This was not at all a flattering depiction of Israel and Israelis, which didn’t sit entirely well with me since I felt like it took some reductive shots that aren’t backed up in reality, but what was most interesting was how Ramy still managed to say the wrong thing to both of the women he spent time with in this episode. Congratulating his new boss’ mother on surviving the Holocaust prompted an unfortunate rambling defense that only made things worse, and she got him back at the end of the episode by managing to help him with a lingering enlargement problem of his and then congratulating him when she walked away. He got mocked for asking if there was a special line at the checkpoint for people with American passports and then beaten up by those same boys when he just went ahead and stole a bike to leave somewhere by the checkpoint. I’ll interpret Ramy then getting the kid arrested as him not bothering to consider the consequences of his actions. Comparing life under occupation to having to go through the Lincoln Tunnel was also crash and thoughtless, and his genuine shock at her offer of an iPhone charger from a decade ago was rather pretentious as well. Naseem had a very different experience that unsurprisingly didn’t get him into the country, but he was all set on making a problem anyway by showing how he could hold his breath under torture, which wasn’t what happened. His interrogator actually seemed to like him and wanted him to get to experience the gay Tel Aviv scene, but all he was able to do was get him an aisle seat that Naseem didn’t even see as a kind gesture.
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