JERUSALEM — Jack Angelides was about to board a flight out of Israel’s international airport when he was given a curious choice. Traveling with a laptop and a stack of printed reading material, he was told to part with one or the other, due to unspecified security concerns.
The Israel-based British-Cypriot businessman said he negotiated a compromise in which he kept the computer and several pages, checking in the rest of the documents.
“It was a very unpleasant, very uncomfortable” experience, said Angelides, the general manager of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv.
While standing in long lines, walking through scanners and removing belts and shoes are a fact of post-Sept. 11 travel worldwide, Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport seems to stand alone in the developed world with its security techniques, often leaving travelers dumbfounded.
Though Israel denies profiling travelers, business executives, journalists and especially Arabs and visitors to Palestinian areas seem prone to being targeted with aggressive questioning, long luggage examinations and strip searches.
The tough security is not new, but it is stirring debate. On one side stands those concerned about Israel’s good name, tourism potential and moral standing. On the other are those for whom security arguments can seem close to sacrosanct in a country hit with decades of attacks by Palestinian militants.
Aryeh Shaham, the Airports Authority’s legal adviser, told a parliamentary hearing that there is no ethnic profiling at the airport.
“The inspection is not done according to population groups,” Shaham said. Instead, it is done according to criteria set by security officials “and I can’t disclose those.”
In response to e-mailed questions, the Airports Authority said its inspection process is “anchored” in Israeli and international law.
But it acknowledged that with 20 million people traveling through the airport, “there are extraordinary events that we regret.” And it is not clear whether terrorists have ever been caught as a result of the airport interrogations.
