My comment: sorry if this is racist, but this has definitely been my experience when meeting Israelis when traveling through Asia. This goes especially for Israelis just off of their conscription tour. They’re especially shitty and mean to the locals. To be fair, I’ve met the random cool Israeli that hates their country and ran away from conscription, but they tend to be the exception.
My first encounter with Israelis was when I was backpacking through South America in my twenties, and I remember being shocked by how consistently awful they all were. I guess after their mandatory military service they tend to go traveling for a bit, and whenever I’d run into them they were reliably some of the nastiest people I’d ever encountered.
They weren’t ever nasty to me, though. I am a white westerner, and I never had a problem with them. They were nasty to the impoverished brown-skinned people who were hosting us. They were obnoxious and bullying toward local guides, they’d leave the place in a mess, and they were always trying to screw over the locals for a better deal or extra meals or favors. One time they tricked a hostel into putting up a sign in Hebrew for other Israeli backpackers which said ugly things about our hosts (they told the hostel owner it was a great review), which I only know because they were laughing hysterically about it and told me. They consistently treated the people who were looking after us like they were much lesser than us. Their pushiness and entitlement were just unbelievable.
It was a very educational experience for me. I knew the Palestinians were being treated unfairly because my father had told me so, but I also had a great love of Jews and Jewish culture. I had visited Auschwitz and Dachau and Anne Frank’s house in my travels, and I remember having some romantic ideas about kibbutzim. This was my first time directly encountering the reality that there is something unhealthy about Israeli society. Not Jews or Jewish culture, but Jewish Israelis.
Now I see evidence of this on my news feed every day, in the IDF soldiers prancing around in the undergarments of dead and displaced Palestinian women, in the AI translations of Hebrew tweets, in the polls which show widespread Israeli approval for the atrocities in Gaza, in Israeli TikTok videos mocking the suffering of the Palestinians, in the Israelis showing up in my comments justifying the worst things in the world in the most depraved ways imaginable.
My encounters with Israelis in South America were an early taste of ugly things to come. Everything I glimpsed then I’ve been seeing online over the past year. I keep thinking about those obnoxious pricks I met all those years ago, and about how they didn’t know at the time that they were giving me very useful information for me to make use of in the future.
When Israel supporters tell you to shut up about Gaza until you’ve been to Israel and met Israelis, just ignore them. Don’t go to Israel; you’re a westerner, they’ll be nice to you. Go to one of the tourist spots in the global south that Israelis like to visit, one with lots of brown-skinned people who’ve been colonized by the west, and watch how they treat people there. That will show you what Israelis are really like.
Not accusing you of being racist, but I have seen this same rhetoric used by libs and chuds about Chinese people in a way that certainly feels racist. Personally I’d just avoid this type of criticism that could easily be misconstrued as a cultural critique rather than a national one. There are plenty of things to call out Israel for that don’t run this risk.
The difference though, is that there is a very obvious reason why Israeli tourists are this way. I don’t doubt that white South Africans / Rhodesians were like this when they traveled. Obviously folks living in antebellum southern US didn’t do a lot of international travel but I imagine they would be the same. There is nothing inherent in Israeli genes that causes them to be this way (as racists might imply, as you indicate above). But when you have an entire society built upon a foundation of open and pervasive racism and dehumanization, this is the natural outcome.
Just to add that Australians, Brits, Amerikan, Germans and French are also infamously bad as tourists, and they have the same problem with colonisation.
Tbh I’m uncomfortable pointing out that Israeli tourists are shitty, but it’s a very well known truth to anyone who’s traveled the backpacker circuit.
Anecdotal but I only just saw a video of a guy in the IOF who apparently assaulted Muslim women and was called out by a black lady and pushed away by someone who came in as well (perhaps her husband?). He was being Islamophobic and it looked like he was about to say something racist to her and began getting in her face until her tall (husband?) stepped in and he backed off.
Anecdotal but felt it meshed with the other person’s experience.
Most of the complaints I’ve heard about British tourists is because of the rampant alcoholism rather than a general attitude
There were also reasons behind the misbehavior of Chinese tourists (to whatever extent it may have existed).
I don’t have much to comment on Chinese tourists, except to say that people who have disposable income to travel abroad are gonna be shittier than working people are stay home. I’ve been to China a few times and I thought that they were cool as hell.
Obviously folks living in antebellum southern US didn’t do a lot of international travel but I imagine they would be the same.
Sort of related, the many stories of American GIs in Britain (and later Italy and France, though those were combat zones so different) during WWII show some of the same tendencies
