Palestinian Americans warned of security profiling at B-G Airport

Haaretz 08:28 20.03.2008
By Haaretz Service and News Agencies

Authorities may question Palestinian Americans on arrival in Israel and require them to obtain a Palestinian Authority travel documents, the U.S. State Department said on Wednesday. Israel's airline security also faced a legal challenge Wednesday from a civil rights group charging that its practice of ethnic profiling is racist because it singles out Arabs for tougher treatment, and Arab American groups slammed the government's travel warning as condoning Israel's policies. "American citizens whom Israeli authorities judge may be of Palestinian origin are likely to face additional, and often time consuming, questioning by immigration and border authorities," the State Department said in a travel warning to U.S. citizens.

It added that Israel may require persons judged to have residency status in the West Bank or Gaza to use a Palestinian Authority travel document to transit Israel when entering the West Bank or Gaza, and they may have to depart via the Allenby Bridge to Jordan. James Zogby, president of Washington's Arab American Institute, said the State Department had accurately diagnosed the problem for Palestinian Americans traveling to Israel but had not done enough correct it. At a Supreme Court hearing, civil rights lawyers demanded an end to Israel's airport racial profiling policy, which they say violates Israeli law. Racial profiling is illegal in the U.S., where passengers must be singled out for security checks on a random basis. But some terrorism experts say Israel's measures are effective precisely because they take ethnicity into account - and warn that equality at the airport could cost lives. Israel is considered a prime target for hijackers and other attackers because of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and extremist Islamic rejection of the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Despite that, there hasn't been a successful attack on an Israeli airliner in decades, and experts point to Israel's security procedures as a key factor. Many of the measures are kept secret, but known precautions on Israeli airliners include armored luggage compartments, armed sky marshals and reinforced cockpits. But a key to preventing attacks, experts say, is the screening process on the ground, and that is the focus of the civil rights complaint. Israeli Jews and Arabs get dramatically different treatment when boarding Israeli planes, as anyone who's ever stood in line at Israel's Ben-Gurion International Airport has seen. Hanna Swaid, an Israeli Arab, remembers being strip-searched by gruff security guards and having his luggage taken apart piece by piece 20 years ago before he flew from Israel to London, where he was a post-doctoral student. Today Swaid is an Israeli Arab lawmaker, and he regularly receives complaints from Arab citizens about similar treatment. Swaid said last year a relative, a 25-year-old computer programmer, was not allowed to take his cell phone on a domestic flight, even though Jewish passengers were. He also said he knows of cases in which Arabs who serve in Israel's police or military have been singled out for extra scrutiny. But the court appeal by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel - and any public debate of the policy - are hobbled by the government's refusal to discuss any of the policy's details. In court, the government's attorneys would not reveal the screening criteria or admit that ethnicity was one of them. They agreed to divulge the information only in a closed session that excluded everyone but the judges and themselves. Representatives of Israel's Transport Ministry, Ben-Gurion Airport and the Israel Airports Authority said Wednesday they would not comment before the end of legal proceedings. The next hearing is scheduled for May, and any decision in the case is at least months away. Swaid says he understands the need for security checks. "It's in my interest and that of all the other travelers," he said. "But the screening should be done equally for both Arabs and Jews and be done politely," he said, rather than the humiliating treatment commonplace today. "In what's known as the profiling process, any Arab is seen as a threat, and it's not a good feeling for an Arab to pass through the airport with this tag of being a suspect," he said. "You have to check people, but you have to do it equally and with respect." Swaid said Israel should adopt a model closer to the U.S. policy that bars ethnic profiling and instead relies on random checks and screening based on country of origin. He is now drafting legislation that would change the current policy. Proponents of Israel's approach say checking all passengers equally would require manpower and resources many times greater than are needed today and would needlessly extend the time passengers spend waiting for flights. Ariel Merari, an Israeli terrorism expert who has written about aviation security, said ethnic profiling is both effective and unavoidable. Israeli security personnel must learn to be more courteous, he said, but there is no denying that the policy has played a central role in Israel's enviable record: The only time an El Al airplane was hijacked was in 1968, and the last time hijackers succeeded in boarding one of its planes was in 1970. Then the hijackers, a Palestinian woman and a Nicaraguan, were foiled by sky marshals, an innovation at the time. "It's foolishness not to use profiles when you know that most terrorists come from certain ethnic groups and certain age groups," he said. A bomber on a plane is likely to be Muslim and young, not an elderly Holocaust survivor. We're talking about preventing a lot of casualties, and that justifies inconveniencing a certain ethnic group