For more than two decades, Israel has framed the construction of a second international airport near the country’s main population centers as a pressing national need to ease growing air traffic congestion.

Yet successive Israeli governments, mostly at the helm of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have failed to move forward with implementing decisions and development plans for a major air hub outside of Ben Gurion International Airport, aside from the remote Ramon Airport near Eilat.

The latest plan now being advanced by the government involves not one but two new international airports simultaneously: One in the north, at the current site of the Ramat David air force base in the Jezreel Valley, not far from Haifa, and one to the south, in the northern reaches of the Negev desert between Beersheba and the border with Gaza at a site called Ziklag.

The double whammy is meant to build capacity and then some for what officials hope will be a sustained resurgence of tourism in the coming decades. Passenger numbers were at record levels before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down air travel and had been on the rebound when the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and ensuing war brought tourism to a virtual halt.

But though experts agree Israel must build more capacity for air travel, some question the viability or sense of putting an airport in the northern Negev along with one over a former airbase in the Lower Galilee, citing concerns about security, a lack of infrastructure and existing air traffic congestion in the area, and seeing the decision as driven more by politics than sound reasoning.

“Israel has not been able to build even one new international airport after 20 years of discussion and a handful of governmental decisions on where it would be located, so how can we realistically speak about two?” said Brig. Gen. (res.) Joel Feldschuh, a former head of the Civil Aviation Authority.

Feldschuh, a military and civil aviation expert who also served as the CEO of Israel’s flagship carrier El Al, championed the establishment of an international airport at Ramat David during his tenure at the helm of the Civil Aviation Authority from 2014 to 2022.

Technically, Israel already has three international airports. Ramon airport, located in the sparsely populated Negev desert near the Red Sea resort city in Eilat, has the capacity to handle millions of passengers a year and a runway that can handle large jumbo jets. There is also a small airport in Haifa served by Air Haifa, which runs daily flights to and from Cyprus and Greece.

In practice, however, nearly all international travel into and out of Israel is handled by Ben Gurion International Airport, which sits some 8 kilometers (5 miles) southeast of Tel Aviv.

In 2019, the airport handled over 24 million international passengers and nearly 800,000 more on domestic flights, stretching capacity on especially busy days. More than 167,000 passenger planes landed at or took off from the airport over that year, plus around 4,300 more cargo planes, averaging out to around 470 flights a day, or one every three minutes.

According to Feldschuh, during the peak summer months that year, the Israel Airport Authority “denied about five to 10 percent of the traffic demand as it couldn’t absorb it because of the aerial infrastructure.”

Should geopolitical calm prevail and tourism indeed come back, the airport is expected to see as many as 40 million passengers annually within the next five years, hitting its current peak capacity, and as many as 80 million by 2050, according to some forecasts.

Simply expanding Ben Gurion is not an option, as capacity........

© The Times of Israel