Israel in Hot Water over Racial Profiling in South Africa

As seen at TheMediaLine.org

It all began with a soft-spoken South African aggrieved over the alleged non-payment of a bonus by his former employer, the Israeli airliner El Al.

Fast forward many months and the South African government has deported an Israeli diplomat and reportedly threatened the expulsion of all El Al security officials in the country following claims that they are Israeli intelligence agents.

What happened?

Jonathan Garb was employed by the Israeli airline as a security guard and profiler, trained in Israel and tasked with screening passengers attempting to board El Al’s direct flight between Johannesburg and Tel Aviv. After 19 years with the airline, he was fired, allegedly after he filed a complaint with the South African Department of Labor over a financial bonus Mr. Garb claims he was entitled to.

Michael Bagraim, a well-known South African lawyer and the national chairman of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, took on Mr. Garb’s case against El Al for wrongful dismissal.

Then the former El Al security guard contacted Carte Blanche, a South African investigative television series, claiming that the airline’s policy was to profile passengers based on race and religion and offering evidence that its security personnel were actually employed by the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service.

Carte Blanche producers then sent a Muslim man with a hidden camera to Johannesburg airport to meet a friend near the El Al check-in desk. While the man was not flying and did not approach the check in desk, he was thoroughly interrogated by men claiming to be airport security personnel.

The program then found evidence that the security personnel for El Al, a private company, had their guns licensed through the Israeli embassy, accusing the officers of being agents of the Shin Bet. The program explicitly accused the Israelis of using racist security policies and knowingly violating South African law.

“El Al does excellent security work, but they work above the law,” Mr. Garb claimed. “This here is secret service operating above the law here in South Africa… It’s like the CIA, or the FBI, or MI5, but they’re hiding behind the guise of the airline.”

“The crazy thing is that we are profiling people racially, ethnically, even on religious grounds,” he said, pointing out that the Israeli profiling system meant that black passengers endured much harsher profiling than white passengers.

“We pull the wool over everyone’s eyes,” Mr. Garb added. “We do exactly what we want. The local authorities do not know what we are doing.”

Video part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGwBXIPUW5E

Video part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POWvgcKWg-U

The program caused a diplomatic storm in South Africa, a country still healing from the wounds of decades of racial persecution during the Apartheid era.

“There’s two things this program brought up,” Dr Virginia Tilley, a researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa’s statutory research agency, told The Media Line. “One they are doing racial profiling. In South Africa it is particularly not OK for anybody to be screening people based on ethnicity or race and giving them a hard time on that basis.”

“The second thing is they are going way beyond what would be necessary for the security of the airplane,” said Dr Tilley, who is featured on the Carte Blanche program as one of the 4,000 passengers Mr. Garb claims to have profiled. “For example I was traveling to Israel, had a series of documents with me and they copied all of them and faxed them to Israel. That has nothing to do with the safety of an airplane.”

“They are conducting espionage under the guise of an airline,” added Dr Tilley, who has been involved in campaigns supportive of an international boycott of Israel. “They can’t operate a foreign intelligence gathering service in South Africa, interrogating South African citizens on South African soil. That’s illegal.”

Last week South African authorities deported an Israeli diplomatic passport holder said to be working for El Al at the airport, reportedly delivering the Jewish state with an ultimatum that if the employment of El Al security guards is not better arranged within the week, all such guards would be deported from South Africa.

But Elizabeth Smith, a political counselor at the South African Embassy in Israel, claimed the matter had been raised by Israel, not South Africa.

“The initiative was not ours,” she told The Media Line. “The Israeli government has raised it with South Africa and at the moment there are bilateral discussions taking place in South Africa, not Israel. We are speaking to the Israeli government about issues that are of concern to both of us.”

Local Israeli media have reported that a team of Israeli diplomats have been dispatched to South Africa to try resolve the matter, but both the Israeli Embassy in South Africa and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to comment.

“Of course we are not involved in the screening of people or anything like that,” an Israeli foreign ministry official told The Media Line on the condition of anonymity. “Some of the security people are government employees and as such do receive some services from the embassy, but everything I would say about security would jeopardize security so I’d rather not comment further.”

El Al also declined to comment for this article, saying only that as a policy the company does not discuss security matters.

But a former El Al security officer, who asked that her name be withheld, defended El Al’s approach to security.

“I stand 100% behind the racial-profiling policy because I think it tackles the problem directly,” the former El Al security officer told The Media Line. “It’s foolish to ignore the fact that over the past four decades, practically all the hijackings and bombs on planes were carried out or planned by Muslims. In my opinion, most airlines around the world would prefer to check passengers and their luggage based on their religion or ethnicity, but they can’t, because it’s not considered politically correct and they don’t want to offend anyone.”

“An alternative would be to check the luggage of every single passenger who gets on a plane, but few airlines have the time or human resources to do that,” she said. “So you have to figure out a system and I think El Al’s system has proved itself quite well.”

The former El Al officer argued that it was important to distinguish between the effectiveness of a security policy and the style of those carrying it out.

“There’s a separate issue with El Al security, which is that security officers are sometimes rude and disrespectful towards passengers, whether Jews, Arabs or otherwise,” she said. “That’s a different matter that has to be addressed, but I think that a person can be checked on basis of his or her background in a dignified way, without the passenger feeling put down.”

Michael Bagraim, the national chairman of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies who initially represented Mr. Garb’s case against El Al, withdrew as his lawyer after seeing the Carte Blanche program.

“I found the program offensive,” Bagraim told The Media Line. “I didn’t know any of the other issues and it was a shock to me. I haven’t investigated it but I don’t think they do profile and I don’t think it would be unjustified if they did.”

“Either way, his case had nothing to do with profiling or anything like that,” he said. “He was dismissed because he had taken a complaint to the Department of Labor about not receiving his bonus. I believe he was dismissed unfairly.”

“But you can’t be malicious, trash El Al and at the same time want your job back,” Bagraim added. “So I felt his gratuitous attack on the employer was not acceptable and detrimental to the court case.”