On the afternoon that I flew from Israel to Germany this week, for instance, one security guard ran a computer check on my Palestinian cabby’s identity card, then interrogated him for 10 minutes in a private office. Another rifled through the car’s interior, opened my luggage, and used mirrors attached to the end of six-foot poles to check the car’s underside for hidden bombs.
The security checks don’t end at the airport’s entrance. Pistol-packing in-flight guards travel on every flight of national carrier El Al. Every passenger is checked through Interpol for a criminal record before he boards the flight. Plainclothes guards wearing loose-fitting jackets covering bulging holsters patrol airport buildings. Inside the departure terminal, young uniformed inspectors question every passenger, checking for inconsistencies in stories and using a “profiling” system that pays special attention to Christians and Arabs. As an American Jew, I’m usually treated with courtesy initially-until the inspectors leaf through my passport and notice the entry stamps from such Middle Eastern countries as Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco, which I’ve visited as a journalist. In my case, the grilling process can sometimes last 45 minutes, with detailed questions from two or three inspectors about the reasons for my visits, the people I met, where I stayed and whether I accepted any gifts. Several times I’ve had to switch on my laptop computer and Palm Pilot and show them my past and future itineraries; other passengers I’ve talked to have been made to telephone friends and relatives in Israel to verify their stories.
Israelis have always felt a special proximity to terror, but during the past year, more than two dozen suicide bombings and dozens more failed attempts have pushed anxiety to their highest level in decades. Eighty percent of Israelis feel they’re vulnerable to terrorist attacks, according to recent survey by the University of Haifa’s National Security Studies Center. That sense of insecurity has given rise to a raft of self-protective measures that, until last week, would be unthinkable to most Americans.
Security guards stand at the entrances to shopping malls, parking garages, office buildings, movie theaters, discotheques, fast-food restaurants, even public beaches. Soldiers carrying Uzi submachine guns patrol intersections and popular outdoor gathering spots. Airports and bus terminals can be emptied out at the slightest report of potential trouble. Many Israelis have also developed self-preservation instincts that Americans may soon have to consider: changing their driving habits, avoiding public gathering places and being on a constant lookout for suspicious objects like unattended packages.
Those habits aren’t frivolous: during the past year, the newspapers have been filled with reports of ordinary citizens averting potential tragedies through sharp-eyed attention to the abnormal. In July, for example, a bus driver noticed a watermelon stuffed inside a plastic bag and tied to a seat in the rear of his bus. Hidden inside the hollowed-out fruit, he discovered, was a 15-pound bomb. The driver managed to clear the bus and call in the bomb squad before it detonated. A week later, a young Palestinian woman attempted to blow up Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station by hiding a 10-pound bomb packed with nails and screws inside a box of laundry detergent: an alert security guard at the entrance challenged her, causing her to fling the box at him and flee. (The bomb didn’t go off, and she was arrested). Other explosives have been found hidden inside garbage bags, backpacks, even beer cans.
For an American who moved to Jerusalem at the height of the intifada nine months ago, the security measures I confronted in daily life were a rude and unpleasant shock. The first time I went shopping for groceries at a big new supermarket in my neighborhood, I was forced to submit to a search of my knapsack and a full body check by a handheld metal detector. It all felt undignified and unnecessary. The same process greeted me at the entrance to the Cineplex at the Jerusalem Mall, the new Ikea in the coastal city of Netanya, even the McDonald’s just off Jerusalem’s renowned Jaffa Road.
Now, however, I breathe a sigh of relief at every such search and frisk, the result of nearly a year spent living in a place where the still of the morning has been shattered too many times by the screams of ambulance sirens converging on the latest suicide bomb blast.
Like many Israelis, I’ve even begun to pay close attention to the quality of these searches and avoid those places where the security measures seem haphazard. I began to stay away from the Jerusalem Mall, for instance, after noticing that the entrance guards, most of them elderly, were conducting only the most perfunctory checks of people’s belongings. Several weeks later, the Jerusalem Post published a report exposing the mall’s potential dangers: over several months the police had tested the mall’s security by attempting to smuggle in bombs and weapons-and had succeeded more than 80 percent of the time. Now that mall is off-limits to my family and to almost all of the Israelis I know, as well. Until 11 days ago, most Americans surely viewed such preoccupations as something utterly foreign to their lives. But in this new age of anxiety, they may soon become all too familiar.
