The skies are opening a tad

The British airline Thomsonfly will begin flying to Israel in November. Thomsonfly is a low-cost airline, and will sell round-trip tickets between London and Tel Aviv for 140 pounds sterling - about half the price charged by the regular airlines, El Al and British Airways. Granted, the product is not identical. But the "leaner" product - no meals and departure from more distant airports - is fully compensated by the significant difference in price.

Thomsonfly is not the only one: BMI, another low-cost airline, is also seeking to fly from Britain to Israel. However, BMI wants to fly from Heathrow Airport, and El Al and British Airways have exclusive rights to flights between Heathrow and Tel Aviv. This has thus far blocked the BMI flights.

Such exclusivity deals are one of the problems keeping Israel's skies from being opened to free competition. These are old agreements that effectively create cartels, and thereby prevent prices from falling. Israel is the only Western country whose airline industry continues to operate according to the old norms of protectionism and extensive government involvement. The global revolution began in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan instituted an open-skies policy in the United States. The European Union recently adopted this model as well, and the result has been the development of a new model of aviation that provides low-cost flights - which in turn has caused an impressive upsurge in the number of tourists worldwide. The time has come for Israel to also benefit from this increased tourist traffic.

The tourism industry could solve the unemployment problem among people with minimal education. Each additional 100,000 tourists entering Israel creates 4,000 jobs and contributes $200 million to the gross domestic product. Lowering the price of flights is also a Zionist act, because for middle-class Jews in the United States, France and England, the cost of fares is critical. They would like to visit Israel once, twice or three times before they decide to move here, but expensive flights prevent them from doing so. Israel is currently holding talks with the European Union on a new aviation agreement. The Europeans want the agreement to resemble the one they signed with the U.S. - in other words, an open-skies agreement. However, the Transportation Ministry and the government as a whole are afraid. They are proposing restrictions and want the industry opened to competition only gradually. The local airlines are also fighting the idea; they do not want competition.

The agreement with Thomsonfly is a step in the right direction. But does it herald an actual policy shift? For that, more decisive action is needed. Government representatives in the talks with the EU must put the public interest at the top of their order of priorities and sign an open-skies agreement. Israel would thus finally join the rest of the Western world, and airline fares would drop - to the benefit of the public as a whole.