Racial profiling in Israel
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Racial profiling in Israel refers to the extensive system of racial profiling used in or by Israel, primarily by Israeli security forces. Racial profiling is the act of suspecting or targeting a person of a certain race on the basis of observed characteristics or behavior, rather than on individual suspicion.[1][2] More broadly, as in the definition given by the American Civil Liberties Union, it refers to law enforcement of targeting individuals who fall under suspicion because of their race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.[3][4][5] Bio-social profiling has been seen as 'integral to the Israeli security apparatus.'[6]
Overview[edit]
Though airport racial profiling in Israel in its most recent form emerged in a very specific context of threats, internal and external, from groups challenging Israel's own definition of itself as a state.[7], it has deeper roots. The security screening and profiling of passengers in Israel's airports instituted in the 1970s was embedded within a larger historical context, one where the state was formed on the premise of a privileging hierarchy, with a large Jewish majority and an Arab minority. With the Israeli conquest of the Palestinian territories in the Six Day War in 1967, Israel's security risk identification system within the broader tensions that developed, was bound to reflect the state's ideological priorities. For Whitaker, 'neutral scientific impartiality' in screening in such circumstances was difficult: 'it would be delusional to expect that any security screening process for Israel could escape the constraints of national ideology'. The result has been, in his view, that rather than seeking anomalous behavior ticks as risk identifiers, the Israeli system reflects the larger structural nature of Israel as a Jewish state, with 'racial, ethnic and religious profiling' making up the core of the vetting. While the systems developed to profile behavior along ethnic and religious lines have proved functional, they are also, Whitaker asserts, intrinsically discriminatory and repugnant to human rights.[7]
Historical background[edit]
On the signing of the Armistice agreements between Israel and other belligerents to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Israel, in a contentious measure, decided to keep in place the military rule that had prevailed during hostilities. The British Mandatory authorities had already established a functional system of non-statutory regulations regarding residence permits which Israel had inherited and could use without passing further legislation.[8]
The IDF opposed it, being of the view that, given the devastation and shock affecting the defeated Palestinian communities, the maintenance of such provisions was no longer necessary, since, in their view, the civil police force could handle the application of the existing emergency regulations. Ministers such as Bechor Shitrit also opposed the maintenance of martial law to govern the Palestinians as conflicting with the article guaranteeing the equality of all citizens set forth in the Israeli Declaration of Independence: the involvement of low-level officers in looting, theft, rape and murder would, he thought, also complicate matters. On deliberation, it was decided to suspend military law only in mixed cities with a Jewish presence, while applying it elsewhere as the most effective measure for depopulating Arab villages, impeding Palestinians from returning to their villages and home, and for assisting Jewish immigrants to settle and displace them. It was the permit system that formed part of the body of non-statutory regulations, enforced from the earliest days by the new-found military, that, in Shira Robinson's view, 'created a culture of racial profiling and served to criminalize the Palestinian public at large'.[8]
The measures were implemented quickly, with patrols of both the military and border police establishing fixed and flying checkpoints and stopping anyone with an 'Arab appearance' to examine their papers. Such profiling became vexatious for the Yemenite Jews in Israel, who were often taken to be Arabs. The permits issued stipulated strictly the time given for any Palestinian moving in the country and the routes permitted. Officers were rewarded if they achieved compliance with the figures set forth in a monthly quota system for arresting a given number of Palestinians halted by such procedures and caught out in permit infractions. The overwhelming majority of those arrested, be they Palestinians returning late for missing a bus, peasants retrieving flocks that had wandered from their set pastures, old men overstaying a permit during an evening visit to a mosque, women taking buses to markets to sell produce, were tried not in civil tribunals, but in military courts. Down to 1967, it has been estimated that 95% of all convictions by Israel's military tribunals regarded Palestinians rounded up for such permit infractions or for trespassing. [8]
Shortly after the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956, Israel began a Jewish settlement project on land expropriated from Palestinians on the hill above the Galilee town of Nazareth designed to "swallow up" the predominantly Palestinian village below. Local activists, fearing they would become residents of a 'new Johannesburg' but also reacting to the deaths of 22 Palestinian children from land mines and military exercises nearby, protested that the plans were based on racial grounds. Some concessions were made in reducing the severity of the permit system, which was claimed to regulate movements along territorial rather than racial lines, but widespread protests continued and when, in 1958, two Palestinians were tried for entering Safad, which was freely accessible to tourists and Jews, the local police chief admitted under interrogation that entry into this so-called "closed zone" was determined by a less visible racial profiling system designed to bar only Palestinians.[9]
Racial profiling in Ben Gurion Airport[edit]
Israel first introduced a new set of protocols for profiling potential terrorists for airport passenger screening after the hijacking of an El Al plane on 23 July 1968, and these have persisted down to the present day (2012). The measures have proved highly effective, and a high percentage of respondents, both Jewish and Arab have affirmed that they feel safer with such checks in place.[10]
In 1972, terrorists from the Japanese Red Army launched an attack that led to the deaths of at least 24 people at Ben Gurion Airport. Since then, security at the airport has relied on a number of fundamentals, including a heavy focus on what Raphael Ron, former director of security at Ben Gurion, terms the "human factor", which he generalized as "the inescapable fact that terrorist attacks are carried out by people who can be found and stopped by an effective security methodology."[11] As part of its focus on this so-called "human factor," Israeli security officers interrogate travelers using racial profiling, singling out those who appear to be Arab based on name or physical appearance.[12] Additionally, all passengers, including those who do not appear to be of Arab descent, are questioned as to why they are traveling to Israel, followed by several general questions about the trip in order to search for inconsistencies.[13]
As of 2007, according to Boaz Ganor, it appeared that Israel had not undertaken any known empirical studies on the efficacy of the technique of racial profiling.[14] In the spring of 2008, Israel's Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, responded to complaints from human rights groups which had threatened to take to the courts the issue of passenger screening and security checks of non-Jews before the courts. He directed the airport authority to implement a policy of 'visible equality' and thereby put an end to the practice, regarding as humiliating, of racial profiling, in particular of Palestinian Israelis which had been in place for decades. The vetting procedures were duly modified but, according to Jonathan Cook, while the prior use of coloured stickers was replaced by uniform white stickers for all passengers, airport security officials simply wrote over the stickers with a numbering system that conserved the distinctions.[15]
Israel does not admit that it employs profiling based on ethnic criteria, but a 2012 empirical study based on interviews with 918 passengers, evenly covering 308 Israeli Jews, 306 Palestinian Israelis, and 304 non-Israelis found strong indications suggesting that it does so.[10] According to Ariel Merari, an Israeli terrorism expert and retired professor of psychology[16] "It's foolishness not to use profiles when you know that most terrorists come from certain ethnic groups and certain age groups"; he notes further that a terrorist on an airplane "is likely to be Muslim and young", and argues that the goal of preventing numerous casualties "justifies inconveniencing a certain ethnic group."[17]
Amotz Brandes, a former intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and a security agent and profiler at El Al Airlines, has said that Israeli security almost exclusively profiled Arabs and Muslims until the 1972 airport massacre, and that as a result of that massacre, Israel began to use threat-based profiling in addition to racial profiling at Ben Gurion Airport.[18]
Many passengers have complained of the discrimination they claim to have suffered on entering Israel from intrusive searches based upon suspicion related to their Arab or Palestinian identity, or association with such people.[19] [20][21] [22] [23]Israeli Arabs are included in the terror profile notwithstanding the fact that only one of the 102 terrorists involved in attacks on Israeli aviation over the period 1968-2010 came from that background.[10]
Racial profiling in other contexts[edit]
Airport security is not the only area where Israel employs techniques of ethnic profiling. The military governance of the Palestinian territories uses these methods extensively, and it has been argued that, with regard to the administration of Palestinians, 'Profiling is its methodological procedure.' [24]The gamut of informal and formal control and monitoring techniques used by Israel to profile and control what it considers a ‘dangerous population’ in the occupied territories has led Ilan Pappé to define it as a Mukhabarat state, a term usually applied to neighbouring Arab countries, meaning an ‘intelligence surveillance state’ [25]
The Israeli Security Forces use racial profiling at military checkpoints and during some of the duties they perform. In August 2017 Haaretz reported that security guards working for a company which provides security at Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station said they were instructed to demand ID from people who look Arab and detain those who do not have an ID with them.[26]
Roni Alsheikh, the current head of the Israel Police, stated in 2016 that "All over the world it is proven that migrants are more involved in crime than others... This also goes for Arabs… and also in east Jerusalem."[27]
Scholars in Canada have recently written that:[28]
"Israel has marketed itself as a global expert in combating the 'Islamic' or 'Arab' terrorism held to be responsible for the type of security threats associated with the 9/11 attacks, and with an intensification of profiling based on the techniques and experiences of the conflict zone of Israel/Palestine. This is despite the reality that what might be labelled terrorist attacks—such as the one by an anti-Muslim activist that took the lives of 91 victims in Oslo and Utoya Island in Norway in July, 2011—often in fact defy the efficacy of racial profiling."
Emulation in other countries[edit]
The post 9/11 environment, with Muslims increasingly identified as potential terrorists,- something which has generated a large scholarly literature-[10] the Israeli surveillance system has, it has been argued, given new legitimacy to a model of overt racial profiling backed by antiterrorist legislation that had, in earlier decades, been seen as a relic of the past. Israel’s expertise in the area achieved a certain international reputation, and has influenced policing in a number of Western countries, to a degree that some critics claim that there has been an ‘Israelization of surveillance’ and the ‘Palestinianization of the racial contracts of liberal democracies.’ [29]
"Israeli-style profiling" started in the U.S. in the wake of 11 September 2001, when Boston's Logan airport hired the former director of security at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport.[30]
Dave McIntyre of the Integrative Center for Homeland Security said with regard to Israeli predictive profiling that the "US Secretary of Homeland Security returned from a security tour of Israel and pledged to adopt some of their techniques to make us all safer."[31]
Israeli airport racial profiling has been particularly praised by some Republican politicians. Former Arkansas governor and two-time presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has stated: "What the Israelis do - and I've flown on El Al about a dozen times to Israel - what they do is the way it ought to be done".[32] Tea Party member Allen West has stated: "I traveled to Israel, and I tell you what... They have very good procedures and you don't have to go through all of these very draconian practices."[32]
Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, has repeatedly called for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to adopt Israeli profiling methods[18], including racial profiling.[18]
See also[edit]
External links[edit]
- Minister backs Israel's top cop over racial profiling controversy, i24NEWS, August 31, 2016
References[edit]
- ↑ "Profiling". Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.
- ↑ Warren, Patricia Y.; Farrell, Amy (2009). "The Environmental Context of Racial Profiling". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 623: 52–63. JSTOR 40375886.
- ↑ Michael L. Birzer, Racial Profiling: They Stopped Me Because I'm ------------!, CRC Press, 2016 p.14: 'The discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.'
- ↑ Mareile Kaufmann, Ethnic Profiling and Counter-terrorism: Examples of European Practice and Possible Repercussions, 2010 p.94:’ the ECRI's 2004 'General Policy Recommendation No.8 . .urges states to implement legislation adopted in connection with counter-terrorism at national or local level in a manner that "( )does not discriminate against persons or groups of persons notably on grounds of actual or supposed “race”, colour, language, religion, nationality, national or ethnic origin.'
- ↑ Avi Kober, Israel's Wars of Attrition: Attrition Challenges to Democratic States, Routledge 2009 p.132:'Profiling refers to the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin.'
- ↑ Julie Peteet, Space and Mobility in Palestine, Indiana University Press, 2017 p.9.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Reg Whitaker, 'Behavioural profiling in Israeli aviation security as a tool for social control,’ in Elia Zureik, David Lyon, Yasmeen Abu-Laban (eds.), Territory Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power, Routledge, 2010 pp.371-384 p.383.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Shira N. Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State, Stanford University Press 2013 pp.41-42.
- ↑ Robinson,Citizen Strangers, ibid.pp.178-182
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Badi Hasisi, Yoram Margalioth, Liav Orgad, 'Ethnic Profiling In Airport Screening: Lessons From Israel, 1968–2010,' American Law and Economics Review, Volume 14, Issue 2, 1 December 2012, pp.517–560,pp.518,552.
- ↑ Cited K. C. Khurana, Aviation Management: Global Perspectives, Global India Publications, 2009 p.271
- ↑ "Israeli airport security order dancer to prove identity with dance steps". International Herald Tribune. September 9, 2008. Archived from the original on September 14, 2008. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
- ↑ Volokh.com Airport Security in Israel, November 27, 2007
- ↑ Bernard E. Harcourt, ‘Muslim profiles Post-9/11: Is Racial Profiling an Effective Counter-terrorist Measure and Does It Violate the Right to be Free fronm Discrimination?,’ in Ben Goold, Liora Lazarus (eds.),Security and Human Rights, Bloomsbury Publishing 2007 pp.73-98 p.93.
- ↑ Jonathan Cook, 'Visible Equality' as Confidence Trick, in Ilan Pappé (ed.), Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid, Zed Books 2015 p.123.
- ↑ Lee, Dave (2010-11-17). "New study delves inside a suicide bomber's mind". BBC News. Retrieved September 16, 2016.
- ↑ "Rights group challenges Israel's airport security". NBC News. Associated Press. March 19, 2008. Retrieved January 8, 2017.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 "Trump claim on Israel profiling misses full security context". @politifact. Retrieved 2018-06-22.
- ↑ Marc Tracy, Israeli Airport Security Now Checking Emails Tablet 5 June 2012
- ↑ George Khoury, ‘This is our Israel, this is for the Jews. No Palestinian should come to Israel’: A Palestinian-American’s story of being detained at Ben Gurion airport Mondoweiss 29 July 29 2015
- ↑ Nirit Anderman, 'Arab Actress Tells of Humiliating Security Check at the Airport,' Haaretz 29 July 2016
- ↑ Bethan McKernan, 'Palestinian women sue Israeli airlines over 'unwarranted' strip searches,' The Independent 9 October 2017
- ↑ Mariam Barghouti, 'Palestinian Women Are Harassed And Humiliated At Checkpoints. Here Are A Few Of Their Stories,' The Forward 17 October 2017
- ↑ Orna Ben-Naftali, Michael Sfard, Hedi Viterbo, The ABC of the OPT: A Legal Lexicon of the Israeli Control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Cambridge University Press, 2018 p.235:'Israel’s territorial expansion into the OPT, coupled with its demographic angst and with its security cult, generates the perception that Palestinians . .cease to be conceived of as citizens or protected persons endowed with rights; they are construed as an “objective enemy”. Such enmity is not grounded in either a concrete action or a concrete risk assessment, which defines “real enemies”: it is grounded in racism. Profiling its is methodological procedure.'
- ↑ Elia Zureik, Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit, Routledge 2015 pp3-5. p.5.
- ↑ Lior, Ilan (2017-08-23). "Guards at Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station Ordered Racially Profile Arabs". Haaretz. Retrieved 2018-06-22.
- ↑ Seth J. Frantzman, 'Comment: The ‘natural’ excuse for Israeli racial profiling,' The Jerusalem Post 3 September 2016.
- ↑ Abu-Laban, Yasmeen; Bakan, Abigail B. (2012). "After 9/11: Canada, the Israel/Palestine Conflict, and the Surveillance of Public Discourse". Canadian Journal of Law and Society. 27 (3): 319–339. ISSN 1911-0227.
|access-date=requires|url=(help) - ↑ Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Abigal B. Bakan, ‘The “Israelization” of social sorting and the “Palestinianization” of the racial contract: reframing Israel/Palestine and the war on terror,’ in Elia Zureik, David Lyon, Yasmeen Abu-Laban (eds.), Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power, Routledge, 2010 pp.276-293 p.288.
- ↑ Jonathan Last (1 September 2006). "Behavioral Profiling Needed". CBS News. Retrieved 23 June 2018.
Israeli-style profiling first came to the United States after September 11, when Boston's Logan International Airport hired Rafi Ron as a security consultant. Before joining New Age Security Solutions, Ron had been director of security at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport
- ↑ "Profiling Predictive Profiling". Integrative Center for Homeland Security at Texas A&M University. Texas A&M University. 26 June 2008. Archived from the original on 18 August 2010. Retrieved 23 June 2018.
But recently the US Secretary of Homeland Security returned from a security tour of Israel and pledged to adopt some of their techniques to make us all safer. “Predictive Profiling” seems a very likely candidate for the job.
- ↑ 32.0 32.1 Milbank, Dana (2010-11-25). "Dana Milbank - Why the Israeli security model can't work for the U.S." ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2018-06-22.
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