ANJUNA, India, Dec. 15 — A favored destination of young Israelis seeking respite from the frazzle and stress of home, the tourist haven of Goa got a rude reminder of reality this week.
Based on information gleaned by its counterterrorism agency, the Israeli government issued a rare terrorism alert on Thursday warning of a planned attack by Al Qaeda on tourists during the New Year’s holiday season. The advisory described the information as “a concrete threat” but gave no further detail.
The Israeli Embassy urged its citizens to visit another time or, if they must be in the state of Goa, to stay away from crowded places. “We advise them to be alert and to take this threat very seriously,” the embassy spokesman, Lior Weintraub, said Friday by telephone from New Delhi, the capital.
In Anjuna, on Goa’s northern coast, where Internet cafes cater to Israelis checking e-mail messages from home and where restaurants serve schnitzel for lunch, the news of Al Qaeda’s suspected designs was greeted with a mixture of apprehension and aplomb.
“Now we feel at home,” Yossi Damti, 23, fresh out of the Israeli Army, said with a shrug on Friday afternoon.
“We got used to it,” said his friend, Orif Tordjman, 21, who had also just completed her military service. “We’re not going to leave because of this alert.”
Goa is among India’s most coveted tourist destinations. For Israelis, it is also a common stop on the post-military-service tourist circuit. The embassy in New Delhi estimated that around 35,000 Israelis come to Goa each year, crowding into a handful of coastal villages like this one.
Alerts like this latest one, which was unusual for its level of specificity, are particularly vexing for the Indian government, which has long maintained that Al Qaeda does not operate on Indian soil. In August, in the days leading up to India’s Independence Day, the United States Embassy said it had received information that foreign terrorists, including Al Qaeda, planned to carry out a series of bombings in and around New Delhi and Mumbai. Indian officials dismissed the alert as a routine advisory.
India has cultivated warmer relations with Israel and the United States, making it, according to some security analysts, more vulnerable to Qaeda attacks.
Local news outlets on Friday quoted the chief minister of Goa, Pratapsing Rane, as saying that his state remained safe for tourists. Tourism is among the state’s principal sources of revenue.
At an Internet cafe on Anjuna’s main strip, Shai Zimon, 23, who had been traveling across India for the past 6 weeks, said he was hunting for a ticket to fly to Thailand for New Year’s Eve, but not because of the terrorism threat. “You can’t base your trip on what the government says,” he said.
If you did, piped in a Swiss woman, Gitta Klee, also checking e-mail messages, no one would ever go anywhere.
Ms. Klee, 53, who has lived in Goa for more than 27 years, theorized that the terrorism alert was the brainchild of anxious parents not wanting their children to party in Goa. “Me, I don’t think this place is interesting enough for terrorists,” she said.
Word seemed not to have spread yet to the non-Israeli tourists who crowd into some of the same cheap guesthouses here. A pair of German tourists waiting for a bus to the beach were oblivious to the alert. A British tourist, Mustapha Dari, 24, said he had heard only something vague from a friend who had watched the news the night before on Indian television. His friend, Raffi Israelion, 20, a Parisian, confessed that he was particularly worried because local residents often took him to be Israeli.
At a Jewish community house on Friday afternoon, the news had seeped in, and the visit of a foreign journalist was enough to spark fear and hostility. At first, two women sitting on the porch of the house, where preparations were under way for a service to mark the first night of Hanukkah, said they knew of three friends who had canceled their New Year’s Eve plans for Goa.
They said friends and family in Israel had already called them and urged them to return home. They weren’t sure what they would do. One of the women, who gave her name only as Adi, said she did not want Al Qaeda to “ruin our plans.”
Nor, it turned out, did she want to say any more to a stranger. The conversation quickly turned tense. Why are you asking for our names, they demanded. Why do you want to know when the first candle would be lit on the menorah this evening? Why are you asking if we will stay here for the New Year’s holiday?
“All this situation, I don’t know,” Adi said nervously, and quickly disappeared into the house.
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