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.

  • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
    ·
    7 hours ago

    Anytime I've seen them in Thailand they always stick to themselves because they know everyone else hates them.

  • SexMachineStalin [comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    12 hours ago

    I remember seeing a TikTok that was posted by Africa4Palestine some years back where an "israeli" woman went to South Africa, complained about the large amount of Palestinian flags present in a rally in South Africa BTW and was them subsequently told off by this absolute gigachad that he doesn't recognise the state of "israel", with the woman being left absolutely speechless in basically a hamas-red-triangle prologue.

    "israeli" tourists to South Africa were either Pissad agents, mobile hitler-detector particle accelerators, or defensless little lambs lost in the words who barely survived getting hit by a car once the reality sets in.

    Of course now there are no direct flights between South Africa and "israel", relations have been suspended and "israelis" apparently don't feel welcome in South Africa anymore, L crab-party obaida-index

  • bunnygirl [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    18 hours ago

    A real "I've never met a nice South African" moment

    • ButtBidet [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      18 hours ago

      I've still never met a cool white South African, despite meeting seemingly cool ones, as soon as I get to know them they turn into shit. The one black South African I know is an ML and cool.

  • xXShadowXx [none/use name]
    ·
    19 hours ago

    I've seen hostels that have a no-Israelis-policy after repeated bad experiences.

    I've seen a situation where Israeli tourists were pissed off about something so they deliberately tore the toilet out of the floor to flood the place.

  • miz [any, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    16 hours ago

    I can't find it, but there was that tweet from late 2023(?) where some Israeli tourists staying at a hotel were complaining about a car in the lot that had a Free Palestine sticker... it turned out to be the manager's car and they got thrown out of the hotel

    EDIT: I'm not sure it was late 2023, it could have been a few years earlier during the Great March of Return. maybe that's why I couldn't find it

  • miz [any, any]
    ·
    19 hours ago

    back in the 00s I knew an Israeli who told me that Israeli tourists were known as the worst, and told me stories of people she knew who would bring tools to the hotel so they could remove fixtures to take with them

  • Angel [any]
    ·
    20 hours ago

    Least malevolent Israelis

  • Speaker [e/em/eir]
    ·
    19 hours ago

    I suppose it's difficult to be a good tourist when you're busy scouting out the next chunk of "Greater Israel".

  • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
    ·
    18 hours ago

    I worked customer service for booking.com and I heard some really messed up stories about how intensely racist Israeli tourists are, like one of my colleagues who was also Lebanese (or Palestinian, I forgot) who said that an Israeli tourist demanded a room change or even a hotel change (again, I don't remember exactly) because there were other Arabs who booked rooms in the same hotel or nearby said tourist.

    Me personally? The only call I got from an Israeli was an incoherent complaint that I actually found very funny. He said something to the effect of 'My room is front of hotel with air conditioner I no can to sleep'. He just kept saying stuff and ending it with 'I no can to sleep' and I just found it amusing. I don't remember if I ever resolved his issue but just his wording and monotone was hilarious.

  • danisth [he/him]
    ·
    19 hours ago

    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.

    • CleverOleg [he/him]
      ·
      18 hours ago

      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.

      • ButtBidet [he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        18 hours ago

        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.

        • Saeculum [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          12 hours ago

          Most of the complaints I've heard about British tourists is because of the rampant alcoholism rather than a general attitude

          • ButtBidet [he/him]
            hexagon
            ·
            9 hours ago

            It's the drinking and the shit that comes after: fighting, screaming, puking, public indecency, etc.

        • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]
          ·
          18 hours ago

          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.

      • spectre [he/him]
        ·
        18 hours ago

        There were also reasons behind the misbehavior of Chinese tourists (to whatever extent it may have existed).

        • ButtBidet [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          17 hours ago

          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.

          • spectre [he/him]
            ·
            14 hours ago

            That's one aspect I agree, the other perspective I've heard is how the immense growth of their "middle class" that can now go and be tourists has been so fast that those people weren't well adapted to "western etiquette" and such cause they weren't from multigenerational middle-class or upper-class backgrounds. It's also my understanding that the government has engaged in some information campaigns to get people to behave more in line with their host countries' expectations over the past few years.

            • SoyViking [he/him]
              ·
              11 hours ago

              We get a fair share of Chinese tourists where I'm from and I rarely hear anything good or bad about them. People are used to them by now. The only bad thing I've heard about them is a complaint about their table manners but this came from a person who complains about everyone's table manners so I wouldn't pay too much attention to it.

  • egg1918 [she/her]
    ·
    18 hours ago

    I would post the vid of those Zionist fuckers getting obliterated by 1 guy on a beach but I can't find it :(