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.
Fair, I was confused by your parallell between religious groups (christianity, islam) vs ethnicities (amish or ethnic jews). Now that you clarified, your argument makes more sense to me.
I agree with you - nobody should be displaced from their homes, even in the face of somebody elses “home claim”, since this would eternally perpetuate the same problem.
There is some food for thought that follows from this reasoning also. The foundation/creation/growth of almost every nation/state (I’m sure there is some unique obscure one somewhere who can claim to be the first humans to settle their land) has involved displacing people, and almost every settled people has done so by displacing those who came before. Does this not mean almost every other past creation/perpetuation/growth of a state/nation/settled people was wrong? (Even the kurdish people settled their current territories by force, just a long, long time ago)
It’s true that a lot of peoples (maybe most?) today live in a place which they took by force from someone else, though you don’t have to look far to find areas that are still inhabited by the first people that arrived there. Still, for a fair comparison you need to separate between those that took areas by force either from necessity (e.g. they were displaced themselves) or otherwise before any kind of international regulation existed.
You cannot compare a tribe or small kingdom taking land by force 2000 years ago to a modern state annexing land, just like you cannot compare the sacking of a city 1000 years ago to a modern genocide. The world has changed.