Will Israel's #Flotilla2 Strategy Work Against The #Flytilla As Well?

Diplomacy worked well for Israel in securing help from other countries, especially Greece, to prevent the Flotilla from successfully taking off. Now Israel is again reaching out to others to help them deal with this latest ploy:

Israel has instructed foreign airlines to prevent 300 pro-Palestinian activists from boarding flights to Israel over the weekend, after Israeli security forces handed them the names of 300 people who they had blacklisted.


The Transportation Ministry requested that foreign airlines report to Israeli authorities if any of the blacklisted passengers appear on their flights to Israel in the next 24 hours, stressing that these people will not be granted entry into Israel.

In effect, Israel's instructions mean that the foreign airlines will not allow those passengers to board their flights in airports abroad, so they would not need to fly them back to their countries of origin after being deported by Israel.

The degree to which this tactic is successful will be seen starting Thursday night:

"This event will end with either no problems or as a catastrophe. There will not be a middle-ground," a senior official at Ben-Gurion International Airport told Haaretz. He said that it only takes about 30 activists to make a scene at the airport for media outlets to widely report on it and thus hand the activists their victory.

While it is not unheard of for a country to request an airline to ban one or two people from coming on board an airplane--in this case, Israel's request goes much farther than that.

And soon we will see the fruits of that strategy.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Flytilla.