I’m too distracted to fall asleep. Everyone is quietly snoring. The sun rises ever so slowly and the wings of the plane rudely cut through the calmness of the clouds. It’s hard to believe that the intensity of the sun repeats itself with this beauty every day. That it’s not for this special day that led me to be on this flight, on my way to Barcelona. I guess my mind makes it negligible just to maintain every-day continuity. Can’t comprehend all of chaos theory at once.
So how did I get on this flight? Around 9 p.m. last night I found out that The Real News got an in-kind donation to send me to Barcelona to cover the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. By midnight I was packed up and by 2 am I was at the airport. Someone thought this tribunal was so important and had the kind of faith in my reporting that frankly makes me terrified.
Last month I took international friends to the airport. When internationals fly alone out of Israel, they get a “6” or a “5”. This number is a sticker you get on your passport and bags that helps the Israeli airport security evaluate your level of Zionism. “1” is awesome, “6” is you’re fucked. 1 is reserved for white Jewish Israelis, 2 is for white Jewish non-Israelis and friendly internationals, 3 is a suspicious Israeli or international, 4 is sometimes given to non-white Israelis, 5 is for Arab Israelis or questionable internationals, and 6 is for Palestinians, Muslims, and hostile internationals. Hostile is defined as not Zionist or suspected of questioning Zionism. Anything above a 3 means interrogation. Of course these are my definitions based on the people I’ve talked to who’ve gotten one of the six. I don’t know what the official language they use says.
In most airports they ask you the benign questions of “did you pack your own bag?” In Israel they try to find out how Zionist you are. If you’re an international who’s been here you’ve experienced the invasive questions about your love of Israel so you know it’s always better to bring along an Israeli for protection. My presence with them meant I answered all the questions for them and the fact that I grew up in a settlement landed them a 2- the best grade they could get as non citizens. We rehearsed for hours.
So I enter the line confident and on cloud number nine from excitement. After all, I’m going to Barcelona! To cover the Russell Tribunal! My Israeli-Palestinian roommate tells me he’ll wait while I answer the security lady’s questions. She sees I speak Hebrew, she asks if I packed my own bags and she gives me a “1” as expected. I’m white and I’m an Israeli, therefore I’m probably a Zionist. High from excitement and privilege I ask if my friend can come with me to the check-in. She says of course and asks for his ID. Her face changes.
Where it says the Jewish birthdate the line in his ID is blank. i.e. not Jewish. I.e. Palestinian.
–"you know this man?”
- “yes”
- “how?”
- “he’s my roommate”
- “where?”
- “Jaffa” (a mixed Israeli-Palestinian city)
- “wait here.”
She looks at his last name. It’s Christian, i.e. Arab. She disappears with our passports. The roommate looks at me and we both know what’s going to happen. When she comes back her smile is gone. She tears the “1” off my bags and angrily puts on a “3” as though to say “you didn’t tell me you have an Arab friend!” Her face says “don’t you see you’re fucking it all up for us?!”
She sends me to the “other” line where people get their bags carefully checked. All the black people are in this line, all the Arab-looking people and the non-Zionist internationals. At least they’re not pretending their racial profiling is random. As I wait in line the security manager looks me up and down. He looks confused. Everyone else is a person of colour. So he approaches me.
- “Where did you come from?”
- “Excuse me?”
- “To the airport, where did you come from? Where do you live?”
- “Tel Aviv – Jaffa”
- “And where did you grow up? When did you come to Israel?”
- “I grew up in Ariel [a West Bank settlement], I came to Israel in ’90/‘91”
- “OH! You’re from Ariel!”
He looks at the “3” sticker on my bag and shrugs. He motions the security lady and whispers something in her ear. The roommate – who was told he’s not allowed to come in after he was discovered as an Arab– looks on from a distance.
- “So you speak Hebrew?” the bag lady asks as she symbolically opens my bag and closes it with disinterest. The Nigerian lady beside me is having her bag checked with special sticks. Every item is laid out and questioned by three security “experts”.
- “I have family in Ariel,” the bag-checking lady tells me with a smile as she motions me to the next line.
- “You see what it means to have an Arab friend?” my roommate says and apologizes for the interrogation that’ll probably follow. I yell at him to never apologize for that again. This week is Israeli Apartheid Week. 40 Cities this year. The only analytical article in Ha’aretz was about a South African (white) anti-Apartheid activist who argued Israel’s bad but not apartheid-bad. For some reason all the white South African activists say it’s not so bad. All the black ones say its worse than they had ever imagined.
Update. Tarachansky responds to Avi, commenting:
Thanks so much for bringing this up. Although my roommate wasn’t traveling with me this time, and therefore wasn’t checked, he has a long history of being harassed and labelled all kinds of numbers at the Ben Gurion Airport.
The NYT would probably not print this account.
Worse yet, the NYT would interview an Israeli “security expert” who will go on record as claiming that Israel profiles behavior, not race or ethnicity or skin color, BEHAVIOR they’ll tell you. Others who haven’t updated their hasbara talking points will claim that “incidents like these are isolated” and that “he probably came across one racist security person, every country has a few bad apples”.
What Lia didn’t tell us is what happened after she was motioned to join the next line. What happened to her “Arab friend”? Was he stuck in the same line with all the undesirables? Did Lia stand up for him and argue with the “security person”, or did she wait until he finished getting his bags checked and the contents turned upside down, acquiescing to the institutionalized system of discrimination so long as she got a “1″?
That bit of the story is missing.
Lia, thanks for the update.
Here’s where I was coming from:
link to youtube.com
Please watch ’till the end.
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Lia, a great story and so very true. the separate, number coded lines at the airport illustrates a fundamental aspect of Israeli society that I’ve been harping on. It is one of the most self-segregated, cliquish societies in the world. People have always formed enclaves based on origin, religiosity, ethnicity, pedigree, ancestry and color – some of which were natural side-effects of the gathering into one small place of people from all over the globe. Much has been said about the heterogeneity of the people of Israel and the similarity to the American melting-pot. But the similarities are superficial. Instead of the walls and fences coming down over time, they get entrenched. Even as new walls are being built to separate one people from another, now further divided by opinion and outlook. If the Israelis could they would have probably put a special mark on bags of travelers to mark them for political lean. Leftists – bad. Rightists – good.
The scene you describe at the airport is poignant not for just the reality of it, or the theatrics of something that should be a relatively banal, straightforward happening, but also for the symbolic nature of it all. The jews spent all that time and effort and took all sorts of grief to escape the ghetto. Only to build ten new ones.
Thanks for the story. I just hope you didn’t let your passport too long out of sight. You know, it takes only 1/2 hour to get an expert copy……
I don’t get it. You ram multiculturalism down our throats, and when we attempt to preserve our “multi-cultures” by making sure our children, our shuls and our neighborhoods reproduce them — by making sure we have boundaries, borders, differences — you freak out and say it’s wrong. What do you want with this crazy making?! Are we all supposed to get married and mongrelize until there are no distinct cultures left? Why do Jews send their kids to private schools? Because they are “good”? Or because they will preserve and pass on Jewish culture, values and race loyalty? Or both?
bigbill,
No one is bitching about you, or anyone else, maintaining your own culture. Everyone does it, and they should, if it makes them happy and their lives worthwhile.
But the presumption that criticizing actions done by the members of that culture (1) automatically extends to everyone within it, (2) is not allowed because “X” happened to that culture over a 2,000 year period, as if only that history matters, and (3) that criticism means the criticizer should be ostracized from society because no criticism of Jews specifically is allowed…is no longer acceptable.
The world, especially the young world, is not going to take it. They want their communities to be marked by joyful participation, not war. Acceptance of The Other in the corral of life, not herding those who dont belong into pens where they can be harmed or eliminated.
You have to wonder if this kind of Judaism is worth preserving when people have to lock themselves up in ghettos to make sure no one can catch a glimpse of the outside world. Is the faith so weak?
bigbill, preserving culture is one thing; excluding others from normal civil rights because they look different is another. You could say that the jim Crow laws were there to enforce “boundaries, borders and differences” in an effort to prevent “black culture” infiltration into a white one. In the US, these were the epitome of racial segregation laws. That is why people look upon racial profiling with suspicion. The sad fact is that the extreme racial profiling practiced in Israel, where people are assigned color coded, numbered stickers based upon their looks, origins and even, as Lia pointed out – their ASSOCIATIONS – is, in truth, racism, not “multi-culturalism”. No one is forcing you – in an air port – to mingle with anyone not of your choosing, so what the heck are you talking about?
BTW, by your criterion, I’d have the right to be kept away, from say, an orthodox jewish male in an air port security line. maybe because i took offense at the way he dressed – or was suspicious of his behavior. maybe because cults make me fearful for my own safety, be it hare krishna or a chabadnick or a sick with a turban or a muslim with a scarf, or whatever I choose to consider potentially dangerous. But according to you excluding a strangely dressed, long bearded person who looks like Bin Laden to me is OK, right?
Yay! Another article that the Zionist trolls will avoid like the plague.
Alright, people. Discuss until your heart’s content.
Thanks, Lia. I hope you’ll share some of your impressions of the Russell Tribunal with us.
Thanks Lia, its revolting! I have been following the Russell tribunal in the last couple of days and i think that was great.
One of the Tribunal co-ordinators Frank Barat wrote:
Findings Russell Tribunal on Palestine-Barcelona session-March 2010
Russell Tribunal on Palestine finds EU states guilty of breaches of international and internal EU law
The first session of The Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RTP) has found European Union member States to be in Breach of International and internal European Union Law with respect to the protection of Palestinian human rights.
Full findings here:
link to russelltribunalonpalestine.org
The Russell Tribunal on Palestine calls on the European Union and on each of its member states to impose the necessary sanctions on its partner Israel through diplomatic, trade and cultural measures in order to end the impunity that it has enjoyed for decades. Should the EU lack the necessary courage to do so, the Tribunal counts on the citizens of Europe to bring the necessary pressure to bear on it by all appropriate means.
CONTACT – Russel Tribunal on Palestine Co-ordinator Frank Barat 0044 771 8998 695 russelltribunal@yahoo.co.uk
Ha ha, sorry, but I found myself thinking, “OK, where’s the bad part? Where’s the part that’s newsworthy?” Because this kind of thing is so absolutely typical. The sad part is, I’ve almost started to normalize it. I feel like Peter denying Jesus every time I have to go through one of those borders or airports and say (in effect), “Arab? What’s an Arab? I’m just a good little Christian tourist seeing all the bright white sights!”
Life is just a hell of a lot easier that way. :(
I have had poor treatment as a potential “terrorist” here in the good ‘ole USA – in both NY and North Carolina. I still remember the chemically treated swabs used to poke through my suitcase to find traces of bomb-making materials on my way back and forth from NY.
In Rome, Italy a security woman demanded to know where my grandparents where born after she looked at my “Semitic” features and decided I was a risk. She didn’t like my previous answer that I was born in the USA. She had then asked “where were your parents born?” After hearing Boston, she was really pissed.
And in Vancouver, B.C I was isolated in a holding area. My elderly friend was told “stay back!” when she tried to approach me to see what the trouble was. I was “suspicious.”
The in LaGuardia Airport in NY I was surrounded by a gang of immigration police and told not to move. They searched my bags and then one took my passport and disappeared with it for 25 minutes while I was stared at by everyone in the airport as a potential terrorist. I was told not to even move.
So my point is that it is not just Israel. It’s right here in the USA.
ISRAELI APARTHEID WEEK
I travel to Israel periodically. As a white Israeli passport holder, my experience is like Lia’s – privileged and essentially painless (although I can’t match the settler credentials). Yet, it’s always unpleasant. What is odd about it is that the tight-lipped unpleasantness of security is that it always happens when I am leaving Israel, never when I arrive there. My wife (a white, Jewish American) has the same impression. You would think that security would be far more concerned about admitting a bad guy into the country, and not about his departure.
This is not about airline security because then the intensity of the security check would be the same whether coming or going. It’s about expressing disapproval for Israelis and Jews living outside the hive.