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.
You mix up the religion Judaism with the ethnicity and culture. The jewish cultural and ethnic group is amongst the least religious peoples in the world, as many as 75% according to a study a few years back being atheist or agnostic (myself included).
The various jewish ethnic groups do have genetic ties to a geographic area and have diseases almost entirely unique to that ancestry.
That does however beg the question of whether ancestry is any sort of motivation to lay claim to an area of land in the first place. A question that can be endlessly debated and if accepted at face value opens up endless cans of worms. (How far back? Forever? Can it be lost? What if multiple peoples have claim to an area? etc. etc.)