Viral videos and 'No Israelis' signs: Thailand's souring welcome for Israeli tourists

Most Thais are famously friendly, but imbroglios can still happen in a country that 33 million people visited last year alone, some 425,000 of them from the Jewish state. So this was no unusual event.

In a third clip, also from Phuket, a youngish man at a street market waves a Palestinian flag angrily at bemused Israelis, among them children, and rants at them in English: “This is Thailand, not your land. Free Palestine!”

Incidents like these feed into already rampant and often virulent hostility to Israelis online, driven largely by expats commenting on articles in English by local news outlets. These outlets then recycle, for easy clicks, yet more accounts of Israelis allegedly misbehaving or locals sticking it to them.

Some Israeli tourists can indeed be rude and even obnoxious, although hardly more so than other nationalities. But only they are singled out, and not just online. Some shops in touristy areas display “No Israelis” signs with photos of them posted online.

The tsunami of animus has Thailand Chief Rabbi Yosef Kantor, a Lubavitcher from Australia, worried.

“Over the past few weeks there have been a flurry of articles and posts on social media portraying Israelis and Jews in a negative light,” Kantor wrote to local Jews in August.

Because the country’s six Chabad Houses cater solely to Jewish tourists, rumors have been circulating online that they’ve become “occupied Israeli territory.”

Certain articles reporting such rumors are “full of antisemitic tropes, spread like wildfire and [elicit] hateful antisemitic comments,” noted Kantor, a long-term resident. “As a Thai citizen, I pray for the welfare of the Kingdom of Thailand.”

Her embassy has also addressed some disinformation by itself: it informed the Thai press, citing a police report, that four tourists embroiled in a dispute over an 8,000-baht ($240) restaurant bill in Phuket were from Saudi Arabia and Morocco, not Israel as widely claimed online.

In August, Fisher-Kamm traveled to the seaside province of Surat Thani province to meet the local governor amid a clampdown on foreign-owned businesses, including Israeli ones, in violation of Thai laws on Koh Samui and Koh Phangan, two islands there with large Israeli communities.

Seemingly in response, some Thais and foreigners began staging protests outside the embassy in Bangkok, saying Israelis have “intimidated and harassed local Thai residents, Thai tourists, and Thai business operators in Phuket and Surat Thani, including Koh Samui and Koh Phangan,” as a newspaper put it.

Thai media is awash in daily reports of tourists from various nations stealing, brawling drunkenly and assaulting locals, yet few garner much public notice – unlike those involving Israelis.

Also protesting at the embassy recently were a Frenchman and a Thai woman who run a private exotic zoo in Koh Samui. They made headlines in August by denying entry to an Israeli family.

In a video recorded by an Israeli woman there with her husband and two young daughters, the Thai woman tells her in English that she won’t sell her tickets because “90% of your community make a problem.”

The mother’s insistence that her girls won’t cause any problems falls on deaf ears. The Frenchman appears, curses them, almost headbutts the Israeli man, then throws a cardboard sign at the family as they leave in haste. At the zoo, a large Israeli flag was displayed with a “No Entry” sign superimposed over it. Next to it was a bullet-riddled target from a shooting range.

Just a few days earlier, on nearby Koh Phangan, another Frenchman set upon two Israeli women in an unprovoked assault, seriously injuring both – a 62-year-old mother and her daughter. The mother required surgeries. The man, she said, attacked them after he learned they were from Israel.

And so a conflict thousands of miles away can now place Israelis at risk even in a Buddhist nation that lost 46 of its own citizens to Hamas’s indiscriminate slaughter in kibbutzim near Gaza on October 7, 2023.

Some 50,000 Thais work in Israel, where they earn far more than they could in their villages. Yet even this fact is turned against the Jewish state online by those who claim the workers are exploited, sexually abused, and denied access to bomb shelters.

Meanwhile, in Myanmar (formerly Burma), which borders Thailand, some 100,000 people have died in a brutal, ongoing civil war since 2021 when the military ousted an elected government. This humanitarian catastrophe right next door receives far less attention than the war in faraway Gaza; so little in fact that The New York Times recently dubbed Myanmar’s civil war “forgotten by the world.”

And this although the Burmese army commits the exact same crimes the IDF has been accused of committing: it bombs hardscrabble villages and massacres civilians in a bid to stump out any resistance in one of the world’s poorest nations.

For all that, most Thais remain as welcoming to Israelis as to any other tourists. Yet the increasingly overt hostility directed at all Israelis by some can make holidays less enjoyable, or even ruin them.

“I never thought something like this would happen to me here in Thailand, where people are so friendly toward Israelis,” the elderly woman who was violently assaulted told an Israeli news outlet. “I’m always careful and don’t say that I’m from Israel. But here in Thailand I thought it was safe.”