Kenn Maurice
In May, 2025, a restaurant worker in Thailand asked an Israeli tourist to remove her shoes before entering the establishment, a traditional cultural custom in the country. The tourist refused to take off her shoes, shouting, “My money helps build your country.” Everything was caught on a video which went viral.
The incident sparked a debate about the open secret of rudeness and aggression rife in Israeli tourists abroad. A discussion long forbidden, as most who even hinted at the phenomenon were tarred as antisemitic for suggesting this. But since the onset of Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Gaza, its violent pogroms in the occupied West Bank, ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon and unprovoked war against Iran, reservations have greatly eased throughout the world.
The reality is that there are scores of reports of Israelis behaving in this manner in the countries they visit. From vandalism to disrespect of local customs to violent confrontations, from Sri Lanka to Brazil to Thailand to Chile to the Netherlands, Israelis have a bad reputation due to an enormous amount of incidents that have piled up over the years. And this has only worsened since the onset of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.
The Maccabee riots in Amsterdam in 2024 highlighted much of this backlash against these incidents. Gangs of Israeli football fans rampaged throughout the city, chanting “death to Arabs” and singing gleefully about dead children in Gaza, ripping down Palestinian flags off of private homes and businesses, and attacking people they believed were Arab or Palestinian. The Israeli government and political organizations which support the apartheid regime were quick to accuse those who protested or even talked about this aggression as being antisemitic. But the video evidence proved otherwise.
Antisemitism is an odious and dangerous social hatred. It should always be condemned. But the state of Israel and its supporters have weaponized the term by equating the nation-state of Israel and the supremacist political ideology of Zionism with the ethnic and religious identity of Judaism. Thus, any condemnation of Israel or Zionism is erroneously painted as antisemitic.
It is important to look at this phenomenon, not through the lens of Jewish identity, but the impact of colonialism, national arrogance and racist ideologies on a society. Israelis are not unique in this regard. There are other countries which have a similar bad reputation thanks to this historical context.
Americans, for example, have also become a global pariah due to the belligerent imperialism of their government, its support for genocide, and their nationalistic chauvinism. Unsurprisingly, it also has a long legacy rooted in dispossession, oppression and genocide. And visitors to the US, as well as Israel, have long reported mistreatment by customs and border agencies, further tarnishing their reputation abroad.
As Israel becomes more and more isolated and loathed in the court of public opinion, Israelis have found they are less welcome in the places they once holidayed in. The boycott of Eurovision by five European nations due to Israel’s participation is a real world consequence of this growing disgust with the crimes of that state.
But instead of grappling with the implications and facing the racist character of its state, many Israelis are defaulting to the false notion that they are hated simply because they are Jewish. Ironically, this belief in perpetual victimhood and refusal to challenge the racism rife in their society and the apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide perpetrated by their government, will only serve to isolate them even more.
Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/15/israeli-tourists-have-a-bad-reputation-around-the-world/
