Greek riot police clash with pro-Palestinian protesters near the port of Rhodes during a demonstration targeting an Israeli cruise ship. Photo: Screenshot

An Israeli tourist has reportedly been refused service at a restaurant in central Athens after revealing her nationality, in the latest incident fueling concern over a growing climate of antisemitism targeting Jews and Israelis across Greece.

Anna Doshin, a recent immigrant to Israel who lives in Haifa, told the Israeli news outlet Ynet that she was dining alone at the Vinoir Bistro in central Athens on the night of July 13 when a young employee approached her and asked which country she was from — a question that led to an unexpected confrontation.

After she replied that she was from Israel, the employee allegedly told her “there is no hookah for you,” removed the hookah she had ordered from her table, and refused to serve her. Doshin said she remained calm, stood up, and quietly left.

“It was the first time something like this had happened to me,” Doshin told Ynet. “I thought saying I was from Israel would be completely normal because I heard a lot of Hebrew around me and saw many Israeli tourists, but it turned out not to be.”

Doshin said there had been no argument, political discussion, or inappropriate behavior on her part before the exchange, and that the experience was especially distressing because she was staying in an apartment in the same building, directly above the restaurant.

“First of all, I was afraid because I was there alone and I am a woman,” she said. “Every day when I passed the restaurant, because I was staying right above it, I felt uncomfortable and scared. I felt humiliated and embarrassed, so I immediately went back home very shaken.”

Although the restaurant’s staff did not explicitly tell her she was being turned away because of her nationality, Doshin said she was certain that was the reason. “What hurt me most was that the refusal came immediately after I said I was from Israel,” she said. “I understood that they were refusing to serve me only because of my nationality.”

Like much of Europe and the broader Western world, Greece has seen a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents over the past two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Across the country, Jews and Israelis have reported an increasingly threatening environment marked by targeted attacks, harassment, intimidation, vandalism, and public displays of anti-Israel hostility. In July 2025, masked vandals ransacked King David Burger, an Israeli-owned kosher eatery in central Athens, damaging property and spraying anti-Israel and anti-Zionist graffiti across the premises.

In one of the most recent incidents, the left-wing anarchist group Rouvikonas staged what it called “anti-Zionist patrols” through the streets of Thessaloniki — Greece’s second-largest city, in the country’s north — on June 27, saying the marches were intended to confront a growing “Israeli and Zionist infiltration” of the city.

The group claimed Thessaloniki had become part of a wider process of “colonization” driven by domestic and foreign capital, alleging that Israeli and other investment funds were buying up beaches, neighborhoods, and villages and displacing local residents. “Israelis are rushing to invest their money, bloodied by the genocide, into Airbnb and other accommodations, or into plots of land that the Greek state is selling off at bargain prices,” it said in a statement.

Rouvikonas went on to accuse Israeli visitors of enjoying holidays financed by wartime profits while Palestinians suffered. “While the people of Palestine and Lebanon are being massacred, Zionist tourists, IDF soldiers and their families arrive by the thousands on cruise ships, turning their investment properties into sources of income or holiday homes far removed from the rapes and murders of civilians and children in Gaza,” it added.

Jewish groups in Greece have sounded the alarm over the trend. The Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece condemned the Thessaloniki patrols as an antisemitic display of fanaticism, likening the black-shirted marchers to Nazi-era assault squads and to the perpetrators of the Campbell pogrom, an antisemitic riot that devastated the city’s Jewish community in 1931.