A civil rights group is challenging Israel's highly effective airport security practices, charging that they amount to racial profiling that singles out Arabs for tougher treatment.
At a Supreme Court hearing on Wednesday, civil rights lawyers demanded an end to the policy. Such profiling is illegal in the US, where passengers must be singled out for security checks on a random basis.
But some terrorism experts say Israel's measures work 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 has 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. He 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 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.
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.
Swaid said Israel should adopt a model closer to the US 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.
But since the devastating attacks in the US on Sept. 11, 2001, it's largely been the other way around: The US has followed Israel's lead in many aspects of airport security, and a number of major US airports have imported Israeli experts and advisers.
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
At first, Francis Ari Sture thought a human was trying to shove him down the steep Norwegian mountainside. Then he saw the golden eagle land. “We are staring at each other for, maybe, a whole minute,” Sture said on Monday. “I’m trying to think what’s in its mind.” The bird then attacked Sture five more times on Thursday last week, scratching and clawing the 31-year-old bicycle courier’s face and arms over 10 to 15 minutes as he sprinted down the mountain. The same eagle is believed to be responsible for attacks on three other people across a vast mountainous area of southern Norway
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
RSS