For weary holiday travelers coping with the hassles of airport security, some politicians and TV pundits are peddling a simple solution: Just do what the Israelis do. Several members of Congress are praising "the Israeli model" as an alternative to the U.S. screening process. What the Israelis do "is the way it ought to be done," adds Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee. Fox News' Sean Hannity extols the Israelis because "they target, they profile, and they do not have these body checks."
There's no question the Israeli system has been a success in a country beset by terrorist threats and suicide bombers. But if you can count, and if you understand American values, it's easy to see why that system wouldn't translate to the United States.
To start with, Israel has one major international airport, Ben Gurion in Tel Aviv, which handles about 11 million passengers a year. The USA has 450 airports, through which 770 million people pass. Put another way, U.S. airports handle more passengers in a single week than Israel — a New Jersey-sized nation with few domestic flights — does in a year.
Moreover, in Israel, where screeners are highly trained and El Al pays for much of the security costs, the airline spent about $57 per passenger last year, according to The Washington Post. And in the United States, where the government picks up most of the tab? Less than $7 per passenger. We don't hear the Transportation Security Administration's critics calling for an eightfold increase in this year's $5.3 billion air security budget.
Even if volume and cost weren't obstacles, Americans wouldn't put up with such Israeli practices as having to get to the airport as much as four hours ahead of departure, being interrogated at length by airport screeners, or having their luggage confiscated. Everyone still has to pass through metal detectors.
Central to Israeli security is ethnic profiling and background checks. While many travelers pass through Israeli airports with minimal scrutiny, Israel singles out Arabs, including many who are Israeli residents, and other foreign nationals for intrusive questioning, screening and searches. In July, Israeli news media reported, former Clinton Cabinet member Donna Shalala, now president of the University of Miami, was detained for more than two hours of questioning because of her Lebanese name.
Israelis have been willing to trade both personal privacy and civil liberties for air security. But even after 9/11, many Americans have balked at that trade-off, as a vocal minority made clear in the recent uproar over full-body scanners and enhanced pat-downs. In 2003, a TSA plan to tap into fliers' personal credit card and other data, then assign them security risk ratings, ignited such an outcry that it was scrapped.
Nor is it clear that ethnic profiling would work. True, most terror suspects have been young Muslim men. But such profiling would have missed "Jihad Jane," the petite, blond-haired, blue-eyed Philadelphia woman arrested in March for allegedly recruiting Americans and others for terror plots. Or Richard Reid, the white British citizen who tried to blow up an airliner in December 2001 with a shoe bomb.
Religious radicalism can infect the brains of people of any complexion or ethnicity. On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC he's worried about terrorist attacks on the U.S. by Americans.
Certainly, it would be helpful if the TSA used more common sense and sophistication than it does now in picking fliers for extra screening. But its critics have to recognize that facile advice about Israel and profiling crumbles under the weight of a single question: How, exactly, would you make that work here?
