Note: Mentioned here (see n.2), made available today in English in time for tomorrow's edition. I urge everyone to read both pages. For background Lavie has been researching this article for several weeks, putting out requests to Israeli progressives and peace groups. Both links at the end are almost identical, except that there are larger and better images on the Hebrew (one of a demo against the fence), as well as a different opening sub-paragraph, posing the question: Are such measures "security" or "political"?Telling left from right
Left-wingers were never liked, but now they are considered a liability
Ha'aretz, 27/29 Jan 2004At the beginning of last month, Yehudit Shendar and her daughter, Roni, flew to India, to attend a wedding of friends. Roni, drawing on her rich experience - despite her young age, 24 - told her mother that they should get to the airport a few hours early, because they were in for hassle. Yehudit, 57, the senior art curator at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial institute, in Jerusalem, was skeptical. What problems could they make for a respectable citizen who had a ticket for an El Al flight to Bombay?
At the airport, Roni, who just three years earlier had completed her army service as an officer in the air force, approached the security personnel and told them that she thought she was on their lists. In the past two years, since she began to work for left-wing organizations - first Bat Shalom, a feminist women's peace and human rights group, and afterward the Alternative Information Center, both Jerusalem-based - she "has forgotten what it is to travel like a human being," as her mother puts it.
...
Yehudit and Roni Shendar are not alone. The fact that every flight entails protracted harassment and security checks for Israeli Arabs (and, of course, for Palestinians) and for a handful of veteran left-wing and right-wing activists, is hardly news. The news is that what was once the lot of the fringes is quickly spreading toward the center. In the more than three years of the intifada, hundreds or more people have joined what the establishment views as radical groups. This includes more than 700 members of the various groups that are against doing military service in the territories and a large number of left-wing and human rights organizations that oppose Israeli government policy and the continuation of the occupation.
Many members of these groups are from the very heart of the elite: senior army personnel and academics, media and business people. They consider themselves an essential part of the Israeli society, the salt of the earth, and are stunned to discover that the establishment has marked them and treats them like dangerous enemies. One fine morning they find in their mailbox a summons from the police to appear for a "clarification," which quickly turns out to be an interrogation by the Shin Bet security service. At the airport they are treated like "ticking bombs": Leaving the country for a holiday or for an international conference abroad is no longer an inalienable right. "Who says that only the Palestinians can be put under closure?" says an Israeli with a bitter smile, after recently missing his flight because he was kept for hours in the security room at the airport.
...
"Once every Arab was considered a terrorist," observes a person who until recently worked in the security check unit of the Israel Airports Authority. "Then it was everyone who knows an Arab, and now it's anyone who knows someone who knows an Arab. Altogether, that adds up to quite a few people."
...
More:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/388532.htmlhttp://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArtTower.jhtml?itemNo=387650&nl=28_01 (Hebrew)
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