From a hotel in Kyoto to a sandwich joint in Edinburgh, the world is becoming hostile toward Israelis who are learning that a vacation won’t shield them from the Gaza war.
During the nine months of war the Israeli tourist experience abroad has been marked by fears of antisemitism and efforts to avoid pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
According to reports by Israeli media and posts online, some of those worries have recently turned real for a number of Israeli tourists.Anecdotal incidents at touristic locations around the world are making it clear that even though there is no official policy of excluding Israelis, that is sometimes the situation on the ground.
An especially bumpy week began on June 17 at the Material Hotel in Kyoto, Japan, when an Israeli named Alex was informed that his reservation had been canceled due to the allegations of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. The Material told Alex that it was “not able to accept reservations from persons we believe might have ties to the Israeli army,” as reported by Israeli website Ynet.
The story made the rounds on social media, produced a stern protest letter from Israel’s ambassador in Tokyo, and led to a rebuke by the Kyoto municipality that the hotel had breached Japanese business law and must ensure that such a transgression won’t happen again.
There’s a very logical filter at play here: if you didn’t think seeking beef with Arabs and participating in a colonialist project in the 50s/60s/70s was a good idea, you would have stayed in the US, and otherwise, you would have moved to Israel. This made it so that Jews in the US lean liberal and Jews in Israel lean ethno-nationalistic, in very broad terms.
Plenty of Jews in the West are from ex-USSR though.
Yeah, I mentioned it as a factor, not as an all-determining fact that explains the whole of Israeli demographics.