Israel’s Commercial Ports: Local Success and Regional Failure – The Jewish Question

Commercial seaports are the backbone of Israel’s trade with the outside world. These commercial ports carry 98% of the country’s total import and export trade each year, which has prompted the Israeli government to continuously develop these ports since the 1950s to maximize their logistics capabilities to meet Israel’s needs. Israel’s trade volume has grown.
The following report sheds light on three main axes related to Israel’s maritime industry: The first: the volume of Israeli trade that circulates through the seaports, the second: a description of the activities of Israel’s commercial and specialized ports, and the last axis stops at the development projects that Israel has sought to initiate over the past decade, as well as the status of the success achieved by each project.
International reports show that in the decade between 2012 and 2022, Israel’s international trade volume increased by about 25%, jumping from $136 billion in 2012 to $180 billion in 2022, and it also expanded its global trade circle until its trade relations exceeded the number of countries it dealt with, namely one hundred and forty countries on all continents of the world.
Commodities traded by Israel with various international partners include raw materials, food and manufactured goods. The most important commodities imported from abroad are electronics, electrical equipment, mechanical equipment, automobiles, spare parts and steel. Israel exports other products, most of which are manufactured and high-tech products, such as medical equipment, optics, pharmaceuticals and chemical products.
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Israel has three commercial ports overlooking the Mediterranean and Red Seas: Haifa, Ashdod and Eilat. In addition to these commercial ports, Israel also has three specialized ports.

Port of Haifa

The name Haifa began to appear as a commercial port in 1905, when it was dedicated to the import of materials for the construction and operation of the Hejaz Railway. It was known for its shallow waters and poor infrastructure until the British launched a comprehensive development project. In 1933, the port was named New Haifa Port, its area was expanded to 1.5 million square meters, and modern docks, yards, storage warehouses and oil basins were added within the framework of the development project. , the railway line ends.
The Haifa Port Authority is also interested in developing a logistics system to facilitate trade flows within the port in order to achieve maximum speed and smoothness in the receipt and acceptance of goods. The company has developed a website that helps customers calculate the cost of using the port facilities to transport products (whether containers, general cargo or bulk cargo), the pilotage and berthing fees for ships in the port, as well as showing the schedule of arrivals and departures of commercial and tourist ships, and tracking the progress of customs and administrative clearance of goods.
Port of Ashdod
In the following decades, until the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, the port underwent continuous development, such as the addition of several facilities specialized in trading in mining extracts and coal, the expansion of the railway network within the port, and the increase in the number of ship berths to 10 in 2005, which was followed by further expansions and the opening of the subsidiary port named “Highovial” in 2006. The port contains three berths with a length of about 2,000 meters and a depth of more than 16 meters, capable of berthing post-Panamax vessels, and an affiliated container and cargo handling terminal covering an area of ​​1.3 million square meters.
The Port of Ashdod has tried to differentiate itself from other commercial ports in Israel by adopting modern training and operating techniques, such as operating a bridge crane operation training simulator, believed to be the only one of its kind in Israel, mechanizing thirty-two cargo truck access gates, and launching a number of electronic systems to manage and follow up the port’s work.

Port of Eilat

Since the early 1950s, Israel has been committed to developing the narrow coastline of the Gulf of Aqaba, which is estimated to be less than 12 kilometers long, for cargo trade, hoping that the port can contribute to the development of the southern region. In addition to strengthening the national economy, the authorities of the State of Israel established the first seaport in the area in 1955. Less than a decade later, the authorities built another modern port in the same area, but the military tensions caused by Israel in the Middle East were one of the reasons for the interruption of the port’s operations.
Israel attempted to revitalize the port in the 1980s and 1990s, resulting in a series of developments to its infrastructure, such as the construction of a yard for imported vehicles and the strengthening of the port with equipment for handling unclean bulk cargoes and cranes for general cargo and containers, but the port faces many internal and external obstacles that have led to a reduction in its workload. These are essentially obstacles based on geographical and political grounds, as the port mainly serves the vast southern region with a low population density of only 14%. The total population of the State of Israel is estimated to be around 10 million, in addition to the port’s lack of connection to the Israeli railway network. This weakens its position in the supply chain serving the local market.

Three specialized ports: Hadera, Ashkelon and Eilat

The Hadera station, located north of the city of Netanya and northwest of Hadera, is one of three specialized ports owned by the State of Israel, where Hadera trades coal and fuel to produce electricity for the Orot Rabin facility.
Ashkelon and Eilat oil stations are active in the field of crude oil, liquefied gas and fuel trading, as each station is connected to a refinery belonging to the Ashkelon-Eilat Oil Pipeline Company. Ashkelon station is considered the most important oil trading station in Israel, known for the size of its attached refinery, which can accommodate 1.9 million cubic meters of crude oil, 400,000 meters of petroleum products and about 8,000 tons of liquefied gas.
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Over the past decade, a number of regional countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean and northern Red Sea have been keen to develop their commercial ports in order to attract as many customers as possible, which has prompted similar initiatives by the Israeli authorities as they have opened up the country’s ports to foreign investment in large logistics projects within its three main commercial ports, in order to ensure a reasonable share of the regional maritime transport market. The most prominent projects in this regard are as follows:

In 2018, the Israeli authorities cooperated with Shanghai International Port Group with the goal of building a container terminal with an annual handling capacity of 1.1 million equivalent containers at the northeast end of Haifa Port. The construction period of the project is expected to be three years. Its construction cost reached 1.7 billion US dollars. Its design takes into account more reliance on digital technology or automation to achieve operational efficiency, but political pressure has prevented China from developing more logistics projects in Haifa Port. It will not support the “Belt and Road” initiative.

Israel is trying to replicate the model of the Haifa Bay Container Terminal project in the Port of Ashdod by partnering with a European company, which built the Hadarom Container Terminal in 2021 at a cost of 3.5 billion Israeli shekels, increasing the size of the port. The Ashdod berth is 1.3 kilometers long and 17.3 meters deep, providing the opportunity to receive container ships carrying 18,000 equivalent containers.

In the past decade, the Israeli authorities have announced their intention to implement new projects aimed at strengthening the local and regional status and presence of the Port of Eilat, which include the construction of a high-speed railway connecting the city of Eilat to the central region of the State of Israel, so that the terminus of this line is the city of Ashdod and the Port of Ashdod. In this context, Israel sought to attract Chinese and Spanish investments to finance its massive project, which relied on competing with the Suez Canal, attracting ships to pass through the canal and transporting cargo from the Port of Eilat to the Port of Ashdod and vice versa by train, but this ambition was not completed due to the high financial cost of the project for its return.

Mustafa Abdullah
Egyptian Center for Ideological and Strategic Studies
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