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.