Ask the pilot

Should America emulate Israel's crack air security? Only if we want to turn ourselves into a full-blown police state.

By Patrick Smith

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June 9, 2006 | What's left to say about airport security that hasn't been thrashed, mashed and rehashed in this column 10 times over? More than it may seem, perhaps. In an age when matters of safety have, to great chagrin, become the heart and soul of the American consciousness, few topics are more bottomlessly exasperating and, by the same token, worthy of careful and repeated analysis. Whether picking apart the follies of our beleaguered Transportation Safety Administration, or taking on the reactionary fear-mongering of Annie Jacobsen, it's a dirty job that requires, if nothing else, tenacity.

Isn't that a splendid disclaimer? It popped to mind as I sat aboard a Jordanian bus, preparing to cross the border from Jordan into Israel at the Allenby Bridge, east of Jerusalem. At such a peculiar ground zero of geopolitical tension, the subject felt ripe for another tour.

Between Galilee and the Dead Sea, the border between Jordan and Israel is formed by what's left of the ancient Jordan River. In places, the snaking, heavily polluted waterway is 3 meters or less from bank to bank -- nearly thin enough to connect with a pair of outstretched arms. There's a frustrating irony, and maybe a certain poetry too, in the idea of so much unease being separated by little more than a reed-clogged creek. For an American tourist, traversing this narrow strip of demarcation can take two hours or more. If you're unlucky enough to be a Palestinian, it might be 12 hours. As a guard stamped my passport and waved me through, I saw throngs of Arabs corralled in a nearby waiting area. Soldiers rummaged through their belongings, swabbing for explosives. Ethnic profiling at its most unabashed.

The bridge crossing was an adventure, but it was the airport in Tel Aviv that I was most interested in seeing. Americans have a way of holding up the Israeli example of air security as the gold standard to which we are obliged to strive. Readers of this column certainly seem to think so. Our airports, letter writers consistently urge, need to be more like Israel's, and our airlines more like that country's impenetrable national carrier, El Al. To wit, not long after Sept. 11, Raphael "Rafi" Ron, retired security czar of Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International, was brought in to revamp procedures at Boston-Logan, departure point for both of the World Trade Center aircraft.

I'd been to Ben Gurion, which is named in honor of Israel's original prime minister, once before. My first-ever trip overseas, as a high school sophomore in 1982, brought me to Tel Aviv on an El Al 747 from New York. Memories are foggy, and in any case the airport has been completely rebuilt. Opened in 2004 at a cost of $1 billion, the central passenger complex, called Terminal 3, is the largest and most expensive aviation project in Israel's history. It is operated and managed by the Israel Airports Authority, a government administration that also runs land crossings like the one at Allenby Bridge. Terminal 3 is an impressive, four-story structure of glass and steel, attractively accented in desert tones. The spacious departure hall is somewhat reminiscent of Terminal One at New York's JFK.

Security? Yes, it's tight and it's everywhere, even before you step inside. Arriving by taxi, we were briefly detained at a roadway checkpoint well short of the terminal itself. Our driver, a Palestinian, was asked to show his identity card while an M-16-toting guard asked for passports. "Where are you coming from?"

"Jerusalem," the driver answered. This was half true. Indeed we'd set out from there, albeit with a stop along the way at Bethlehem, in the West Bank. Such detours, however innocuous, are best not divulged when hurrying to catch a flight at TLV.

Once you're in the building, a security agent has a look at your ticket, thumbs through your passport, and conducts a brief interview. The process isn't unlike the short, Lockerbie-induced Q-and-A debriefings one goes through at European airports, though for us, fresh from a neighboring Arab country, it entailed a mini-interrogation. Why we had chosen to visit Jordan? (To see Jerash, Petra, Wadi Rum and everything in between.) How long were we there? (Six days.) How did we get around? (Rented a car.) Were we asked to carry gifts or packages? (No, but I did have a souvenir Palestinian flag tucked inside a magazine.)

All bags, carry-ons and otherwise, are next run through InVision machines prior to check-in. These igloo-shaped CT scanners probe for bombs and explosives. InVision units have become common in the United States too, but TLV has the process streamlined to a science. Any luggage flagged for extra scrutiny is routed, along with its owner, to a separate station for a hand inspection. There, the staff is able to pull up the resultant scan on a touch-screen monitor, pinpointing whatever offending item roused suspicion (such as a piece of ceramic pottery from the Jordanian city of Madaba).

After check-in and seat assignment, passengers head to the immigration line, where the formalities are about the same as in most other countries. Then, down a short corridor for a quick, straightforward trip through the metal detector, and one more X-ray for carry-ons.

Total time from curbside to boarding lounge, excluding several minutes in the check-in queue, was approximately 25 minutes. Less than half an hour for an explosives scan, open-bag hand search, documents check, security interview and X-ray inspection. That's a shorter time than it takes to pass through a single metal detector in many U.S. terminals.

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