In prison you will receive access to a computer so that you can document your struggle in full detail. If you do not have a Twitter account, one will be provided for you. You will be given a chance to pose for photos in prison. Be sure to grip the bars tightly and put on your best defiant look – one that will impress committed activists back home.
After an hour in prison you will be driven to the airport, where you will be given another 15 minutes to protest your deportation and confer with journalists. Then you will be put on a plane and sent home to whatever suburb you came from. Your boat will either be sunk to the bottom of the ocean or used to transport the next group of protest tourists, depending on how badly it smells.
The Edward Said Extravaganza: You are a mature thinker. Not only do you know the difference between the International Secretariat of the Fourth Communist International and the International Committee of the Fourth Communist International, but you also know why both are wrong and you are right. Israel is despised both as a tool of the capitalist fascist colonialist vanguard and because it is a bridge with the workers and peasants of the Islamic world who are the best hope for bringing down the system.
The first-class flight arrives on schedule, after a brief hijacking. As befits your intellectual stature, the hijackers allow you to draw up their political program for them. It should be no fewer than 100 pages and should incorporate as many references to people of color, dialectical materialism and the military-industrial complex as you can fit in. Ten minutes before landing the hijackers will be disarmed, but this will not affect you in any way as you are an intellectual and above the fray. Nor will you be expected to participate in any of the fisticuffs.
On the ground, you will begin by visiting Israeli left-wing NGOs, whose officials will ask you to help fund their work of bringing down the Zionist state, before being driven to help local Arabs bring in the olive harvest. Their olives are located on an Israeli farmer’s land. You will be encouraged to help vandalize his farm equipment and vineyards. Eventually you will discover there are no actual olives. But symbolic olives will be provided for you to hold up.
Next you will be taken to the separation wall. You will be provided with stones to throw at Israeli soldiers and while you will be too far away to actually hit them, the photo will look brilliant on the cover of Newsweek.
A can of spray paint will also be provided for you to draw pictures or slogans on the wall. In the unlikely case a deep intellectual like you cannot think of a slogan, something about “apartheid” will do.
Following this you will participate in a seminar at Birzeit University on the “Arab Spring.” Study up carefully; many of Birzeit’s faculty are graduates of Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow and are up on all the latest twists and turns in Marxism-Leninism. PA President Abbas, another graduate, may stop by and consult with you on his updated thesis of how to run a fake terrorist state entirely on foreign aid.
Finally you will be driven to Amos Oz’s house, where the cranky writer will expostulate at length on Israel’s immoral occupation and on how much he hates the settlers.
At that point it’s back to the airport. While waiting in the airport lounge, you may be able to turn your thoughts into an essay for The New Yorker.
Just because people hate a country doesn’t mean a tourism package can’t be developed for them.
Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli-born artist, writer and freelance commentator on political affairs with a special focus on Jewish concerns and the War on Terror. He maintains a blog at www.sultanknish.blogspot.com, where a version of this article first appeared.