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by WELCOME FRANCE PALESTINE MISSION - Press Release

50 international peace supporters and peace activists detained by Israel and imprisoned at the Givon Prison, near Tel Aviv, declared hunger strike in support of the Palestinian political prisoners and rejecting the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine.

bout forty French participants of the mission Welcome to Palestine, and a dozen other internationals, were jailed Monday morning at Givon (near Tel Aviv), because they refused to be deported on their arrival, and not because they committed any offense or crime, quite the contrary.

According to the score that we could perform on the night of Sunday to Monday, there were 27 men and women who arrived in Tel Aviv on an Easyjet flight from Geneva, and 10 or 11 others arrived on board an Air France flight from Nice.

Some have managed not to get caught with their mobiles, and were able to sendto the outside world (to us, to relatives in France) a few new SMS: the morale is high. They maintain their right, elemental, to be able to travel in occupied Palestine and they are prepared, if necessary, to declare hunger strike, especially because this Tuesday April 17th is a day of general mobilization of thousands Palestinians languishing in the jails of the apartheid regime.

Example of an SMS received on Monday morning at 10 h30

“We are 13 girls in Lyon, Scottish 4, 2, Nice, Marseille 2, 3 in Paris, one of Quebec, one of Corsica, and they still don’t let us call without giving us any explanation. We all go on a hunger strike as long as we cannot call. And tomorrow we will all go on a hunger strike with the Palestinian women prisoners.”

Already, the draconian measures taken by the government and the Israeli secret service to prevent the thousands of volunteers to reach Palestine (only half a dozen have managed to win Bethlehem, to our knowledge) has turned into diplomatic and political disaster for Netanyahu and his clique.

We owe this to the overzealous Secret Service which have been unable to determine with any credibility in what the volunteers were “dangerous extremists pose an existential issue for Israel,” have raked wide, very wide, in the composition of their blacklists.

Haaretz reveals that for hundreds of passengers whose identities have been stalked for weeks, the Shin Bet has not been able not only to establish that they represented any “danger” to Israel, but even in some cases any militant activity in the service of the Palestinian cause!

The sweep operation did not spare a member of the Board of Directors of the powerful German pharmaceutical company Merck (Merck Darmstadt) who came in Israel in order to sign an agreement for scientific research! He found himself black-listed!

Better, a French diplomat and his wife who must start working at the French consulate in Jerusalem this summer. The couple was planning to look for an apartment in Jerusalem, but the night before their departure, they received an email from the airline, Lufthansa, saying that their tickets were canceled because they were banned from enter Israel!

In fact, what happened Sunday with a passenger on Air France, puted off her flight from Nice to Tel Aviv because she had responded negatively to a questionnaire from the airline asking if she was “Jewish” or ” Israeli “, gives a fairly clear picture of the exclusionary strategy developed by the Israeli spy agencies. When the passenger is not “racially pure”, is eliminated.

Even if it means to go after passengers with the “right profile”. Still in Nice, Sunday, members of our delegation witnessed the misadventures of a transient non-member of the mission who have been inquisitorial questioned by the Air France staff. Her crime? This woman, Jewish French citizen, had the air of an Arab, because of her surname and the complexion of her skin, which is not surprising since that many of the Jews in France are from the Arab world, especially North Africa. And when the employees of Air France have sought to hide behind the racial instructions they had received from Israel, the Jewish passenger replied indignantly, “Well, now I do not like this country.”

Wherever passengers, hundreds, were denied boarding, there were vigorous protests, , Brussels, Geneva, Mulhouse, Rome, Paris, Nice, etc. … We report the news on these sites http://www.bienvenuepalestine.com and

http://www.europalestine.com, as well as our twitters @touspalestine, @Europalestine1, and on the Facebook page