Israelis in the Closet

Blaming foreign media bias and antisemitism is comforting. After twenty years of explaining Israel to outsiders, I have come to a harder conclusion as we head to the polls.

“So, where are you from?”

In my line of work, those four words are how every good morning starts. For nearly twenty years, as a licensed tour guide in Israel, I asked them of the strangers climbing into my van. Ohio. Manchester. Toronto. Sydney. You ask the question, people smile, and the ice breaks.

You are in a taxi somewhere in Europe, heading from the airport to the hotel, tired from the flight and hoping for an uneventful ride. The driver asks where you are from, and for two seconds you freeze. You assess the driver, the accent, the atmosphere in the car. Then you calculate how much trouble the truth might cause.

Before October 7, 2023, this was mostly an exercise in reading the room. You could say “Israel” and get a suspicious look in the mirror, an awkward silence, or an enthusiastic speech about the Promised Land and the Chosen People. You never knew.

Or you could say “Tel Aviv.”

For years, Tel Aviv functioned as a magical diplomatic loophole. Israel was a complicated conflict zone many people preferred not to think about. Tel Aviv was different: Mediterranean beaches, great hummus, and techno music until sunrise. It was a brand you could mention without inviting a debate about borders, religion, or the United Nations. And if neither answer appealed, you could always rub your eyes, mutter something about jet lag, and stare out the window.

Then came October 7.

The Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel and the abduction of 251 hostages shattered our world at home. The war in Gaza that followed damaged Israel’s standing abroad. Within months, the country that had suffered the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust found itself accused of genocide, facing intense scrutiny over the devastation in Gaza.

For Israelis traveling abroad, the question in the taxi could feel like the beginning of a trial. Suddenly, you were expected to represent a government, an army, and an entire national history simply because you happened to be sitting in the backseat.

Many Israelis agree on a cover story before they even finish packing: they are from Malta, Cyprus, or Greece. Some Israelis say they switch to English when speaking to their partners in public, hoping not to be identified by their Hebrew. The result can be absurd: parents conducting family life in broken English while their children carry on loudly in Hebrew, unaware that the family has entered a covert operation.

Other stories are less comic. Israelis describe conversations with strangers cooling as soon as their nationality comes up, or avoiding the subject altogether. Individual experiences vary, but the calculation itself has become familiar: is it worth saying who you are?

The discomfort extends well beyond Israelis. A survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, conducted before October 7, found that 76 percent of Jewish respondents in Europe hid their Jewish identity at least occasionally because they did not feel safe. In the United States, a 2024 American Jewish Committee survey found that 56 percent of Jewish Americans had altered their behavior out of fear of antisemitism.

Hiding your nationality is not the same as hiding your religion. An Israeli saying “Cyprus” faces a different pressure from a Jewish student in Chicago hiding a Star of David. But both confront the social cost of being identified with who they are.

We have become a nation in the closet.

Not every Israeli feels this way, of course. Plenty travel openly and encounter nothing worse than a political disagreement. But when answering a simple question about your home begins to feel like a risk assessment, something has changed.

And here is the paradox. The navigation app on that taxi driver’s phone might have been developed in Israel. Israeli engineers have helped build cybersecurity systems, chip technologies, and medical innovations used around the world.

Yet technical competence does not buy moral credit. A country can produce brilliant engineers and make disastrous political decisions. Its entrepreneurs can win the trust of international boardrooms while its government loses the confidence of foreign publics.

The numbers reflect the scale of the problem. In a June 2026 Pew Research Center survey across 36 countries, a median of 67 percent of adults held an unfavorable view of Israel, compared with 25 percent who held a favorable view. These figures don’t explain why people feel as they do. Some are reacting to Israeli policy; others are influenced by disinformation or antisemitism. Often, these forces overlap. But the crisis cannot be dismissed as a minor public-relations misunderstanding.

Ask the Israeli government, and a familiar explanation emerges: the world is antisemitic, the foreign media is biased, and our public diplomacy, or Hasbara, needs a bigger budget, louder spokespeople, and a slicker presence on TikTok.

I used to believe some version of that story. If outsiders misunderstood Israel, I thought, the answer was to explain it better. Give people the facts. Walk them through the history. Show them the map.

That instinct came naturally to me. For nearly twenty years, I took visitors through Jerusalem’s crowded quarters, up to the Golan Heights, and along the seam line overlooking the West Bank. Often, visitors arrived convinced of a simple narrative and left with a more complicated view. A good day on the road did not require us to agree. It required us to look honestly at the same piece of ground.

Over time, I ran into the limits of explanation.

Some visitors misunderstood Israel because they had been fed bad information or knew little of the region’s history. Others were asking legitimate questions that no amount of historical context could make disappear.

A spokesperson can explain why a government made a decision. A historian can trace how a conflict developed. Neither can make a contradiction vanish through eloquence.

If Israel’s leaders say they want international legitimacy while cabinet ministers make statements that undermine it, the problem is not poor translation. If ministries fight over turf during a war and sideline capable communicators for political reasons, a clever ad campaign will not fix the chain of command. And if successive governments avoid resolving the country’s borders or defining a credible postwar strategy, no communicator can manufacture one on live television.

Sometimes a country loses an argument because its story is poorly told. Other times, it loses credibility because its actions contradict its words.

That second problem has a name: friendly fire. It is the damage Israel inflicts on its own international standing through warped political incentives, institutional dysfunction, and strategic paralysis that public relations cannot repair.

The failures reinforce one another. Hostile actors exploit real Israeli mistakes. Political leaders blame the resulting backlash entirely on antisemitism. Institutions become defensive, communicators lose credibility, and the underlying problems remain. Israel ends up fighting hostile narratives while handing its opponents fresh ammunition.

As Israelis prepare to vote, our international standing should be part of the conversation. After twenty years of helping outsiders understand my country, I no longer believe that explaining is enough. Telling the truth rapidly and accurately still matters. But a country cannot talk its way out of every problem it creates, and no spokesperson can save us from the leaders we choose to empower.

Sometimes Israel needs to tell its story better. Sometimes it needs to get its own house in order.

Knowing the difference is the only way out of the closet.