Israel airport security demands access to tourists' private email accounts
haaretz.com
haaretz.com
I have been in Israel where terrorist bombs have blown up buses or the open market just a mile or so from where I was.
A major difference between America and Israel: In America they search your bags on the way out of a store. In Israel they search your bags on the way in.
Also completely useless for anything than purely 'selecting' who you let in since I am going to assume a terrorist wouldn't exactly use terrorist185@hotmail.com and then hand the email over when asked.
Israel is full of overly invasive security measures. The alternative is probably just to bar access to the country altogether, or at least bar it to people of certain backgrounds.
If you don't like the security measures then don't go there.
But what happens if you are Palestinian like the people in these stories and as a politically aware Palestinian you become active in pro-Palestinian activism because you care about the rights and freedoms of your people? Those are the people that Israeli is targeting if you read these articles.
Israel allows civil unions, allows homosexuals to serve in the military without restrictions, supports Muslim private schools, pays for Islamic religious activities, and generally respects human rights. [1]
We also have our warts, like everyone country does. Israeli politicians have attempted to pass our own Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act. We have our equivalents of the TSA, FBI, and CIA - and for us they are an existential necessity.
Keep in mind that many - probably most - Israelis will be equally disturbed by this. Israel's Supreme Court has an excellent track record of ruling against military and government action. Their decisions are binding - there is no one above the law in Israel. Prime ministers, presidents, and intelligence organizations alike have been prosecuted.
We're also only 60 years old, and have fought 7 major wars in that time, twice in such dire situations that it was widely believed we would fight to the last dead man and lose. Compare with other countries, or just MKULTRA, before you judge us so quickly.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Israel
Edit: This is almost a societal-version of the fundamental attribution error. When your country does something wrong, you blame it on the politician or individual. When you hear about the same thing happening in another country, you wonder why that country is so backwards and evil.
Have any been made? The discussion here, at least, seems very civil and focused on the issue at hand. Israel is indeed a very laudable nation and people in many ways.
But this behavior is awful, and has to be condemned.
There have been comments below calling for America to stop supporting Israeli. I want to point out how exceptionally uncommon this type of behavior is.
Israeli law recognizes same-sex marriages performed elsewhere... It does not, however, allow same-sex couples to marry on Israeli soil. Civil marriage doesn't exist in Israel for heterosexual couples, either, (except where both spouses are non-Jewish) and therefore only a marriage sanctioned by religious authorities can take place within Israel.
The State of Israel allows foreign partners of its homosexual citizenry to receive residency permits. The Civil Service Commission extends spousal benefits and pensions to the partners of homosexual employees. The Israeli State Attorney's Office has extended the spousal exemption from property-transfer taxes to same-sex couples. Israel's attorney general has granted legal recognition to same-sex couples in financial and other business matters. Attorney General Meni Mazuz said the couples will be treated the same as common-law spouses, recognizing them as legal units for tax, real estate, and financial purposes. Mazuz made his decision by refusing to appeal a district court ruling in an inheritance case that recognized the legality of a same-sex union, his office said in a statement. Mazuz did differentiate, however, between recognizing same-sex unions for financial and practical purposes, as he did, and changing the law to officially sanction the unions, which would be a matter for parliament, according to the statement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Israel#Recogniti...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/opinion/pinkwashing-and-is...
> We also have our warts...
But you didn't mention the elephant in the room in your comment, which is pretty strange:
Israel also has run a 40+ year occupation that denies non-Jewish residents of rights and freedoms while subsidizing Jewish settlements in and around the disenfranchised non-Jewish population. Many many people, including former Israeli PMs and many respected academics, consider Israel's occupation and its settlement practices to be a form of apartheid or leading to it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_analog...
Furthermore, this is a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians without Israeli citizenship, not Jews and non-Jews. Obviously the two are related, but the ultimate question is whether Palestinians without Israeli citizenship, living in the West Bank, should be granted citizenship or not. Israeli Arabs living in Jerusalem, Haifa, etc. were granted full rights in '48, or when Israel annexed the area. Israel hasn't annexed the West Bank, so non-Israelis in the West Bank are stuck as citizens of no country.
Calling Israel an apartheid severely downplays the horror of what happened in South Africa. It seems odd to point out that I learn at university alongside Israeli Arabs and ride on buses next to them, because of course I do. Why wouldn't I?
The situation is difficult and the property laws effect everyone who tries to build without permission, which is almost everyone: The Jewish settlement of Ulpana is going to be demolished next month because it was built on illegally acquired land.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gdxs_Qb4k...
I say this as an American with no connection to either side.
There even used to be vast swathes of land within Israel proper that could only be leased to Jews, because the founders of the country had given it to a trust tasked with ensuring it remained in Jewish hands, though I think the supreme court finally put a stop to that a few years ago.
Reddit comment[0] has (a) full story[1].
[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ulvaj/israel_airp...
[1] http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/do-you-feel-more-arab-or-more-...
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-airport...
Nonetheless, this does seem a little overboard. From having personally been grilled by Israeli airport security, I can say that they are very thorough. I doubt they really need this intrusion to determine if someone is a threat, as it is easier for them to just not grant access, but I suppose if someone really needed to get into the country they could be willing to divulge the information.
Security, in any form, is annoying. Implement two-factor on your gmail account, and it will occasionally annoy you when you have to dig out your phone for the code, and that's just to protect your email from prying eyes! What if you had to legitimately protect your life and the lives of your family? What kind of inconvenience would you accept for that protection?
(Edit) Why is this downvoted? What did I say that did not add to the conversation? Just because you disagree with me? That's rather childish. I think my point is rather poignant, that security is a necessary evil, and that for some it is more necessary than others.
This justifies things... how?
Not to mention that imminent danger has been the mother of a huge number of evils in our time, and since time immemorial.
So, to be clear, I'm not saying anything about guns pointed my families. I'm talking about people's natural right to privacy and the overreach of government. These two things have nothing to do with each other and your attempt to connect them is both misleading and disingenuous.
We're talking about the same thing here. Security abuses privacy, but is necessary. My point was, and still is, that for some it is more necessary than others. As we in the US and Western Europe don't live under constant threat to our lives, we accept less. However, Israelis do live under that threat, so they accept more.
Some of us did living in Belfast - and we would like to thank all those nice Americans in Boston for making it all possible.
I'm guessing that an implied part of your point is that because they had arab names, they might have had metaphorical guns? Yeah. That's the part that drew the downvotes.
If I understand your view rightly, I think you are in favor of having the Israelis out of the West Bank, as that would reduce the overall amount of attacks. Is that correct?
"Why are you mixing citizenship with ethnicity?" It's the ethnicity that they use to profile.
"using the same scale, what is the percentage of violence committed against Arabs by Israelis?" I don't know. More Arabs are killed by other Arabs than by Israelis. If you're talking about just Palestinians, yes, it would be by Israelis.
"Don't some of those fall into the category of "terror attack"?" No. No. No. That's the biggest problem with education about the conflict. How do you define a "terror attack"? I define it as violent acts towards civilians with the intent of causing mass psychological damage. Israel does not commit such acts. They attack military targets in the Gaza Strip, and sometimes kill civilians, as any army in the world has had the difficult issue of doing. A British soldier stood up in the UN and proclaimed that during the last Israeli/Gaza offensive (operation cast lead), Israel did more to protect Gazan civilians than any nation has ever done previously (http://www.unwatch.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=bdKKI...). He was referring to the Goldstone report, which was later rescinded and apologized for.
"Isn't there a power imbalance which prevents Arabs from profiling and being able to restrict what Israelis can do?" No, not at all. Try getting into Egypt with an Israeli passport. Multiple acquaintances that have were harassed by Egyptian police. In actuality, it is much more difficult for Israelis in Arab countries than it is for Arabs in Israel.
"If Arabs were able to profile and exclude certain classes of people, wouldn't that help stop further "countless terror attacks" against them?" What terrorist attacks?
"If I understand your view rightly, I think you are in favor of having the Israelis out of the West Bank, as that would reduce the overall amount of attacks. Is that correct?" I am 100% for a two-state solution with two people living side by side peacefully. Settlements in the West Bank are an issue that needs to be figured out. You have to realize that these "settlements" are sometimes small, and sometimes (like Ariel) are large cities with thousands of residents. It's not simple to just get them to up and move. Remember, Israel did that (The unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip) and all they have gotten in return is more than 9000 rockets and mortars fired on Israeli citizens.
(edit) Ah yes, downvoted for the inconvenient truth.
For me, that number does not seem believable. For example, in 2007 there were 2,796 calls to the Rape Crisis Hotline concerning "Rape, attempted rape, Statutory rape", 386 for "Gang rape and sexual attacks", and 1,630 for incest. I suspect the same is true today, but I have not found more recent numbers.
It's very unlikely that incest is caused by an Israeli vs. a non-Israeli, but perhaps you don't regard that as violent. Do you regard rape as violent? I certainly do. Are 99% of those rape reports caused by non-Israelis? Or are they made up for by very large amounts of violence elsewhere?
I looked also for domestic violence reports, but that was hard to come by. From what I gather, it is poorly and infrequently reported, and criminal proceedings can take years to prosecute which discourages women from doing so. The UNHCR says "11 percent of the 688 women admitted to battered women's shelters in 2005 were Ethiopian (Haaretz 23 Aug. 2006). In addition, approximately one quarter of Israeli women murdered by their husbands in recent years have been Ethiopian."
688*0.11% = 75, so there must be at least another 7500 cases of Arab violence towards Israelis for your 99% number to be true.
More realistically, I think this sort of violence isn't something you think much about. http://columbiacurrent.org/2010/04/conspiracies-of-silence-v... writes pretty clearly on how this is talked about even less in Israel than in the US.
For Palestinian women, it's even worse, but my goal here was to question how you determined the 99% number.
I put "terror attack" in quotes for precisely the reason you described - it is ill-defined. One definition says "the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal." Another definition says that attacks on military cannot be considered terrorists. Yet another says that if the main goal is to get money then it is likely not terrorism.
This is why I would rather use the term "violence" than the term "terror attack" and when you ask "What terrorist attacks?" I would rather refer to settler attacks like the one I found in Haaretz titled "Settlers attack Palestinians to avenge West Bank outpost demolition", which seems to fit your definition of "mass psychological damage", if only to a single town.
I found these http://old.btselem.org/statistics/english/Casualties.asp statistics. Various source question what "civilian" means, but it's enough basis for this discussion. It lists that 53 Palestinians were killed by Israeli civilians in Israel and the Occupied Territories, while 254 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians (over a 12 year period). This is not 99%.
I noticed that you switched from talking about Israelis to talking about "Israel". Why is that? I easily found cases where a Palestinian was "shot and killed by settlers while harvesting his olives", and "killed by settlers who rioted in Hebron"; isn't that the topic we were on, and not state policy? But it is not hard to find other cases of Israelis instigating an attack even while Israel protects the Palestinians.
I see that you then switched the topic to "Egypt"; I thought you were using "Arab" as the term for non-Israeli people living either in Israel or the Occupied Territories, and that is how I meant to use it. If you want to include Egyptians in this category then surely this category is getting rather nebulous. How many Egyptians have served in the Knesset? What percentage of violence is committed against Israelis by Egyptians?
With your new definition, then certainly it's true that more Arabs are killed by other Arabs than Arabs by Israelis because there are some 300+ million Arabs in the world and only some 7.6 million Israelis. Would you clarify what you mean by "Arab" in this context?
Yes, there are Palestinians civilians killed by Israeli civilians. However, they are not state sponsored. When an Israeli civilian is killed in a terror attack, it is state sponsored. Palestinians democratically elected Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization. Fatah, in charge of the West Bank, also has a terrorist arm, called the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades.
Arabs are an ethnicity. Egypt was an example of an Arab dominant culture that does not treat Israel well (even though they have a peace agreement!).
You're really grasping at straws. If you want to defend the actions of terrorist organizations like Hamas, go ahead, but I'm not going to pay attention to it.
Now you say that 1) you made up the number, and 2) you're talking specifically about terrorism. Okay, that's fine, but that's a different topic than "violence" and different than the "lived under constant threat to your life" which you started off with. You did say that profiling reduced terror attacks, but didn't say that it reduced the amount of violence. These two are not necessarily coupled.
South Africa, for example, has complex history of people divided by race, and where ethnic tensions and hatreds still run strong. In my 6 months or so in that country I met many people who "lived under constant threat to [their] life", for being outside at night, or in the wrong part of town, or while being carjacked or during a break-in while they slept at night. So no, it's not apparent to me that you are saying that all violent attacks, or that all threats to life in Israel are due to terrorism.
(It appears even that there are more homicides per year in Israel than deaths by terrorist attacks, but then as is often pointed out, every year over 10 times more people die in car accidents than died in 9/11 - some things we just get desensitized to.)
It looks like you are restricting 'terrorism' to state-sponsored terrorism. Surely al-Qaeda is the premier example of a stateless terrorist organization. Why can't the terrorist appellation also describe organized groups of settlers who, in violation of the law and counter to government policy, attack Palestinians?
I am not defending Hamas. I am attacking your rhetoric. You use absolutist statements, and you change your definitions somewhat when it serves your goals. I highlighted some of those changes. That annoyed me, and I do not believe it helps you achieve your goal of explaining your views to others like me.
If it helps, the statistics from btselem.org are quite clear that a large majority of the civilian Israeli deaths by Palestinians are done by people affiliated with the political organizations of the Occupied Territories, Lebanon, and elsewhere, and done in such a way that I have no problems calling it terrorism. But - and to get back to the topic I once thought you were making - based on those and other numbers, it seems significantly more likely that an Israeli will die of violence inflicted by another Israeli than by a non-Israeli.
I'm sorry that I was not clear, but I thought it was obvious that I was talking about terrorism, as that is the main violent issue in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
With that meaning, then yes, obviously there is little state-sponsored terrorism against Israelis by the government of Israel. But that seems rather a trivial statement, and I did not consider that that was your intent.
Israel can continue what they're doing, but without any US policy or financial support if they continue to do so towards US citizens/legal residents.
Edit: Good guess apparently. Look at the search keywords here: http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/do-you-feel-more-arab-or-more-...
What they lack in operational sophistication they make up in dedication and deadliness.
But that is just me.
This is a really poor frame. People who disagree with this practice are not "Israel bashing," they're disagreeing with this policy. It's inappropriate to preemptively insinuate that those who disagree about a civil liberties issue are anti-Semitic.
So you're trying to preemptively stop generalizations based on your generalizations? Honestly, who's paying you for your Israeli propaganda?
This way you'd avoid being classified early as a(n overreacting) shill, as that can only hamper your educational efforts.
Quote: "The agent, suspecting Tamari was involved in pro-Palestinian activism, wanted to inspect her private email account for incriminating evidence. The 42-year-old American of Palestinian descent refused and was swiftly expelled from the country."
http://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-palestinian-activist-says-s...
Stories on how foreign countries treat privacy are important. American companies, in some part, have turned places like China in to zero-privacy zones that would have left George Orwell's head spinning.
The post-FB generation of start ups should take very hard lines on privacy and build tools that employ obfuscation & client side decryption. For example, when logging in from an unverified sources (or foreign IP), the email account could reveal only commercial email.
Sadly that isn't what is happening. Just today I got a pop up for Dropbox containing a pre-checked box to "Automatically import when removable devices are connected." Import what? All photos. Sorry if I don't want to store pictures of my girlfriends naked in my Dropbox account.
By the way, what country is known for harassing Americans at their border: Canada. I'd rather travel to Mexico in the middle of a drug war.
By the way, what country is known for harassing Americans at
their border: Canada. I'd rather travel to Mexico in the
middle of a drug war.
That said, I went to Tijuana once when there was apparently a 3-day riot at some high-security prison nearby and it took 4 hours in a 2-mile long line to get back across the border. I'd imagine that a drug war would be even worse.
> This just sounds like an attempt to keep individuals of certain backgrounds out of a country.
Absolutely correct. The security officials believed that the individuals where pro-Palestinian activists. Here is a quote and article that details this:
"The agent, suspecting Tamari was involved in pro-Palestinian activism, wanted to inspect her private email account for incriminating evidence. The 42-year-old American of Palestinian descent refused and was swiftly expelled from the country."
http://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-palestinian-activist-says-s...
Now that this measure is public, any terrorist worth his salt will prepare a plausible and innocent looking email account.
Am I being too naive?
As a US citizen, I'm disappointed in Israel, and would prefer even less of my tax dollars are used to support them after this.
The Court has ruled on numerous issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rights of Arab citizens of Israel, and on discrimination between Jewish groups in Israel. It is unique in that its rulings can intervene in Israel Defense Forces military operations.
Most Israelis are equally ashamed of this. This isn't what your tax dollars support.
Most Israeli citizens can't even visit US because they denied visa, so I wouldn't cry because of one US citizen who denied entry to Israel.
US frequently denied entry to Israelis who were born in Iran or similar countries, including leader of largest party in Israel - Shaul Mofaz, at the time Chief of General Staff!
You say you don't have any other email accounts? How did you buy your ticket? Do you have an email receipt? No? Let me call the airline and confirm.
Any hint that your lying to them and you're back on the plane to where ever you came from.
I have no idea what did they do with the phone, did they read my emails? check my photos? installed some spyware? I have no idea, but I'm sure if I rejected to unlock it, I would be missed my flight. I felt like crap after that.
Interestingly, they didn't care about my second phone, an old Nokia, probably iPhone is more popular.
Requiring this disclosure at an international border is just a convenient pretext in the emerging dystopia. Human and civil rights need to be updated in light of emerging technologies.
Unfortunately, that seems unlikely given, for example, the US government doesn't honor even its own outdated Bill of Rights in the most basic ways (i.e., by asserting its authority to kill US citizens on the President's word).
I posted this quote/article in response to another comment but it is pertinent here:
"The agent, suspecting Tamari was involved in pro-Palestinian activism, wanted to inspect her private email account for incriminating evidence. The 42-year-old American of Palestinian descent refused and was swiftly expelled from the country."
http://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-palestinian-activist-says-s...