It was 4:36 a.m. when Orit Gutman’s phone pinged in Israel with the kind of text message no mother wants to receive.
“Pick up. It’s urgent. They’re chasing us,” her son, Shahar, 17, wrote last month on the family WhatsApp group from the Greek island of Rhodes. A minute later, an update: “I’m hiding. I don’t know where the others are. I jumped over some wall.”
Shahar, who was on vacation with five other teens, had ended up in one of a series of hostile encounters between Palestinian supporters and Israelis traveling in Europe this summer against the backdrop of the Gaza war.
Sympathy for Israel ran high in the initial aftermath of the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and another 250 were taken hostage, according to the Israeli authorities, making it the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
But the good will soon dissipated as Israel prosecuted its fierce counteroffensive in Gaza, now approaching the two-year mark and with more than 60,000 Palestinians killed, according to Gaza health officials, whose tally does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Travel for Israelis has become increasingly uncomfortable in the charged atmosphere fanned by images from Gaza of devastation and starvation following an Israeli blockade, and amid a diplomatic backlash from some of Israel’s closest European allies.
Three prominent classical musicians were kicked out of a pizzeria in Vienna for speaking Hebrew. A celebrity Israeli D.J. known as Skazi was barred from appearing at Tomorrowland, a major electronic dance music festival in Belgium, after two Israeli festivalgoers were flagged by a pro-Palestinian activist group as potential war criminals and were questioned by the Belgian police. An air traffic controller radioed “Free Palestine” to the cockpit of a passenger plane of El Al, Israel’s national carrier, shortly after it took off from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris earlier this month. And Israel’s national soccer team coach was recently shoved by a passerby shouting, “Free Palestine!” in Athens, Greece, according to his spokesman.
The harassment of Israelis in nearby Greece has come as a rude shock. Israelis flock to Greece each year, and many consider it a kind of home away from home. About 40 flights were scheduled to fly from Tel Aviv to various Greek destinations within the span of 24 hours one weekday this month, according to Ben Gurion Airport’s departures board.
In a recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research group, more than half the respondents said the reports of rising antisemitism and harassment of Israelis abroad were affecting their travel plans, from their choice of destination to the decision to travel at all.
In Greece, pro-Palestinian activists held a day of action on Aug. 10. Thousands rallied peacefully in Athens, and smaller protests took place in other city squares and on the islands. Banners read “Not in our name,” and “Stop the Genocide.”
Local unions had already organized pro-Palestinian protests on the docks of popular islands to deter Israeli cruise ship passengers from disembarking. One of those protests forced an Israeli cruise ship, the Crown Iris, carrying hundreds of passengers, to turn back from the island of Syros without landing. When the same boat arrived in Crete, protesters on the quay side clashed with riot police officers who used tear gas.
Israel’s ambassador to Greece, Noam Katz, argued publicly with the mayor of Athens, accusing him of not doing enough to make Israelis feel safe and failing to clear the city of anti-Israeli graffiti. Mr. Katz described slogans like “Kill Zionists, Save Lives” as antisemitic and an “incitement to action.”
The mayor, Haris Doukas, responded in a sharp social media post that the city authority does not “accept lessons in democracy from those who kill civilians and children” in Gaza and that it “fully respects its visitors and supports the right to free expression of its citizens.” He added that the city does remove such graffiti.
Still, many Israeli tourists have enjoyed peaceful and uneventful vacations, and many Greek officials and businesspeople have gone out of their way to offer hospitality.
Pavlos Marinakis, the spokesman for the Greek government, called the events in Syros “outrageous,” adding that “antisemitism and any other form of fascism and racism will not be tolerated.”
When the Crown Iris reached Rhodes, traders came to the port to welcome the passengers. The police kept a small protest at a distance, scuffled with a few of the activists and made eight arrests.
“We welcome our friends, the Israelis, who have been visiting and supporting our island for years,” said Michalis Zisimatos, the spokesman for the local association of restaurateurs and related businesses. “We love them and they love us,” he added.
But for Shahar Gutman and his friends, an otherwise fun vacation ended in fear when, on their last night in Rhodes they went to a club popular with Israelis, Ms. Gutman, his mother, said in an interview.
Another group of Israelis at the club had gotten into an argument with a dozen or so men, according to Ms. Gutman. The altercation started with the Israelis chanting pro-Israeli slogans and the other group of patrons responding with pro-Palestinian chants, the Greek police said.
Ms. Gutman insisted that Shahar and his friends played no part in the slanging match, a claim that could not be independently verified. But when they left the club, she said, the pro-Palestinians, who appeared to speak a language other than Greek, pursued them and, she said, beat some of them.
Later, the police came to the teens’ apartment and questioned them, according to Ms. Gutman. A police spokeswoman, Constantina Dimoglidou, said the police investigation pointed to a verbal exchange and said there were no injuries. She said the nationality of the pro-Palestinians remained unclear. The next day, Shahar and his friends got on their scheduled flight back to Israel.
Israelis, and especially soldiers, who are traveling abroad have been advised by their government to avoid conspicuous signs of “Israeliness” and to not post their whereabouts in real time on social media. Passengers from the Crown Iris described on Israeli television how they had turned their T-shirts inside out to hide Israeli logos and said they would identify, if asked, as Spanish or Italian.
Some defiantly patriotic Israeli travelers have wrapped themselves in Israeli flags. The festivalgoers questioned in Belgium were apparently spotted because they were carrying the banner of their army unit, according to reports and images on social media.
But just speaking Hebrew can be enough to elicit an aggressive reaction.
Shlomo Barzel, the spokesman for Israel’s national soccer team, said the chief coach, Ran Ben Shimon, and his assistant, Gal Cohen, were chatting in Hebrew in central Athens this month when a passerby began shouting at them, then shoved Mr. Ben Shimon.
“There was nothing else overtly Israeli about them,” Mr. Barzel said, adding that the passerby was unlikely to have recognized them.
In Vienna in late July, the cellist Amit Peled, the violinist Hagai Shaham and the pianist Julia Gurvitch popped into a pizzeria for a bite before their concert. Mr. Peled says he ordered their food in German, but the waiter wanted to know what language they had been speaking between them. When Mr. Peled replied that it was Hebrew, the waiter said he would not serve them and expelled them.
“The initial shock and humiliation were profound,” Mr. Peled wrote in an Instagram post a day after the events. “But what struck us even more deeply was what came next — or rather, what didn’t. The people around us were clearly startled, some offered sympathetic glances, and then, quietly, they went back to their dinners, their conversations, their wine — as though nothing had happened.”
Even more galling, Mr. Peled said in a phone interview, was that two of them came to the concert after their meal.
Mr. Peled, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said that he no longer wears his Star of David necklace on campus, where the atmosphere is loaded, but keeps it in his cello case. Since October 2023, he has shown solidarity with the victims of the Hamas attack onstage with musical tributes and dedications, often drawing ire.
“Here,” he said, “I was just ordering pizza.”
The three musicians recounted the events in identical terms. But speaking to local Austrian news media, the owner of the pizzeria said he had been at the restaurant all that day and denied that it had happened.
Mr. Shaham, the violinist and a professor at Tel Aviv University, said he was accosted in the Dutch city of Amsterdam last year by a man in a suit who told him not to dare to speak Hebrew there, calling it “that disgusting language.” In Berlin, he said, Uber drivers would cancel his rides when they saw his name.
“As a human,” he said, “I think we have to act humanely.”
Presenting himself as a cultural representative who does not take a political stance, Mr. Shaham added, “Classical music is the language of Europe.”
Myra Noveck contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
Isabel Kershner, a Times correspondent in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
Niki Kitsantonis is a freelance correspondent for The Times based in Athens. She has been writing about Greece for 20 years, including more than a decade of coverage for The Times.
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