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.
Anecdotally, I’ve never met any Jewish people in the US who didn’t have strongly negative opinions of the government/state of Israel.
Some people aren’t okay with their holy texts being warped into a cudgel and used to beat down the innocent.
It depends on your particular social circle but 80-85% of Jews are supportive of Israel. Most oppose Netanyahu.
I think there’s a lot of nuance here, because “supporting Israel” can mean a lot of different things. Generally agreeing with the idea of being allies with a primarily Jewish state and wanting a good well-being for them is very different from endorsing Israel’s genocide against Gaza, but both could be considered as “supporting Israel”.
Damn, if that isn’t a spot-on description of how I feel about my faith right now.
My parents don’t understand why I stopped going to church, amd when I try to explain why, they say that they’re different when they’re really not.
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.
I notice similar things as well, in that my personal expirences with them, comapred to average US population, US Jews seem to be far more informed on whats happening and far more likely to have at least harsh critisizm for Isreal. Part of why I really hate people conflating the two in order to spread hate.
Not to rain on your experience, but aren’t a lot of Zionists in the illegal land settlements also Americans, and aren’t a lot of the Jewish people participating in “birthright trips” also American?
US Jewish populations are actually really polarized on this topic, they aren’t a monolith. There is definitely more of an age/generational divide regarding Zionism in Jewish communities than a nationality split.
I am very much in contact with the younger, far more left leaning crowd, so my experience is definitely skewed against basically anything modern Israel has done.
I do know a couple loud mouthed older generational Jewish folk who would like nothing more than for Israel to be the dominant power on the planet, and will have no issue telling you that you deserve torture and torment for literally infinite time (hell) for even vocally supporting Palestinians.
That’s what I compare against the average American.
There’s a lot of people in this world who get what they want when other people can’t separate the two in their minds.