#Airflotilla | Israeli Police deport two ‘flightilla’ activists to Greece
occupiedpalestine
The Israel Police ratcheted down visible security at Ben-Gurion International Airport a notch overnight Thursday, after Israel gave foreign carriers a blacklist of more than 300 suspected hostile, pro-Palestinian activists headed here on flights.
Demotix | in Politics, | 8th of July 2011
Two Israeli police officers monitor visitors from incoming flights at the arrivals hall of Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, as passengers exit passport control and customs.
The Israel Police ratcheted down visible security at Ben-Gurion International Airport a notch overnight Thursday, after Israel gave foreign carriers a blacklist of close to 400 suspected hostile, pro-Palestinian activists headed here on flights.
“Due to statements of pro-Palestinian radicals to arrive on commercial flights from abroad to disrupt the order and confront security forces at friction points, it was decided to refuse their entry in accordance with our authority according to the Law of Entry to Israel 1952,” the letter read. “In light of the above-mentioned, you are required not to board them on your flights to Israel. Failure to comply with this directive would result in a delay on the flight and their return on the same flight,” the warning read, according to The Jerusalem Post.
A group of some 50 protesters demonstrated at Paris’ Charles De Gaulle Airport on Friday, saying that Israel had “occupied” the facility after several activists were barred from boarding flights to Tel Aviv.
By the morning, officials at Ben-Gurion said they had ID’ed two female American tourists wearing “fly-in” t-shirts arriving on a flight from Greece, and sent them back to Athens.
In the arrivals hall, groups of uniformed police and airport security meandered among the crowds of visitors as they rolled luggage carts into the hall.
Dozens of news crews toting video cameras and microphones buttonholed the occasional tourist, asking if they’d encountered any signs of tension or heightened security at the departure airports.
Police Spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld told me early Wednesday morning that “There were no problems,” with the passengers on two flights, from France and Germany, that he accompanied from their exit from the airplane, through customs, and into the arrivals hall.
“This event will end with either no problems or as a catastrophe. There will not be a middle-ground,” a senior airport official told Haaretz.
Passengers on flights from Cyprus and Germany told me after going through passport control and customs that they did not see any heightened security surrounding either their flights, or at the departure airports.
Israeli officials on Friday said they’d renew their elevated security stance, including at the entrance to the airport’s vehicular security checkpoint, far from the terminal, where activists might send buses of protesters.
Israel has slammed the activists’ attempts to enter its territory under the rubric of the “Welcome Palestine,” events in taking place at locations within its territory and in the West Bank protesting Israel’s policies, and consider it an affront to their sovereignty.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, on a visit to Bulgaria, said Wednesday that Israel was responding with the appropriate degree of caution in deploying more than 600 uniformed and undercover officers for the expected arrival of an estimated 700 to 1,000 protesters over the weekend.
“Every country has the basic right to prevent the infiltration of provocateurs into its territory,” Netanyahu said at a press conference with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, held in Sofia.
“Right now there is information of a few hundred people who want to disturb the peace,” Netanyahu said. “I don’t know with what level of violence, but we have very reliable information that they want to come and disturb the peace and cause a provocation. We are taking the necessary steps.”
“If we didn’t take action, we would be asked afterward why we didn’t act,” Netanyahu said, replying to critics at home who doubted the need for beefed-up security. “At the end of the day, it is the government and the relevant authorities who have to prepare. It is okay that all the time we are being questioned and criticized and checked,” Netanyahu said.