It’s roughly 1am on a sticky, humid Wednesday night, and the bar is rammed. Thick cigarette smoke and Hebrew fills the air. My friend and I are the only punters speaking in English; we’re shot quizzical looks as obvious outsiders.
Bizarrely, this isn’t a popular late-night spot in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. I’m in Pai, a rural hippy town in northern Thailand, where tensions in the Middle East are beginning to echo.
Pai is a laid-back town full of stoners, tie-dye and acoustic covers of Creep. For decades, this relaxed, easy-going culture made it a popular hotspot for tourists travelling through Thailand. With its £3-a-night hostels, it attracts more than 200,000 visitors a year, who are kept entertained by its nightclubs and bars, as well as the surrounding canyons and waterfalls. Here, the roads are filled with amateur-driven mopeds, and the rivers with "tipsy tubers" floating along in rubber rings.
In recent years, however, mainly male Israeli backpackers — many fresh from their mandatory military service — have started arriving in large numbers. This influx, into what local media has dubbed the new “promised land” or “Pai-lestine”, has not been warmly received.
“It started after October 7,” Maya, 29, tells me over cheap cigarettes and Thai iced tea in a café on the outskirts of Pai. Many of those visiting are embarking on “the Hummus Trail”, a rite of passage for post-IDF servicemen and women, where they travel to far corners of the earth in search of respite, something that has become increasingly popular given the ongoing war. Previously, India was the main destination, but Pai and Thailand’s southern islands are increasingly popular.
More recently, some Israeli visitors, enchanted by Pai’s beauty and culture, have started taking up more permanent residences, purchasing five to ten-year rentals. To accommodate these expats, a new “holistic” school has opened in Pai, offering classes in English and Hebrew. “This is not just normal travelling,” says Maya, who moved to Pai from the south of Thailand eight years ago.
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