appears (see http://www.holyfire.org) they really need a reality check.
Maybe the Israelis are taking too many of the drugs they market to the world.
Recently 16 teenage so called “settlers” i. e. American Jew fanatics, completely destroyed the ancient church built on the spot where Christ made the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
Bethlehem, is completely a walled in prison, with dwindling Christian population.
Taybeh (Biblical Ephraim), the last Christian village in the Holy Land, had acres of land confiscated by the govt without right of appeal, and this past week acres of their wheat crop were burned to the ground by “settlers”. This is not only the last all Christian village left where Christ walked the earth, but it is the one where he fled “for fear of the Jews” before entering Jerusalem (Palm Sunday).
And let’s not forget the martyr St. Philoumenos, a priest tortured to death by “settlers” in 1979 as he began vespers.
They wonder why tourism is declining???
And this is to say nothing of the sin city of Tel Aviv, with more brothels per square meter than any place on earth, as well as home to the world’s largest gay pride parade.
07/02/2015 False Flag Weekly News with Kevin Barrett and Jim Fetzer | NO LIES RADIO said,
July 2, 2015 at 19:32
[…] 19) “BDS” campaign is working https://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2015/06/26/despite-the-odds-bds-is-working/ […]