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Mediating touristic dangerscapes: the semiotics of state travel warnings issued to Israeli tourists

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14766825.2010.517318

1747-7654

Chaim Noy, Ayelet Kohn,

Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research

Abstract Official 'travel warnings' are recurrently published by the Counter-Terrorism Bureau in Israeli media, with the aim of informing potential tourists about the dangers of terrorism aimed at Israelis who travel abroad. These travel warnings, which juxtapose menacing warnings with tranquil visual representations of touristic vacationscapes, have recently gained a considerable public attention and have sprouted discussions around local tourism and identities. In this article, we offer a discursive and semiotic analysis of 55 travel warning articles, which appeared between 1998 and 2010 in printed and digital Hebrew press in Israel. We address visual and textual aspects of the articles and ask how they represent and mediate touristic vacationscapes. Following recent developments ('turns') in both tourism studies and media studies, we argue that these warnings articles construct multilayered spatial–visual representations of tourist destinations, which amount to a unique genre of tourism imagery in and of itself. Focussing on travel warnings addressing Israeli tourists who travel to the Eastern shores of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, we find that these combined or hybrid images and spaces present a convergence of two contemporary systems of representation, related to tourism and mass media, respectively, and construct a charged and mediated cultural space in Israeli collective imagination. Keywords: mediadiscourserepresentationsIsraelterrornationalismvisual images Notes The NTCB, established in 1999, is a department of the National Security Council in the Office of the Prime Minister. In our analysis, we address Secular Jewish Israeli tourists to Sinai, which is precisely the audience that warnings articles in local (Hebrew) media address. It is important to point that Israeli tourists to Sinai are not a homogeneous population, and that many are not Jewish–Palestinians who live in Israel. (Keep out of Sinai, Citation2006). This was a headline in the September 5, 2006 issue of the daily Yedioth Ahronoth (online edition). Retrieved from www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3248658,00.html. www.nrg.co.il. Picture by Eli Dassah. Picture by Avigail Uzi. The latter headline is ostensibly cynical, a sense conveyed via the use of a rhetorical question (implying 'Surely, in Israel there are warnings too'). Picture by Yaron Kaminski.