Celebration of Summer – Israeli Travel Posters Collection Sale

In celebration of summer and the holiday season, Farkash Gallery proudly presents a captivating collection of travel posters depicting the Land of Israel from its early establishment until the present day.

Poster art has always been a powerful form of visual communication and an art form in itself. Travel Posters began to appear at the turn of the 20th century, Colonial nations like Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands started to create vibrant and exotic posters advertising landscapes of their colonies to entice travelers. In Palestine, tourism flourished under the British Mandate, becoming an important economic and political battleground between the Arabs and Jews. During that time Arabs exploited the country’s burgeoning tourist industry in order to spread anti-Semitic propaganda by distributing invidious anti-Jewish leaflets among their foreign charges.

The Zionist Executive, aware that its cause was being gravely undermined by the currently Arab-controlled tourist industry, resolved to remedy the situation, and to do so as quickly as possible. Discussing the matter for the first time in 1922 these years saw the beginning of a Zionist assault on Palestine’s tourist industry. The Zionist movement, defining tourism in political terms, consciously set out to exploit the tourist industry as part of its national political struggle. As such, it launched a coordinated attack on the country’s oral, visual, and written tourist media. Guidebooks, tourist maps advertisements, films, and tour guides were all used to shape and present the desired, Zionist take on Palestine.

The Zionists regarded tourism as an area well worth investing in and fighting over, and not simply for economic reasons. While there is little doubt that the Zionist movement saw tourism as an important source of revenue, its political benefits were considered equally if not more important. A flourishing Jewish tourist industry, by presenting tourists with a positive image of Palestine’s Jewish community could, it was thought, pay invaluable political dividends. It would, for example, allow the Zionists to enlist tourists as ambassadors for their cause. Documents, the first of their kind and dating from the mandatory era, touching upon the Arab-Jewish competition over the country’s tourist industry make it clear that the Zionists, like the Arabs, regarded tourism and its role in ideologically oriented image-making as an important means of advancing their political national goals. Hence, the Zionist desire to break into, even dominate the industry. 

Though it is impossible to measure the degree to which tourism ultimately contributed towards the fulfillment of Zionist aspirations, it is nevertheless evident that throughout the mandatory period, tourism was regarded, indeed wielded, by the Zionist movement as a political weapon. The Zionists believed that tourism offered them an opportunity to promote the Jewish national endeavor and influence world public opinion in their favor. Nor, it must be said, did this process cease after the creation of the state of Israel.