Jerusalem Post - Stereotyping security

[buckthesystem]

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid...icle%2FShowFull

Rania Jubran is the first-ever Israeli Arab cadet, or diplomatic intern, in the Foreign Ministry, and she is also the daughter of Supreme Court Justice Salim Jubran. In mid-February, before boarding a flight to Barcelona, Jubran, 26, showed passenger security examiners at Ben-Gurion Airport her Foreign Ministry ID card, but it didn't help. They took her aside and told her to open her suitcases, which they tagged as a high security risk. Then the questioning got going in earnest.

"At that point I asked to clarify the matter with the security officer in charge," she wrote to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in a letter that found its way into Yediot Aharonot. "As a result, two senior security officers came over. I showed them my Foreign Ministry employee's card, but they ignored it and began asking me the same questions I was asked by the junior security officer. The questioning was inconsiderate, disrespectful and rude toward me as an Israeli citizen, and certainly as a Foreign Ministry employee."

It was only after Jubran contacted a Foreign Ministry official at the airport that she was allowed to board the plane. But then when her trip was over and she was about to get on a return flight to Ben-Gurion, overseas Israeli airport security officials put her through the same, or maybe even a little worse, ordeal. Taken aside again, she produced not only her Foreign Ministry ID, but her father's Supreme Court calling card as well.

"This only worsened the situation and increased the suspicions," she wrote in the letter. "The security officer began to interrogate me about my Foreign Ministry employee's card and about the location of the Foreign Ministry, as if I was pretending to be someone I wasn't."

At first the El Al security officer in charge would not allow Jubran to board the plane, but she finally convinced him that she presented no terrorist threat and was allowed to come home.

Jubran told me that the details in the story were accurate, but that the Foreign Ministry would not permit her to be interviewed about the incident.

There are countless other stories not only from Israeli Arabs, but also from non-Arab gentiles, and even from wildly pro-Israel Christian evangelists, about excessively suspicious, insensitive, humiliating treatment at the hands of Israeli airport security examiners.

Dr. Rajai Dajani, 68, a gynecologist in Jerusalem's Beit Hanina neighborhood, travels with his wife to Europe or North America about three times a year to see their children and grandchildren or take vacations, and each time the inspection of their bags at Ben-Gurion, and sometimes of their bodies as well, takes "a minimum of two hours," he says. "Once they nearly undressed my daughter completely; another time they made my wife take her bra off."

(Body checks, i.e. strip searches, at the airport are conducted in a closed room by security inspectors of the passenger's gender. Examiners can ask passengers to strip down as far as their undershorts or panties.)

"Some of the security people are very decent; the last time we traveled one of them spoke to us in Arabic and was very apologetic," Dajani continues. "But sometimes they're very nasty. Once I asked the examiner for a chair because a man of my age can't stand for two hours, and he said it wasn't his job to give me a chair. Another time my daughter was a nervous wreck after being examined, and I told them, 'This is no way to treat people,' and they told me if I didn't like it, I didn't have to fly."

Els van Diggele, 40, an Amsterdam author who lived and wrote here for a decade before returning home last year, describes herself as "the only non-evangelical Christian I know of who defends Israel," yet she had to endure nearly hour-long security examinations whenever she flew out of Ben-Gurion.

The examiners were never rude to her, van Diggele notes, describing them as "friendly in a businesslike way." But they typically went through every item in her bags. Once, she says, they made her read aloud from notes for a book she was writing. Another time they didn't allow her to take her laptop computer on board.

She recalls one of the inspections in which she had to take off her jewelry: "I couldn't get my ring off, maybe because I was so hot and miserable and tense, so I had to go over to a machine where they checked my ring while it was on my finger. I told them, 'This is going too far.' You can't imagine how relieved you feel when they finally let you go."

THESE SORTS of accounts from Ben-Gurion Airport are anything but new. The official response all along has invariably been to point out the grave terror threat this country faces, and to insist laconically that the questioning, baggage examinations and body checks of passengers are for security's sake alone, that there is no racism or xenophobia involved, that improvements in service are constantly being made, and that any passenger complaints of maltreatment are thoroughly investigated.

In recent months, however, the controversy has come to the surface as several highly reputable, thoroughly peaceable Israeli Arabs have gone public with charges of being harassed at the airport. Labor MK Nadia Hilou, who says she and her family went through an experience at Ben-Gurion about a year ago that she "won't forget," is pressing Knesset, security and airport officials to change the examination policy.

The liberal New Israel Fund has been doing the same, spurred by the treatment suffered at the airport over the last year by several of its Israeli Arab activists. Machsom Watch, whose members monitor IDF treatment of Palestinians at West Bank checkpoints, is after the Israel Airports Authority to allow it to post a monitor at Ben-Gurion's security stations - a request that was turned down, but which Machsom Watch hasn't dropped.

In December, two Israeli Arab organizations, the Arab Association for Human Rights and the Center Against Racism, published a study about the treatment of Israeli Arab passengers by airport authorities, describing it as "racial profiling" accompanied by frequently degrading treatment. "This offensive practice accentuates the sense of discrimination felt by Arab citizens, reinforcing their feeling that they are considered second-class citizens by the state," the report concluded.

THERE IS no arguing that security officials scrutinize Arabs, including Israeli Arabs, much more carefully than they do Jews. Less risky than Arabs but riskier than Jews, in the eyes of security, are non-Arab gentile passengers. An airport official admitted as much to me off-the-record, while "Jackie," a former airport security examiner, states plainly that this is the policy.

"Ultimately, it's a question of [ascertaining a passenger's] loyalty to Israel," says Jackie, who worked at Atarot, Ben-Gurion and Eilat airports as well as Israeli airline terminals abroad for a few years during the last decade. "A Jew would only be coming here because he loves Israel, and he wouldn't commit a terrorist act. You can't make that same assumption about Israeli Arabs or non-Jews."

He adds, however, that according to policy, an Israeli Arab who's served in the IDF is considered no higher a security risk than a Jew. Furthermore, he says, the level of suspicion - and thus the rigor of the airport examination - varies according to the individual Arab or gentile, with the greatest suspicion falling on males between their late teens and mid-30s who are traveling alone. And even if security examiners become satisfied that an Arab or gentile is not himself a terrorist, they have to determine if his bags might have been tampered with by a terrorist without his knowledge.

This second line of questioning is also put to Jewish passengers, and answers that sound fishy, or unidentifiable objects in a suitcase that turn up on the X-ray, will likely mean further questioning of a Jewish passenger and inspection of the contents of his bag - but Jewish passengers go through this much, much less frequently than do Arabs and gentiles.

Jackie thinks the ethnic profiling system, with all the purely personal profiling it also entails, is legitimate and necessary because it accurately reflects the demographics of anti-Israeli terror. Making everyone go through the same examination, regardless of whether they're Jewish, Arab or non-Arab gentile, would make Israeli air travel prohibitively slow and expensive, he says, and also would be illogical from a security standpoint.

(for rest of article go to link)