Because of "genocide"

Hotel in Italy rejects Israeli guests

(Bild: stock.adobe.com/Roman Yanushevsky)

Anti-Semitism scandal in Italy: A three-star hotel in the Dolomites is said to have told a group of Israeli tourists that they were "not welcome" because they were "co-responsible for genocide".

The manager of the hotel in the village of Selva di Cadore in the northern Italian Dolomites province of Belluno offered to cancel the booking free of charge: "So if you would like to cancel your booking, we will be happy to do this for you and allow you to cancel free of charge," the hotel informed the guests.

The incident was publicized on the website of the Jewish community of Milan, Bet Magazine Mosaico (see post below). The report sparked a wave of outrage.

Facebook page of the hotel offline
Numerous politicians of various stripes condemned the discrimination and accused the hotel operators of anti-Semitism. The owner of the accommodation refused to make a statement. The hotel's Facebook page went offline. 

The accommodation can also no longer be found on Booking.com. "We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind. If we are made aware of discriminatory behavior by an accommodation partner, we always follow up immediately and can remove accommodations from our platform - as we did in this case," it was announced.

The President of the Regional Council of Veneto, Roberto Ciambetti, warned that one should not make the mistake of equating peoples with their governments. "This applies to the Israelis as well as the Palestinians. Nobody identifies the Afghan people with the Taliban or the Iranian people with the sinister religious extremism of the Ayatollahs," emphasized Ciambetti. 

Not the first incident of this kind
Last summer, a similar incident in San Vito di Cadore in the province of Belluno caused a stir. The owner of a vacation home had refused a booking from a Jewish family of five via Airbnb. In this case, the host's response in Hebrew characters was: "You can stay in the gas ovens", as the Israeli website "Ynet" reported at the time.

The host later apologized and explained that it was probably a mistranslation of an answer to a question about a gas oven, but Airbnb still blocked the host from the service.