NEW YORK: Kristen Schurr had just come home with an Israeli deportation notice freshly stamped in her US passport — an unexpected souvenir of a trip that landed her in an Israeli prison after 10 days inside the besieged Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Schurr claimed that she was assaulted by Israeli soldiers, jailed for a week without charges and forced to fly home without most of her belongings, including filmed records of her experience with 150 Palestinians and nine fellow foreign “peace workers” who were holed up with little food or water inside the ancient basilica.

But she would very much like to go back, and in a news conference on Saturday she urged other Americans to follow her example.

Schurr, a 33-year-old doctoral student and self-described peace worker, is one of small minority of non-Arab Americans who have ardently embraced the Palestinian cause. She travelled to the West Bank two months ago under the auspices of the International Solidarity Movement, which organizes nonviolent protest actions against Israeli policies there.

Most of its members are Europeans, but Schurr’s predominately American contingent scored one of the movement’s biggest coups this month by sneaking into the church during the 39-day showdown between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen there.

To Israelis, these pro-Palestinian visitors are an irksome annoyance at best, and at worst a serious security risk, as officials contemplate the political consequences of European or American casualties in places that can quickly become free-fire zones. To Palestinians, though, they are enthusiastically welcomed as proof of international support.

In the United States, the homegrown Palestinian solidarity movement has had limited political impact so far, acknowledged Adam Shapiro, a movement leader who joined Schurr at the news conference Saturday. Public opinion polls show Americans overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, and in Congress pro-Israeli sentiment runs even higher.

Shapiro’s parents received death threats after he appeared in news broadcasts worldwide as a spokesman for the foreign activists who had joined Yasser Arafat in his blockaded Ramallah headquarters. His father, a math teacher, was fired last week from a part-time job at a private Jewish academy in what the family believed was a reprisal for his son’s political activity, he said.

But the publicity surrounding their recent endeavours has made it easier to recruit more Americans for solidarity missions to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, they say. In the past few weeks alone, they have recruited 30 new volunteers in Michigan, 50 in San Francisco, and 200 in New York, all of whom hope “to work against the occupation” in the Palestinian territories this summer, Shapiro said.

When the Manger Square standoff finally ended, the armed men inside the church-some from Palestinian Authority security forces, others from local militias-were expelled to Gaza and, for 13 whose ultimate fate still appears unclear, to Cyprus.

Five Americans in the group remain in Israeli custody in the Ramle prison outside de Tel Aviv, according to Israeli news reports and relatives and movement spokesmen here. Most were detained by the Israeli army in Bethlehem’s Manger Square on May 2, after they deliberately distracted troops there in a successful effort to allow Schurr and nine other colleagues sneak into the cordoned-off church with food.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service.