21 April 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
Two Israeli Arab brothers
have won $8,000 in damages from
Israel’s
national carrier, El Al, after a court found that
their treatment by the company’s security staff at a
New York airport had been “abusive and unnecessary”.
Abdel Wahab and Abdel Aziz
Shalabi were assigned a
female security guard
who watched over them at the airport’s departure gate
for nearly two hours, in full view of hundreds of
fellow passengers, after they had passed the security
and baggage checks.
Later, El Al’s head of
security threatened to bar Abdel Wahab, 43, from the
flight if he did not apologise to the guard for going
to the toilet without first getting her approval.
Abdel Aziz said he had been humiliated and “cried like
I’ve never cried before in public”.
Although surveys of Arab
citizens, who comprise one-fifth of Israel’s
population, show that most have suffered degrading
treatment when flying with Israeli carriers, few bring
cases to the Israeli courts.
The brothers are now
planning to sue El Al and its
New York staff
in the United States over Israel’s racial profiling of
passengers in a country where the practice is
illegal.
“I’d rather go to
New York by
donkey than fly with El Al again,” said Abdel Aziz,
44. “We will keep fighting this case until Israel is
embarrassed into stopping its policy of discriminating
against its Arab citizens.”
The brothers, who live in
northern Israel,
were the only Arabs in a party of 17 Israeli insurance
agents on a two-week business trip to Canada and New
York in 2007.
They arrived four hours
early at
John F Kennedy airport
in New York for their return flight with Israir, an
Israeli charter company, to allow time for the
additional checks they expected from El Al’s security
staff.
El Al has special
agreements with most countries’ airports to carry out
its own security checks for passengers flying with
Israeli airlines.
The brothers said they were
questioned, searched and had to wait two hours while
their bags and carry-on luggage were subjected to
lengthy inspections.
“The Jews with us went
through in minutes,” said Abdel Aziz, in his home in
the village of Iksal, near Nazareth. “The difference
in treatment was very clear.”
After they had passed the
checks, an El Al security guard, Keren Weinberg, was
assigned to them until they boarded the plane. They
were told to make sure she could see them at all
times.
When Abdel Wahab visited a
toilet without her permission, a noisy argument broke
out between the two, with Ms Weinberg accusing him of
“roaming freely”. He said he told her to “either
arrest me or go away”.
Ilan
Or, the head of El Al security, was then called and
issued him an ultimatum that he apologise or be
prevented from catching the flight.
Abdul Wahab
told a magistrate’s court in
Haifa this
month that he broke down in tears and finally said he
was sorry.
“I was in shock. One minute
I was made to feel like a terrorist and then the next
like a naughty child,” he said.
Judge Amir Toubi said the
security staff had admitted that neither brother was
deemed a security threat and that Israeli law did not
allow checks to continue after passengers had passed
the security area.
“With all due understanding
of security needs, there is no justification for
ignoring the dignity, freedom and basic rights of a
citizen under the mantle of the sacred cow of
security,” the judge ruled.
El Al told the court that
it had been “asked by the state to conduct security
checks abroad on behalf of [charter companies] Arkia
and
Israir airlines,
and is acting under the security guidelines set by
official bodies of the state.”
Abdul Wahab praised the
court’s decision but said the damages were minor and
would not act as a deterrent against El Al repeating
such behaviour in future. He said the brothers would
appeal to a higher court in Israel and were planning
to initiate a legal action in New York, too.
“I will not rest until we
get an apology from El Al and they acknowledge that
what they did is wrong,” he said. He called on all
Arab citizens to boycott El Al until it committed to
stop its discriminatory policy.
A 2007 report on racial
profiling by Israeli carriers, published by the Arab
Association for Human Rights and the Centre Against
Racism, concluded: “This phenomenon is so widespread
that it is hard to find any Arab citizen who travels
abroad by air and who has not experienced a
discriminatory security check at least once.”
The two groups found that
Arab and Muslim passengers typically faced long
interrogations and extensive luggage searches, and
were also regularly subjected to body and strip
searches, had items including computers confiscated,
were kept in holding areas and were escorted directly
on to the plane.
The report noted that
foreign countries that allowed Israel to carry out its
own security checks at their airports failed to
supervise them and preferred to “ignore their
discriminatory nature and the human rights violations
committed on their own soil”.
New York’s JFK airport was
one of the airports that refused to answer questions
from the groups about incidents of discriminatory
treatment of Arabs and Muslims.
Israel has also come under
harsh criticism for the standard racial profiling
policies it uses against its own Arab citizens and
foreign
Arab nationals
at Ben Gurion airport near
Tel Aviv.
The practice of putting
different colour-coded stickers on Jewish and Arab
passengers’ luggage ended three years ago. However,
airport guards still write a number on uniform white
stickers indicating the level of security threat.
Critics say higher numbers are reserved for non-Jews.
Faced with a lawsuit from
Israeli human rights
groups,
Menachem Mazuz,
the attorney general at the time, instructed the
airports authority
in early 2008 to implement “visible equality” by
ending discriminatory screening policies.
However, observers have
noticed no change in practice. “This was a very
cynical exercise. ‘Visible equality’ simply means
making it look like there’s equality when the
inequality persists,” said Mohammed Zeidan, director
of the Association for Human Rights, based in
Nazareth.
In December an airport
official told the right-wing
Jerusalem Post
newspaper: “Profiling makes the biggest difference. A
man with the name of Umar flying out of Tel Aviv,
whether he is American or British, is going to get
checked seven times.”
Two years ago Israel’s
racial profiling policy made headlines when a member
of an American dance troupe with a Muslim-sounding
name was forced to dance at the airport to prove he
was who he claimed.
The incident with the
Shalabi brothers follows on the heels of a diplomatic
crisis between Israel and
South Africa
over revelations that spies posing as El Al staff have
been operating at Johannesburg airport, gathering
information on non-Jewish passengers visiting Israel.
El Al has threatened to
close the route after South African officials stopped
providing the airport guards with diplomatic immunity.
South African TV reported
last month that two of the Mossad assassins suspected
of killing a Hamas commander in
Dubai in
January may have used Johannesburg airport to fly back
to Israel.
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are “Israel and the
Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran
and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East”
(Pluto
Press) and
“Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair” (Zed Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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