Israel is cracking down on the International Solidarity Movement, charging it is linked with terror. The activists say it’s their nonviolence that bothers the army, and they’re planning a huge new campaign.

The confrontation had seemed almost inevitable for months. And for a team of Israeli officials considering a clampdown on international activists disrupting IDF operations in Gaza, the suicide bombing of the Mike’s Place bar in Tel Aviv in late April, in which three people were killed, was the last straw.

For several weeks, top administrators from the Foreign and Interior Ministries, the police, and the defense establishment had already been meeting to frame new guidelines. Their work was prompted by a string of serious clashes with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), mainly in the Gaza town of Rafah, resulting in the death of at least one activist at army hands.

But now, say Israeli officials, things had taken a major shift for the worse. Their inquiries showed that the two suicide bombers involved in the Mike’s Place attack, both British nationals, had actually been hosted by ISM. "For us," says the Foreign Ministry’s Information Chief Gideon Meir, "that was the turning point." Defying army bulldozers was one thing; providing cover for suicide bombers to slip into the country quite another.[...]