Micah Riederby Micah Rieder
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Photo Credit: Ninara/WikiCommons/CC BY 2.0
IN RECENT WEEKS, the polyrhythm of Israeli entitlement in Thailand has practically saturated the news cycle. A tall order, given a school-shooting massacre, a number of copycat incidents, and near-vertical escalations of separatist violence in the south.
Most notable among the tunes in rotation: a confrontation over a zoo on the island of Koh Samui, where a Thai-French couple refused entry to a group of Israelis. By the time the smoke cleared –and there was actual smoke–Israelis had made death threats, a 500,000 baht bounty had been placed on the couple running the business, and the Israeli ambassador had met with provincial officials to insist Israeli tourists be protected, just in time for the Thai-French family’s home in France to be set ablaze.
That the embers of Israeli-linked fires in South America and Europe have made landfall in Thailand (by way of France) is, oddly, the cheap punchline here. More interesting is that someone determined that the Thai-French couple owned a house on the other side of the world, then tracked down and targeted it. The A to B of that is no small task, and it went down with unlikely speed and accuracy. In other words, this was not some impulsive, retaliatory tantrum. It involved considerable intelligence-gathering and logistics coordination.
Given that, it bears mentioning that the very spyware Thai journalists and democracy activists have found running on their phones in recent years was developed in Tel Aviv. All of which makes one particular development in this saga rather conspicuous. Thai Mai Thon (“Impatient Thais”) –Thailand’s own Proud Boy-esque nationalist goon squad, best known for assaulting democracy activists in Bangkok– is now positioning itself as something of a cavalry against Israeli entitlement.
Why is that conspicuous? Pull up a chair.
Slowly at First, then All at Once.
SINCE 2010, Thailand has had an official arrangement with Israel, exporting farmworkers to compensate for shortages resulting from Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement. In practice, this pipeline has existed since the early 1990s. The capture and death of Thai nationals on Oct. 7th was the direct result of this program and, indeed, Hamas seemed aware of it. Thais who evaded capture reported hearing Hamas militants calling to them in Thai, as they hid.
By that time, hundreds of Thai migrant workers had already died on Israeli farms, likely from heat exhaustion and reportedly brutal working hours – all of which appear to have been chalked up to “arrhythmia”.
None of which was terribly interesting to Thai nationalists. At any point. At any level.
Getting to Israel involves massive payments to agencies that broker migrant worker entry; families often take on debt in the process, and remain liable for those debts when the workers die. Meanwhile, when Thai women farm workers in Israel were surveyed, 100% of respondents reported experiencing sexual assault. Thailand has not meaningfully addressed any of this. Certainly, the latter stat has not meaningfully informed visa policy per Israelis entering the country, or the risks they pose to the local population.
On this point, the silence of Thai nationalists has been, rather predictably, deafening.
The harvest of that inaction has been similarly foreseeable. In the last year, Israeli tourists have made Thai headlines attacking hospital workers, stealing from Thai businesses, and in one particularly illustrative incident, defecating on a cafe floor. All while establishing de facto colonies in places like Pai, Koh Phangan, and Phuket.
The Thai nationalists presently submitting petitions to the Israeli embassy and peacocking on social media? Nowhere to be found.
So much so that grassroots Thai anger at Israeli entitlement reached a volume impossible to ignore. For months, a two-pronged government response has been underway. On one side, an overhaul of visa-exempt entry policies long exploited by tourists from a host of countries. As a result, the visa-free sixty days granted to a range of passport-holders since Covid restrictions were lifted has been reduced to thirty. Or so one is to believe, anyway. Sixty-day visa-free stamps have appeared in passports as recently as last week.
On the other side, a crackdown on illegal, foreign-run businesses and land deals has revealed a number of shocking stats. On Phuket, some 361 businesses now face investigation for using nominee structures to appear Thai-owned after a confrontation with the local Chabad House. Among them, ten Israelis bearing naturalized Thai citizenship now also under investigation. Notably, Chabad tried to rebuff investigators, asserting the space was “Israeli territory.”
Judging by their lack of response, Thai nationalists took a powder.
On Koh Phangan, in June, ten Israelis were arrested and deported for running illegal businesses estimated to have done $6 million in damage. This week, 112 additional businesses were flagged for investigation, 104 of which are “new.” At least two illegal schools have been raided — one of them host to 89 Israeli children. While the school operations’ lack of paperwork has dominated press coverage, the reality is that Israelis with children that couldn’t be legally enrolled in schools posed such a market gap that two were being run off-book to meet demand. None of which was news to anyone living there. Tensions over the proliferation of Israeli businesses and Israeli behavior on Koh Phangan were being reported in the press nearly a year ago.
Apparently, catching the ferry from Surat Thani was beneath Thai nationalists.
The most recent major conflagration comes from the island of Koh Samui – a short ferry ride from Koh Phangan. An exotic animal zoo on the island run by a Thai-French family recently denied entry to Israelis; an increasing trend among Thai businesses in Israeli-dense areas; sometimes over politics, often over Israeli behavior. The Israelis filmed the incident, and the footage went viral. In its wake, the family announced free entry for Palestinians, and received death threats from Israelis – including the claim that a 500,000 baht bounty had been offered for their deaths.
In the wake of the confrontation, the Israeli Ambassador met with officials from Surat Thani Province – home to both Koh Samui and Koh Phangan – under the auspices of ensuring Israeli safety. Within 48hrs the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced an investigation into the zoo incident. Not solely the death threats, but the actions of the family in denying Israelis entry. The press has largely discussed them as though morally equivalent, and for a brief moment, reports indicated Thailand was preparing to deport the husband.
Nuisance vs. Colonization (and Some Notes on Negligence)
IN THE EARLY 1990S, while the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was being negotiated, Mexican military stumbled onto a training camp for indigenous rebels, deep in the jungles of its southernmost state. When the press began reporting on it, officials feverishly denied the story, fearing it might derail negotiations, waving it off and declaring “No hay guerilla” — there are no guerrillas.
On the day NAFTA took effect, an indigenous insurgency calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation gripped the state, raiding a military base and seizing weapons, burning land records in the public offices of San Cristobal, and declaring war on the Mexican government. Today, in just about every souvenir shop in San Cristobal, one can buy postcards bearing a now iconic vignette: A lone Zapatista slouched with his rifle, napping against a wall in the town square, beneath graffiti that reads No hay guerilla.
When it comes to the rather plain patterns of Israeli settlement in Thailand, the establishment appears to be doing a similar dance. The framework for addressing a problem with rather obvious systemic contours consistently takes aim at individuals who create isolated nuisances. A confrontation at an exotic zoo is just a confrontation at an exotic zoo. That is, until a house burns down on the other side of the world, and someone puts out a bounty on its owners, boasting that he has their local officials in his pocket — right after his ambassador meets with said local officials.
Then, it gets difficult to bundle the optics-cat back into the bag. At ground level, people fed up with patterned encroachment, exploitation, and dispossession start to clock the disjuncture and take note of who’s on their team. This is where the nationalist clown-car presents a valuable intervention.
If state actors cannot risk a concerted and structural confrontation with Israel, they have to reckon with Israel’s equal and opposite reaction at the grassroots. And they then have to wonder who that reaction might turn to for support, agency, and allyship. While Palestine solidarity networks do exist in Thailand, they are keenly marginal — unsupported, practically unacknowledged by the broader human rights landscape in the country. If the communities inflamed, attacked, and enraged by patterns of Israeli behavior in Thailand were to strike up a rapport with those networks, the democratizing effects could prove tectonic — weaving the Thai experience into the international landscape, bypassing editorial at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and tourism industry brand-management.
Clearly, the word from on high has been: That. Cannot. Happen.
And so, nationalist boy-bands who’ve shed not one tear for Thai migrant workers raped and worked to death in Israeli fields; who slept at the wheel while leadership at Chabad House declared its square-footage “Israeli territory”; who apparently missed that all these fraudulent land purchases, businesses, and citizenship documents happened under the noses of Thai officials — are now cosplaying The Equalizer.
Not bearing common cause with Palestinians, or any number of other groups across the world facing the exact same pattern at the hands of Israelis. Not even naming the structural contours of what the Israeli presence in Thailand now represents. Rather, they speak of one thing and one thing only: Reinforcing Thai authority.
How convenient.
None of which would’ve come so effortlessly, were it not for the fact that Thai human rights and NGO networks have consistently declined to name and challenge Israeli activities in Thailand. Even this very moment. Even while denouncing the genocide in Gaza. They’ve ceded the conversation to the throngs of expats spewing antisemitic bile in the replies on Thai news stories about Israeli incidents, rather than laying the groundwork for communication and solidarity with impacted communities.
The husband and father on Koh Samui whose life was threatened by Israelis, and whose home was burned with his mother inside, barely escaping — is now giving press conferences surrounded by the same sorts of nationalists who’ve been targeting him. Simply for the fact that they got there first.
Intersectional defeat, snatched from the jaws of victory.