Israeli musician Amit Peled sat down to dinner with a friend at an Italian restaurant in Vienna, Austria. After ordering, he resumed his conversation with his friend only to have the waiter return and ask what language he was speaking.
“I replied casually, ‘English and German.’ ‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘What were you just speaking now?’ I answered, ‘Hebrew, of course.’ He looked me directly in the eye and said, without hesitation: ‘In that case, leave. I’m not serving you food.’ Just like that.”
It’s not an isolated incident, not by any means.
A group of 44 young French Jews was on a plane from Valencia, Spain, to Paris when they were kicked off the plane for being “disruptive.” The kids were returning from a camping trip, and the airline reports that they “mishandled emergency equipment” and adopted a very confrontational attitude, putting at risk the safe conduct of the flight.”
That’s the airline’s story. What actually happened is in serious dispute.
“Public accounts so far suggest that all the children had done was sing or say a name in Hebrew,” reports The Free Press.
The woman who was arrested and beaten is the director of the Kinneret summer camp.
Fifty Jewish French children, aged 10 – 15, were singing Hebrew songs on the plane.
The @vueling airline crew said that Israel is a terrorist state and forced the children off the aircraft; they… https://t.co/V78PEHB58B pic.twitter.com/HizF6SZoaD
— עמיחי שיקלי – Amichai Chikli (@AmichaiChikli) July 23, 2025
Israel Minister of Diaspora and Combating Antisemitism Amichai Chikli posted the video. He claims that some of the flight crew referred to Israel as a “terrorist state.” Another passenger who was not connected to the Jewish group said the kids were “nothing but calm.”
Karine Lamy, a woman identifying herself as the mother of one of the kids, told i24NEWS that only one of the children had started singing and that after a warning from the crew, the children calmed down and behaved. However, she alleged, security was called anyway and instructed the group to disembark.
She said security personnel then told everyone to place their mobile phones on the floor so videos they recorded could be deleted. According to Lamy, the counselor then objected, saying they had no right to do so, leading to her forcible detainment.
Spanish Jewish site Enfoque Judio said some of the kids had later boarded other flights but that others still did not have return tickets as of Thursday afternoon. It was not clear whether the counselor had been released.
“The normalization of public humiliation of minors identified by their religious affiliation is an unacceptable drift. It is not just a discriminatory act—it sends a deeply troubling signal for the safety of all Jewish passengers in Europe,” the group wrote in a press release Thursday.
Oscar Puente, in a since-deleted post on X, called the French Jewish children “a couple of Israeli brats.”
Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, responded to that tirade by observing, “They are French Jews. Europeans.” We doubt, though, that the likes of Mr. Puente will be chastened by such a rebuke. In Greece, also over the weekend, an Israeli tourist, Stav Ben-Shushan, on an Athens beach had a portion of his ear bit off by a man “screaming Free Palestine, f— Israel, I am Hamas.” The man attacked after he heard Mr. Ben-Shushan speaking Hebrew.
Just days before that assault, a group of Israeli teenagers were set upon by a mob on Rhodes. The day before that, an Israeli cruise ship was blocked from docking at the island of Syros and rerouted to Cyprus due to an angry crowd. There were between 300 and 400 children on board, and it was thought their safety was at risk by the protesters who sought to “raise their fists in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.”
The thread connecting most of these incidents is that speaking Hebrew in public seemed to enrage some of those hearing it. The excuse of the Gaza War and the belief in Hamas propaganda about it is just a smokescreen. It’s like saying, “I’m not an antisemite. I just hate Zionism.”
Europeans are inventing ever more creative ways to express their antisemitism while still convincing themselves they’re civilized Westerners.
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