Considerations

JERUSALEM — The Toronto Star won­ders whether North Amer­i­can air­ports should be “Israeli­fied” to make it eas­ier for passengers:

“It is mind­bog­gling for us Israelis to look at what hap­pens in North Amer­ica, because we went through this 50 years ago,” said Rafi Sela, the pres­i­dent of AR Chal­lenges, a global trans­porta­tion secu­rity con­sul­tancy. He’s worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and air­ports around the world.

“Israelis, unlike Cana­di­ans and Amer­i­cans, don’t take s— from any­body. When the secu­rity agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten secu­rity and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 min­utes, all hell broke loose here. We said, ‘We’re not going to do this. You’re going to find a way that will take care of secu­rity with­out touch­ing the effi­ciency of the airport.”

That, in a nut­shell is “Israeli­fi­ca­tion” — a sys­tem that pro­tects life and limb with­out annoy­ing you to death.

When­ever I travel to the United States, I always hate going through Amer­i­can secu­rity because of one thing: tak­ing off my shoes. As I tell my friends and fam­ily: “If Israeli secu­rity doesn’t make you do some­thing, then you don’t need to either! They know what they’re doing.”

And Israel does. Ben-Gurion Inter­na­tional Air­port has not had a secu­rity breach since 2002, accord­ing to the arti­cle. That last one in the United States was, well… Fri­day.

Despite fac­ing dozens of poten­tial threats each day, the secu­rity set-up at Israel’s largest hub, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Air­port, has not been breached since 2002, when a pas­sen­ger mis­tak­enly car­ried a hand­gun onto a flight. How do they man­age that?

“The first thing you do is to look at who is com­ing into your air­port,” said Sela.

The first layer of actual secu­rity that greets trav­ellers at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Inter­na­tional Air­port is a road­side check. All dri­vers are stopped and asked two ques­tions: How are you? Where are you com­ing from?

This is true. When­ever I tell the secu­rity guard at the check­point out­side of the air­port that I am com­ing from “Ris­hon Lezion” or “Jerusalem,” they always wave me past because of my Amer­i­can accent. Although, a Israeli friend of mine who works in the air­line indus­try told me that at this point, there are far­away snipers with guns pointed at your car at this point as well. I try not to remem­ber that.

Offi­cers are look­ing for ner­vous­ness or other signs of “dis­tress” — behav­ioural pro­fil­ing. Sela rejects the argu­ment that pro­fil­ing is discriminatory.

“The word ‘pro­fil­ing’ is a polit­i­cal inven­tion by peo­ple who don’t want to do secu­rity,” he said. “To us, it doesn’t mat­ter if he’s black, white, young or old. It’s just his behav­iour. So what kind of pri­vacy am I really step­ping on when I’m doing this?”

Once you’ve parked your car or got­ten off your bus, you pass through the sec­ond and third secu­rity perimeters.

Armed guards out­side the ter­mi­nal are trained to observe pas­sen­gers as they move toward the doors, again look­ing for odd behav­iour. At Ben Gurion’s half-dozen entrances, another layer of secu­rity are watch­ing. At this point, some trav­ellers will be ran­domly taken aside, and their per­son and their lug­gage run through a magnometer.

Nearly every time that I travel to the United States alone, I am stopped by another guard out­side of the air­port entrance and asked for my pass­port. I pre­sume it is because I am a sin­gle male who does not look like a busi­ness trav­eler (still, no one wears suits here, anyway).

You are now in the ter­mi­nal. As you approach your air­line check-in desk, a trained inter­viewer takes your pass­port and ticket. They ask a series of ques­tions: Who packed your lug­gage? Has it left your side?

“The whole time, they are look­ing into your eyes — which is very embar­rass­ing. But this is one of the ways they fig­ure out if you are sus­pi­cious or not. It takes 20, 25 sec­onds,” said Sela.

The thing that most tourists find dif­fer­ent about the level of inter­ro­ga­tion that occurs before they even approach the ticket counter: “Why are you fly­ing to Israel? What are you going to do? Who are you stay­ing with? Are you Jew­ish? Where do you go to syn­a­gogue? How many can­dles are in a hanukia [meno­rah]? What do you do on Yom Kippur?”

But the inter­view­ers do not care about your answers. (Well, usu­ally. I’ve heard sto­ries about non-Jews — Arabs and Chris­t­ian tourists — auto­mat­i­cally get­ting higher degrees of ques­tion­ing and search­ing, but I’ve never wit­nessed it myself.) They are look­ing at your body lan­guage to see if you are lying. The entire process seems to oper­ate much better:

“First, it’s fast — there’s almost no line. That’s because they’re not look­ing for liq­uids, they’re not look­ing at your shoes. They’re not look­ing for every­thing they look for in North Amer­ica. They just look at you,” said Sela. “Even today with the height­ened secu­rity in North Amer­ica, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes … and that’s how you fig­ure out the bad guys from the good guys.”

That’s the process — six lay­ers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the park­ing lot to the air­port lounge in a max­i­mum of 25 minutes.

Not count­ing pass­port con­trol, of course. And the lines are usu­ally a bit longer than twenty-five min­utes. But although such a secu­rity oper­a­tion seems more log­i­cal, I doubt it will change any­time soon:

“Do you know why Israelis are so calm? We have bru­tal ter­ror attacks on our civil­ians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The rea­son is that peo­ple trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the secu­rity agen­cies. They know they’re doing a good job. You can’t say the same thing about Amer­i­cans and Cana­di­ans. They don’t trust any­body,” Sela said. “But they say, ‘So far, so good’. Then if some­thing hap­pens, all hell breaks loose and you’ve spent eight hours in an air­port. Which is ridicu­lous. Not justifiable.

Amer­i­cans indeed do not trust the Trans­porta­tion Secu­rity Admin­is­tra­tion employ­ees. I can­not count the num­ber of times that I’ve seen a luggage-screener stare blankly at the tele­vi­sion screen, just count­ing the sec­onds until his next break. Since the jobs are likely close to min­i­mum wage, they barely care about their work. And it shows.

Israeli secu­rity, on the other hand, is blunt, effi­cient, and effec­tive. Nearly all of them are in the mil­i­tary or work­ing their directly after fin­ish­ing their post-high school, manda­tory ser­vice. All have expert train­ing in intel­li­gence, behav­ior pro­fil­ing, and such related fields. I doubt the aver­age TSA employee has any­thing close to that level of edu­ca­tion. To revamp air­port secu­rity in any­thing resem­bling that of Israel’s air­port, it would take an entire over­haul of the TSA.

“But, what can you do? Amer­i­cans and Cana­di­ans are nice peo­ple and they will do any­thing because they were told to do so and because they don’t know any different.”

I laughed. That’s such an Israeli attitude.

Else­where: The Jerusalem Post looks at the issue as well.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sul­li­van)

Now Avail­able: E-Book down­load: “Let­ters from Israel: An Amer­i­can journalist’s adven­tures in the Holy Land.”

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