Is Israel spying on its visitors?
Foreign visitors attending conferences in Israel are being asked to complete a form accounting for their free time and the names and phone numbers of the people with whom they expect to have contact.
It happened about a week ago, when I was among a group of travelers that included several Israeli citizens and a Palestinian citizen of the United States. We were returning to Israel following a two-day meeting in Jordan. We arrived at the Sheikh Hussein Bridge an hour before it closed for the night. There weren’t many other travelers there aside from a group of female Palestinian citizens of Israel studying for master’s degrees at a Jordanian university.
The Israeli citizens, both the Jews and the Arabs, quickly passed through the security check, but the American was held back. His modest suitcase had been cleared at the security check, so only the documents he had in his bag had to be checked. A meticulous young inspector laid the documents out, one by one, and leafed through them with a sense of gravity. She then found an especially suspicious paper titled “A Two-State Solution.” Border agents passed the document from hand to hand and asked the man — who explained that he is a professor who teaches at Bir Zeit University and Tel Aviv University — what his connection was to this solution. He had to explain, in detail, how he came to possess such a subversive item.
As closing time inched nearer at the crossing, the terminal emptied of all other travelers. Our colleague, the professor, asked that we leave him with the border police, explaining that there was nothing new about what was happening. He also said that he knew it was uncomfortable for us to watch, but we should let it go and continue on. We refused. A half hour later, he got his American passport back, and we left.
