It seems impossible not to mention Gaza if you meet Israelis on holiday in Europe

I made friends with two Israeli couples while on holiday in Greece this summer and when the conversation inevitably turned to Palestine, I was struck by how misinformed, scared, and ashamed they were. It felt wrong for me to immediately start raging about Gaza war crimes, as we introduced ourselves, in wet swimming trunks by the pool. But when we had dinner together that evening our studied silence on the topic started to become deafening. And when one of my new acquaintances later got up and sang Hava Nagila in a karaoke party it went down like a lead balloon – literally no one joined in, the way people on vacation usually do with the famous Jewish folk song, despite her booming performance and enthusiastic arm-waving. “What was wrong with them? Hava Nagila just means ‘let’s have a good time,’ [in Hebrew],” she said when she came back to our table. And maybe I was cowardly, but I still didn’t want to be some smart-ass stranger lecturing these nice people about my political or moral views while on our holidays. But by third evening, it all came tumbling out, in unsolicited confessions from their side. One of the couples even had a son who was an Isreal Defence Soldier (IDF) currently on active duty in Gaza, they told me, while adding: “But you know, there’s nothing happening in Gaza now”. They were badly informed because they believed what the IDF and the Israeli government was telling them, for instance about ‘fake’ Gaza casualty figures or ‘biased’ UN reports on genocide. And they were scared for the same reason, because they believed Israeli propaganda that all Palestinians, as well as all Arabs and Muslims more broadly speaking, wanted to kill them. "The Arabs love death and they want to destroy us, so what can you do with that?", said one of my Israeli acquaintances. And I think their ignorance and fear was compounded by the fact they lived in a close-knit, kibbutz-type community which was not unlike the one attacked on 7 October 2023 and which was exclusively Jewish, so that they had no personal contact with Arabs in their daily lives, even if they went to Europe on holiday once a year. They were mostly ashamed of Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and security minister Itmar Ben-Gvir, when I told them that the two right-wing extremists were now the face of Israel in Europe. One of the Israeli women put her face in her hands when I mentioned Ben-Gvir's noose lapel-pin, symbolising his Arabs-only hanging law. "He also had a noose birthday cake baked for him," she said. But when she also said, more than once, that there was "nothing happening in Gaza" while her IDF son was there, I also felt a tender, motherly concern that people like me might think he was a war criminal. Meanwhile, the Hava Nagila karaoke flop was sad in more ways than one. If we were to take the audience's lack of participation as a sign of discomfort at singing a Jewish party song because of Israel's actions in Gaza or the West Bank, as I think the signer did do, then the micro-protest would be antisemitic, according to the European Commission's definition. My group certainly looked uncomfortable for a good while afterward, and they were good people – caring, educated, funny – despite being also tone deaf in many ways. And it made me wonder if the karaoke audience would have joined in to a Russian folk song despite the Ukraine war. Neither Israel or Russia see themselves as aggressors, amid all the other differences in their wars. So if a passionate rendition of Occhi chernie, for example, had also flopped on on that hot and slightly boozy August night in Greece, then its Russian singer might have felt that Europeans hate his ethnicity and culture, rather then seeing it as a little protest, by popular association, against Russian president Vladimir Putin's aggression and amid his mystical propaganda about Russian identity to justify his violence. And so the self-feeding loop furthers the agenda of both Israel and Russia's extremist leaders, who need their people to feel loathed, so that their fear see them rally round the flag, instead of listening to what outsiders think.