“My Money Builds Your Country”
How Thailand Became a Mossad Logistics Hub, an Israeli Organised Crime Base, and a Post-Genocide Holiday Destination — and Why the Land of Smiles is Running Out of Patience...
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Thailand has always been extraordinarily good at hospitality. The kingdom’s tourism infrastructure, its Buddhist culture of warmth and patience, and its pragmatic approach to the eccentricities of foreign visitors have made it one of the most visited countries on Earth. Thais are, by most measures, genuinely welcoming people who have tolerated extraordinary amounts of nonsense from the international tourist class for decades with a grace that would be beyond most of us.
That grace, it turns out, has limits.
In 2025, “No Israel” signs began appearing on restaurant doors across Koh Phangan and the mountain town of Pai. A Thai restaurant owner on Koh Phangan, having watched Israeli tourists steal tissue boxes, occupy seats without ordering, and skip queues for months, finally asked a group to leave. His reward was 4,000 one-star reviews in the space of days. His rating dropped from 4.8 to 2.2. This is what impunity looks like at the retail end: not a military operation, not a diplomatic incident — just a Thai guy trying to run a café, getting review-bombed into submission for daring to say enough.
“my money builds your country.”
A video that circulated in May 2025 captured an Israeli tourist telling a local restaurant owner, in a phrase of such crystalline colonial confidence that it deserves to be preserved in amber, that “my money builds your country.”
She said this to a woman in her own country.
That one sentence is, in many ways, the thesis of this article. Because the relationship between a significant cohort of Israeli nationals and the Kingdom of Thailand is not, and has not been for some years, simply a tourist relationship. It is something considerably more layered — and considerably more troubling — than Thailand’s polite official silence would suggest.
Bangkok: Not Just a Holiday Destination
Let’s start with the thing Thailand’s government is least likely to say out loud.
In July 2023, Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) blew open a network of 56 Mossad operatives working inside the country. The investigation uncovered nine separate networks overseen by senior Mossad agents based in Tel Aviv, gathering biographical intelligence on foreign nationals, tracking vehicles via GPS, hacking protected networks and physically surveilling targets. All of this was documented in a 228-page Turkish prosecutor’s indictment.
Buried inside that indictment was a detail about logistics that should interest anyone thinking about Thailand’s role in Israeli intelligence operations. MIT documents revealed that Mossad sent dozens of its agents — including Turkish nationals — on secret three-stop “touristic” trips to first Serbia, then Dubai, and finally Bangkok, all locations where Turkish citizens can travel without a visa. On the final leg of those trips, according to multiple corroborating reports, the operatives were taken to a Mossad centre in Bangkok to advance their espionage skills, learning tradecraft including how to evade counterintelligence and place tracking devices on vehicles.¹
This was reported by the Daily Sabah, confirmed by the Times of Israel, and carried by the Middle East Forum, Ynet, and the Middle East Monitor. It was not, notably, picked up with any great enthusiasm by the international media. Bangkok being an active Mossad training facility is, it seems, the kind of information that does not detain newspaper editors for long.
To be clear about what this means: Thailand’s capital city hosts infrastructure used to train intelligence operatives for a foreign power. These are not diplomats. They are, in the language of the indictment, people being taught how to surveil, track, and in some documented instances elsewhere, abduct and kill. The Thai government has said nothing publicly about this. The relationship between Bangkok and Tel Aviv remains officially warm, including, in one particularly striking detail, a 2025 collaboration in which Israeli firm Cellebrite — whose digital forensics tools have been used globally against dissidents and journalists — was brought in to train over a thousand Thai police officers.² The Israeli ambassador attended the ceremony.
The Organised Crime Infrastructure
If the intelligence dimension requires some unpacking, the organised crime picture requires rather less.
In January 2026, Thai tourist police raided a luxury villa on Koh Phangan, arresting four Israeli nationals suspected of operating a drug distribution network. The targets were primarily Israelis. Cocaine, ketamine, MDMA, and LSD were seized, along with cash. According to Thai authorities, the group had been using WhatsApp to distribute narcotics at parties across the island. One month later, an Israeli man identified as Shai Alfasi, 42, was arrested with narcotics valued at over 50 million baht — roughly £1.1 million — after Thai tourist police ran an undercover operation against what they described as the island’s largest drug trafficking network. Alfasi had been running it out of a beachside restaurant.³ ⁴
In April 2026, Thai immigration authorities detained 28-year-old Matan Aviv on Koh Samui, following coordination with Interpol and the Israeli Embassy. According to Israeli authorities, Aviv was a senior figure in an organised crime group known as “The Avengers.” He faced charges in Israel including theft, fraud, illegal weapons possession, drug offences, murder, and offences involving explosives and drugs linked to minors. He had been living, until his arrest, at a luxury villa.⁵
These are not isolated incidents. The Chiang Rai Times noted that Israeli defendants have been convicted in drug trafficking cases in Thailand going back years, with some older cases drawing potential death sentences.⁶ The pattern — networks targeting tourist areas, primarily run by Israeli nationals, operating out of legitimate business fronts — is well established and documented.
The impunity dimension matters here too. Israel’s extradition policies remain restrictive, particularly for Israeli nationals. As the Organised Crime Index notes, Israel’s legal framework against organised crime is “robust but inconsistently applied,” and its extradition policies have drawn sustained international criticism.⁷ One commentator covering the Alfasi case noted, without apparent irony: “I wouldn’t be surprised if this case quietly goes away and Alfasi is extradited back to Israel, similar to how the Israeli official facing paedophilia charges fled to Israel after being arrested in a sex trafficking sting in Las Vegas.“⁸
The Law of Return — which grants Israeli citizenship to any Jew worldwide — has historically provided a convenient off-ramp for individuals seeking to avoid prosecution abroad, a dynamic documented extensively including by the Jacobin, the US Library of Congress, and multiple legal scholars.⁹
The Territory Question
The organised crime infrastructure and the tourist behaviour problems are not entirely separate phenomena. They share a common architecture: a community confident enough in its local position to behave, in the words of one Thai academic, as if the country belongs to them.
Thai business owners and residents in Pai voiced grievances that included unpaid bills, noise disturbances, and outright aggression. Thais and long-term foreign residents reported encounters where Israeli tourists spoke rudely to staff, argued over prices, and showed no cultural sensitivity. In Koh Phangan and Pai both, residents described a “takeover” dynamic — not merely tourists passing through, but a semi-permanent settler population reshaping the character of their towns.¹⁰
This is not a perception without material basis. In 2024, Pai hosted 31,735 Israeli visitors — the second-largest foreign tourist group in a town of approximately 2,500 residents. Seven Chabad houses operate across Thailand, including one in Pai that constructed a security wall around its perimeter. Israeli-run restaurants, unlicensed hotels, and car rental operations have been documented by Thai authorities in crackdowns across Koh Phangan, Phuket, and Koh Samui.¹¹
In October 2025, Thai authorities raided Koh Phangan businesses and found, among other violations, two companies operating unlicensed hotels with Israeli directors.¹² One investigation begun at an Israeli-owned car rental company in Koh Samui led directly to an additional Russian national operating a similar operation in Phuket,¹³ a detail I’ll return to.
“take a break from genocide to party.”
The forest school is perhaps the most telling symbol. An Israeli “forest school” — a community educational institution — relocated from Goa, India, to Pai, bringing young families with it.¹⁴ This is not gap-year backpackers. This is a community transplanting its own institutions. Popular local sentiment in Pai, expressed in stickers that appeared around town, advertised the area as “Pai-lestine” and offered package holidays for those seeking to “take a break from genocide to party.” The Thai Prime Minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, addressed the situation directly in February 2025, dismissing some of the more extreme claims — including that 30,000 Israelis had moved to Pai — as misinformation, which is fair enough. The broader dynamic, however, was sufficiently serious that the Israeli Embassy issued a formal advisory in Hebrew acknowledging that “several incidents involving the behaviour of Israeli tourists” had led Thai authorities to adopt stricter measures.¹⁵
The embassy’s statement concluded with a line that deserves quoting: “The Thai people respect and warmly welcome Israeli tourists. Let’s maintain this relationship.”
The “let’s maintain” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
War-Weary or Just Arrogant? The Reservist Problem
The Israeli government and Israeli media have largely framed the Thailand situation through the lens of trauma. Young soldiers, they explain, are coming to decompress after months of intensive combat. They are psychologically stressed. They deserve some sympathy.
The psychological burden of prolonged military service is real. Complicity in genocide almost certainly, more so. But the framing — which has been deployed with some consistency across the Israeli press — performs a particular omission. It positions behaviour that locals have documented as aggressive, exploitative, and at times violent as a mental health issue rather than a conduct issue. It asks the Thais — and by extension the rest of us — to understand that those doing the miss-behaving have had a hard time, without asking what kind of hard time? Not to mention the hard time the Thai restaurant woman had when she was told her national economy was funded by the beneficence of the person insulting her.
The Thai academic Dr Manoch Aree, assistant professor of political science at Srinakharinwirot University, offered a rather less softened framing, noting that since the beginning of Israel’s campaign in Gaza in October 2023, Thai locals had come to view Israeli visitors with increasing unease — not merely because of individual incidents, but because of what those incidents represent in context.¹⁶
The context, to be direct about it, is that a significant portion of the Israelis arriving in Thailand from late 2023 onwards are people who have recently participated in military operations that have killed tens of thousands of civilians. This is not a political observation. It is a factual one. Several reports confirmed that Israeli tourists include people who served in Gaza and Lebanon, discharged or on leave, using Thailand as a decompression destination. One local activist group stuck stickers in Pai advertising it as a place to “take a break from genocide to party.” The Thai authorities removed the stickers. The sentiment behind them, among a portion of the population, remained.
Goa: The Template
For those who imagined the Thailand dynamic was sui generis, a brief detour to Goa is instructive.
Goa has been a destination for Israeli post-army travellers since at least the 1980s, when the Israel Defence Forces institutionalised the practice of mass demobilisation holidays. The Washington Post documented, in an investigation of Goa’s narcotics economy, that drug trafficking in Goa was for a long period controlled by separate gangs run by Britons, Israelis, Russians, and Indians, who maintained an uneasy peace by operating on different beaches.¹⁷ A UN-linked UNICRI report confirmed that Russian organised criminal groups established themselves in Thailand following the collapse of the Soviet Union, noting their “consolidated presence” in Pattaya and Phuket.¹⁸ The pattern is consistent across both locations: post-Soviet criminal infrastructure and Israeli criminal and intelligence-adjacent activity occupying the same tourist geography, operating in parallel.
The forest school that ended up in Pai began in Goa.¹⁴ The communities, in other words, migrated wholesale. What Goa had — and lost patience with, to some extent — Thailand subsequently inherited, at scale. The geography changed. The dynamic did not.
And Then There Are the Russians
Thailand is not, of course, exclusively a destination for Israeli organised crime. The Russian dimension deserves attention — not least because the two phenomena increasingly overlap on the same islands.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian arrivals in Thailand surged dramatically. By 2024, nearly 60,000 Russians were living on Phuket alone, with parts of the island resembling, in the description of one Thai resident, a Black Sea resort. Cyrillic signboards advertising Russian restaurants, bars, real estate agencies and tour companies proliferated. Land prices in Phuket rose by up to 40 per cent in a single year.¹⁹
In May 2024, the Thai Central Investigation Bureau launched “Operation Nominee Sweep,” raiding accounting firms and real estate companies across Phuket. The operation arrested 231 people, including 98 foreign suspects — mostly Russian — operating businesses without authorisation, and 37 Thai nationals acting as proxies for foreign companies. One suspect, identified only as Iana, 45, was a director or shareholder in 272 companies, including 142 wholly Thai-owned businesses in which she held nominee positions. Total assets seized exceeded 1.5 billion baht — roughly £34 million.²⁰
A UNICRI report confirmed that Russian organised criminal groups have had what it described as a “consolidated presence” in Pattaya and Phuket since the early 1990s, managing criminal activities — including drug trafficking, extortion, and money laundering — independently of Thai criminal networks.²¹ The Bangkok Post documented, as far back as 2017, a crackdown on “mafia-style gangs in Pattaya city” that captured Russian nationals wanted on Interpol red notices for drug trafficking and fraud.²²
What makes this relevant to a piece about Israeli organised crime infrastructure is what Thai authorities found when they started pulling threads. A 2025 Phuket investigation, initiated against an Israeli-owned car rental company on Koh Samui, led directly to a Russian national operating a parallel operation on Phuket.²³ In October 2025, the same crackdown on Koh Phangan that caught Israeli-operated unlicensed hotels simultaneously netted a Russian national running an unlicensed rental empire.²⁴
The operational overlap between Israeli and Russian criminal networks in the same tourist districts of the same country is well documented. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is a police report.
It is also worth noting, without labouring the point, that a substantial proportion of Israeli citizens are of Russian or Soviet origin — the mass migration of Jews from the former USSR to Israel in the 1990s transformed Israeli demographics. The cultural and linguistic affinities between Russian-speaking Israelis and Russian nationals are well known. In the murky world of organised crime in tourist economies, where national identity is fluid and passports are sometimes more of a suggestion than a commitment, the line between “Russian” and “Israeli” criminal networks may not always be as clear as arrest records suggest.
The Surveillance Bonus
One further layer in this story is that in 2023, cybersecurity researchers at Citizen Lab and iLaw published findings that at least 30 Thai pro-democracy activists, lawyers, scholars, and civil society workers had had their devices infected with Pegasus spyware, produced by Israeli firm NSO Group that is licensed exclusively to government intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The attacks occurred between October 2020 and November 2021, precisely the period of Thailand’s pro-democracy protests.²⁵
NSO Group is not supposed to sell to just anyone, although Ronan Farrow showed they enjoy a loophole or two. NSO’s clients, by the company’s own description, are vetted government agencies. The Thai government, which at the time was engaged in suppressing domestic dissent, appears to have been one of them.
So to recap the overall picture: Israel’s intelligence agency operates a training facility in Bangkok. Israeli tech firms supply surveillance tools to the Thai government for use against its own citizens. Israeli drug trafficking networks operate out of tourist islands. An Israeli organised crime gang called The Avengers was using Koh Samui as a base. Israeli tourists are operating unlicensed businesses across multiple provinces, treating local workers with contempt, and review-bombing any Thai business owner who asks them to behave. And the Israeli Embassy has had to issue public guidance reminding its citizens that other countries exist and have rules.
What Thailand Has Said
The Thai government’s public position has been, diplomatically speaking, careful. The Prime Minister acknowledged the behavioural issues but urged calm. Police crackdowns have been real — the arrests are documented, the operations are genuine. Deportations have increased. Signs in Hebrew advising correct conduct were posted at tourist sites by the Tourist Police.
What has not happened is any public reckoning with the intelligence infrastructure — the Bangkok training centre, the Pegasus contract, the structural dynamics that make Thailand a permissive environment for activities that would draw rather more attention elsewhere.
This is not purely Thai timidity. Thailand’s relationship with Israel, including military procurement, intelligence cooperation, and economic ties, creates structural incentives for discretion. When the Israeli Police Assistant-Chief flew to Surat Thani province in late 2025 for a meeting with provincial commanders about Israeli criminals in the region, Thai officials praised the cooperation as exemplary.²⁶ When an Israeli criminal with a $1.6 million drug operation is arrested, Israel sends police attachés. When an Israeli spy training centre is documented in your capital city, the response is silence.
The asymmetry is telling.
The Smile, Revised
There is a particular kind of relationship that powerful countries and their nationals cultivate with developing nations — one characterised by the assumption that hospitality is infinite, that rules apply differently to them, that local resentment is a cultural misunderstanding rather than a proportionate response to actual behaviour.
Thailand has been patient. More patient, frankly, than the situation warranted.
The signs on the restaurant doors in Koh Phangan are not antisemitism. They are the visible surface of something considerably more systemic: a small island community that watched its beaches occupied, its ratings bombed, its drug supply controlled, and its local culture serially disrespected by visitors from a country that has, in parallel, been running intelligence operations from its capital and supplying surveillance technology to its government.
The Land of Smiles is not infinite. The smiles have terms and conditions. And increasingly, those terms and conditions are being posted on the door.
When the inevitable blowback meets the current crude brazenness and impunity, only the naive will continue to believe that it will have happened “for no reason at all”.