Between war and peace: conflict heritage tourism along three Israeli border areas

Abstract

The construction and evolutionary processes of conflict-heritage tourism sites in border areas in transition between war and peace can be understood through a comprehensive study of the functional, spatial, political and tourism processes along three border areas between Israel and its neighbors. Using a qualitative approach, conflict-heritage sites are shown to represent a relatively large component within the overall tourism supply in the studied border areas. The essence of this type of tourism site is an outcome of equilibrium between actual historical locations of conflicts along the border, their cultural-national importance, their perceived level of security, and their proximity to the borderline. The pace of development of such sites is relatively slow and incorporates their tourism opportunities as well as the physical-social-security challenges faced by tourism stakeholders in those areas. The developmental character of such sites depends primarily on security, economic and planning factors. Based on the Israeli study, it can be concluded that the development of a larger variety of conflict-heritage sites in border areas requires a distance from the frontier, as a result of the security-political situation. In addition, the more time passes since the last conflict in that area, the more sites will be developed, offering complementary tourism activities, often functionally connected to other types of tourism in such areas. Lastly, the study supported the postulate that conflict-heritage attractions do not disappear – but they change only slightly in terms of function when the security situation in those areas calms down. Based on the above insights, the paper proposes further research to better understand processes of heritage tourism development in dynamic border areas.