CAPJPO-EuroPalestine—As indignant as many people in France and abroad were when they heard about the scheduled Israeli Tourism Fair in this great Parisian hotel, the management has decided to cancel the event, which was supposed to open on January 15.
The hotel’s management, as the Paris police prefecture has confirmed to us, has indicated that it has disinvited the 50 Israeli exhibitors who had planned to present their tourism products.
We profoundly appreciate all the individuals and associations in France and abroad that made the effort to communicate their arguments to the hotel management. These arguments were certainly considered in the decision to cancel the event. We also thank the hotel's management for this decision, and we stress that basic ethical rules should guide commercial relations and all other interactions.
As long as Israel makes martyrs of an entire people to annex their lands, defying all international conventions as well as the most fundamental human rights, we must avoid any acts that would turn us into accomplices.
Holding an Israeli tourism fare would have been especially obscene while the Israeli army continues its massacres in the Gaza Strip. But it is the web of relations and collaboration with Israel that we have the moral duty to freeze as long as there is a continuation of the occupation and enslavement of a whole people deprived of liberty for more than 60 years.
Together, we have not only the duty but also the power to reject the impunity enjoyed for so long by Israeli state terrorism. Impunity, which encourages it to increase the violence carried out against Palestinian men, women and children and to multiply, here in France, provocative actions such as the benefit galas for the Israeli army and the attacks by the thugs of Betar or the JDL (Jewish Defence League) who last week wounded two students of the Janson de Sailly high school.
Please stay mobilized ! At the present time we are publishing information almost by the hour on our site http://www.europalestine.com. That is how we announced the entry, yesterday, into Gaza of a surgical mission led by Prof. Christophe Oberlin, and we praise the courage of the French, Greek, German and Egyptian specialists who have broken the siege in order to aid the wounded.
Have a look at the short video on our site showing the big demonstration for Gaza that gathered 100,000 people in Paris streets last Saturday. http://www.europalestine.com/article.php3?id_article=3620