The Great Lulav Ban

Arutz Sheva reports:

The ritual ‘Lulav’ is purchased as part of the ‘four species’ used on Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. The main source of Lulavim has been from the Egyptian city of El-Arish, but the Egyptians have announced that there will be no imports this year, which could raise prices on locally grown specimens.Israelis purchase some 500,000 lulavim every year.High quality lulavim come primarily from Kibbutz Tirat Zvi anyway, so those who spend extra for better lulavim have nothing to worry about.

 Arutz Sheva's grasp of economics is somewhat amusing - since if the cheap lulavim are going to get more expensive, so will the expensive ones.

However the main point seems to be that Egypt is really only hurting themselves. To the best of my knoweldge there is very little you can do with a lulav outside of sell it to god fearing Jews. In effect the Lulav created a market where there was none - and was a special boon to date farmers. By blocking it Egypt has mainly denied their own farmers the only available market. I'm sure some other mediterranian country will be more then happy to ship Israel those bizarre and useless branches.