Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said Sunday she will go ahead with the ‘’Tel Aviv on the Seine’’ event next Thursday, a ‘’beach’’ party in the French capital featuring paddle ball games and backgammon, falafel and Israeli music.

As they have been every summer for the past 13 years, the banks of the Seine are turned into sandy beaches for the benefit of the Parisians who stay in town during the annual holidays and the tourists who pack the city.

This year organizers chose to give the event an international dimension.

The idea of such a day featuring Tel Aviv's beaches in Paris came after a visit of Hildago in Tel Aviv last May and her meeting with her Israeli counterpart Ron Huldai.

But anti-Israeli activists linked to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) reacted strongly against the Paris decision. Some of them are planning protests against the event.

"A year after Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, less than a month after the Knesset's decision to pass a law force-feeding prisoners, and a week after the burning of the Dawabshe family in Duma in the occupied West Bank - the penetration of the Tel Aviv beach in Paris is a real provocation," BDS France said in a statement.

Calling on residents to demand a cancellation of the event by flooding Paris's city hall with emails and telephone calls, BDS France claimed that "Tel Aviv is a not like other cities. It was built on the ruins of seven Palestinian villages."

Undeterred by the backlash, the Israeli Embassy in Paris has continued promoting the event, which producers said will "give Parisians and tourists the opportunity to experience Tel Aviv without traveling out of town.

The umbrella representative group of French Jewish organisations (CRIF) issued a statement in support of the city’s initiative, calling for "the silencing of all those supposedly anti-Zionists, among them elected officials, whose words have, in fact, anti-Semitic overtones."

The organizers stressed that ‘’if all the cities on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Middle East resembled Tel Aviv, the world would be a better place… Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, secular people, all enjoy the beaches of Tel Aviv together."

The Paris municipality, meanwhile, took a diplomatic stance, announcing its "promotion of its partnership with the city of Bethlehem," in an effort to mitigate the pressure of BDS supporters without canceling the event.