Riot police pushed back a handful of anti-Israel protesters chanting “Freedom for Palestine” as the MS Crown Iris, operated by the Israeli-owned Mano Maritime shipping company, docked at the Mediterranean island on Monday.
Police formed a wall to prevent the protesters from approaching too near the port, based on video of the incident. Some protesters resisted and arrests were made.
“The police had set up a security blockade around the port of Rhodes, while representatives of the local authorities said that no one was going to tarnish the image of hospitality that Rhodes has built over many years,” Euro News reported.
Authorities were determined not to repeat the July 22 incident in which Israeli tourists were prevented from disembarking at the Greek island of Syros. Local police there failed to contain roughly 150 protesters, leading the ship to divert to the Cypriot city of Limassol.
It was the very same ship that was unable to dock at Syros that docked at Rhodes. At Rhodes, the Israeli tourists disembarked without incident.
In the case of Syros, the protesters were overwhelmingly not locals, and those who live on the island were furious at the blow to the island’s reputation as a place of hospitality, a high-ranking official in Ermoupolis, the island’s capital, told JNS on Monday.
Greece’s Minister of Citizen Protection Michalis Chrysochoidis called the Syros incident “outrageous” and promised to crack down.
“Anyone who attempts to prevent a third-country national from legally entering the country will face prosecution, arrest, and then criminal proceedings under the anti-racism law,” he said.
Greece is a popular travel destination for Israelis partly because it is close, but also because it provides them a sense of personal security as compared to Turkey and other parts of Europe.
That sense of security may have been shaken, as Monday’s protest at Rhodes is but the latest in a series of anti-Israel and antisemitic incidents in Greece.
In a widely reported incident over the weekend, an Israeli tourist was attacked by a group of Syrian migrants at a beach near Athens, with one of them biting off a part of his ear.
Early on Wednesday morning, only hours after the cruise ship left Syros, Israeli teenagers out for a night on Rhodes were attacked by dozens of pro-Palestinian assailants.
Neil Bar, who researches radical ideologies at the University of Haifa’s Comper Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism and the University of California, Berkeley, told JNS that recent anti-Israeli incidents in Greece are part of an alarming and increasingly organized pattern.
“These aren’t isolated events,” Bar said. “Since October 7, we’ve seen a steady rise in targeted attacks—not just against Israeli tourists, but against Jews more broadly.”
Bar pointed to several disturbing examples in recent weeks that suggest coordination and intent.
“In the last two months alone, a Holocaust memorial in Larissa was defaced, Jewish cemeteries in Volos and Thessaloniki were desecrated, and earlier this month, men in black shirts bearing Palestinian flags were seen patrolling tourist areas in Athens like Monastiraki and the Plaka, threatening Israeli and Jewish visitors,” he said.
“It’s reached a point where the Central Jewish Council of Greece issued a public warning last month, saying Jewish tourists were being ‘attacked and described as murderers,’ simply because of their identity.”
