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.
I’ve worked as a tour guide in a few different places around the globe. Fun job most of the time, if you can deal with the social exhaustion (ADHD is a blessing here, you get to ramble your heart out). Israelis sucked so much everywhere I had to deal with them.
Just loud and rude and mean and complaining about the price or elements of the guided tour (“oh the walking, my legs are sore!” Why go on a walking tour then?)
They were nasty too, sex pests (yo bro, where can I get some tail? Where can I fuck? Is the pussy good here bro? I hear the chicks are easy here, what’s your trick for picking them up? Damn look at the ass on her bro.)
And they were so entitled! Worst was when it was mixed groups (like a bunch of different people who don’t know eachother all book spaces on the same tour.) They’d demean others in the group for asking questions they thought were stupid, they’d be rude and condescending and get angry when I didn’t give them exclusive attention or answered someone else’s queries.
More than once I got interrupted by someone saying “why are you talking about this? I don’t care about that at all” and I’d have to explain to them, like to a child, that someone else just asked about that thing and since the tour isn’t private, then that means I am going to do my best to satisfy everyone in the group, even when everyone has different interests. It was an Israeli every time that happened.
It’s not that any of this was uniquely Israeli, it’s just that it was almost a guarantee with them. I knew I had to mentally prepare for a group of Israelis.
Americans were loud, often stupid, but very nice, easy to impress, good at smalltalk and they tipped well at the very least.
Edit: and racist as fuck of course, but I didn’t experience that because
but more them asking about “cleanliness” wink or “safe bars” wink or talking about how good it was to see types like me in places like this not to mention talks about civilised or cultured the place was becoming
other dumbass complaints I've gotten
It’s too warm! (We are in a jungle)
It’s too humid! (We are in a jungle)
It’s too cold! (We are not in a jungle)
I’m afraid of sailing! (They booked a tour on a boat)
I can’t walk up stairs! (They were disabled, which the company I worked for at the time did it’s very best to accommodate for. This was done by asking people to fill out a questionnaire where they were asked, among other things, if they had any disabilities and told the question was so we could make sure the tour accommodated them. We would also write if a tour entailed things like stairs, cobblestone, lots of walking, etc and we’d send an email with this information AND I would go thru the stuff on the day of, because tourists are stupid babies that believe signs are something other people read. This person had deliberately lied about their disability so they could go on the tour and was then frustrated when the tour wasn’t accommodating for them.)
I wanted to see the big jesus statue! (We were not in Rio de Janeiro)
You are too loud (after I was told to speak up)
A review complained about not being child-friendly. The review was of a tour that we marketed on the fact you went thru red light districts.
You don’t know anything about this city! (Said in response to me for the fifth time telling a guy that the random building he was pointing at was a house)