[The following, by Eamonn McDonagh, is crossposted from Z Word.]

Now the arrest of the two conflict tourists referred to in this piece does seem to have been ill advised. They were inside Area A when they were nabbed and Israel really shouldn't be sticking its nose in there without a powerfully good reason.

However, I have a couple of points to make about what Noam Sheizaf, the blog's author, has to say about the matter. He's very upset that they are being accused of being critical of Zionism and supporting the Palestinians and concludes that there can be no justification for expelling them on the basis of their political views. And just what are those critical views? Well you can read those of Ariadna Jove Martí, one of the two arrested, here [in Spanish]. It's all you might imagine; Israel is an apartheid state, it is founded on a systematic plan of ethnic cleansing, the IDF was founded on the base of the Haganah, a terrorist organization and plenty more besides. Oh, and she refuses to use Hebrew place names.

Has she the right to hold such views and express them. Absolutely. The crunch question is this, does Israel have an obligation to let her enter its territory (I'm presuming she came to the West Bank through it) with the purpose of propounding those views either in Israel or the Palestinian territories? I would say that it is under no such obligation. I would go further and say that it be would extremely foolish to continue to allow foreigners to abuse tourist visas to carry out activities other than tourism. Pretty draconian, huh?

It might be argued that Israel has no legitimate role with regard to the activities of foreign visitors to areas that are under Palestinian control. Well, as I said, arresting them, once they were there, wasn't a brilliant idea, but Israel sure does have an interest in seeing that the West Bank doesn't fill up with foreign busybodies who are only interested in human rights abuses when they are committed, or alleged to be committed by Jews. These people shouldn't be let into Israel in the first place

So let's hope the two wannabe martyrs are sent packing and that Israel takes more care about admitting people who evidently want to see as rapid an end to its existence as possible.