According to Reports: Media Looks to Israel on Airport Security
January 14, 2010 – 4:15 pmIn his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,” Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, takes a look the media coverage of Israel’s airport security systems following the attempt to blow up a plane on Christmas Day.
Two-and-a-half years ago, Israeli analyst Manfred Gerstenfeld wrote an essay for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs titled “What the West Should Learn from the Assault on Israel and the Jews.”
This was at a time, Gerstenfeld noted, when European leaders, confronting mounting threats from Islamists, were starting to rely increasingly on Israel for its expertise in security-related matters.
Gerstenfeld wrote: “European security models in many places are often partly based on Israeli ones, because Israelis have frequently been targeted.
“For instance, in the West not so many decades ago one could board a plane without a security check. At the time such checks were already the norm in Israel. El Al’s security approach has become a model for many other airlines…In anticipation of the summer 2007 travel season, directors from a variety of American airports visited Israel to study its successful passenger-screening system. Such visits are frequent but only few make the newspapers.”
But that certainly changed after Christmas Day, when a Nigerian, allegedly working for Al Qaeda, tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, resulting in a massive security clampdown at airports in the United States and around the world. The chaos caused during the busy holiday travel season prompted an outpouring of media stories on how the West might benefit from Israel’s security expertise.
In “What Israel can teach us about security” (Toronto Star, Dec. 31), Cathal Kelly began her article with the following contrast: “While North America’s airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification. That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel’s, which deal with far greater terror threats with far less inconvenience.
Drawing upon the expertise of Israeli airport security consultant Rafi Sela, Kelly described Israel’s approach to coordinated intelligence gathering and the multiple layers of security checks at Ben-Gurion airport that screen for suspicious individuals while allowing the vast majority of air travellers to move relatively quickly through the lines and onto the planes.
Why isn’t the same system used in North America, she asked. Seal’s answer: a rigid bureaucracy that relies on the wrong security concepts.
On CTV National News Jan. 4, anchor Tom Clark introduced a similar report: “While many countries look to toughen up airport security through body scanners and baggage searches, some suggest there’s a lesson to be learned from Israel. It has faced countless threats since it came into existence more than six decades ago. CTV’s Scott Laurie looks at why Israel has been so successful in stopping terror in the skies and whether its methods could work here.”
Laurie noted: “Instead of just relying on technology, wands, and scanners, security [in Israel] involves up-close and personal interrogation.”
Laurie interviewed airport security consultant Rafi Ron, who spoke about the successful screening technique used at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport: “What we are looking for are people that exhibit a behavioural indicator that may be related to their intention to carry out a violent act…We’ve developed a program called behaviour pattern recognition.”
Contrary to popular misconception this is not, strictly speaking, racial profiling. On several U.S. news programs, Ron explained that many years ago, Ben Gurion Airport was attacked by Japanese and German terrorist gangs working on behalf of radical Palestinian groups. So Israeli experts are aware of the fact that a terrorist threat can come from people of various backgrounds and nationalities, which is what “behaviour pattern recognition” is meant to detect (in addition to the pre-screening inquiries that are routinely undertaken of all passengers on a flight list).
These measures could be adopted at airports in Canada and around the world. This point was made in “Focus On Passenger Behaviour: Israeli Expert,” by Glen McGregor (National Post, Jan. 4).
McGregor also turned to Sela, who explained that an airport cannot function if the security system treats the vast majority of travellers as potential terrorists: “You have to actually look for the things that are dangerous and not just scan everybody…This calls for a total change in approach to the transportation security issue,” Sela said.
Israel is showing the world what this total change involves. Some, as Gerstenfeld noted back in 2007, have started to pay close attention. Others, one would assume, are sure to follow now.
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