grimey wrote:niss wrote:
That's true if you are flying TO israel on El Al but if you want to access the ticket counter for any airline out of Ben Gurion you get the same treatment. Everyone flying out of Israel gets the same security.
And how many guards do they have doing the interviews? We can't get qualified people to run an x-ray scanner, we're not going to find tens of thousands of guys to ask the same sorts of profiling questions over and over, with the knowledge and skills to do so intelligently. Israel can because they are (correctly) insanely paranoid about attacks against them, and so there's a motivation, and there's a large amount of pride in who they are, so there's a great deal of knowledge about their country. Israeli citizens see their security as a valuable public service. We see ours as a nuisance.
We can certainly take some things away from their security model, but implementing it completely just isn't an option.
So, just flew out of Ben G a couple weeks ago on Lufthanasa. Here is the drill.
First: no everyone does not get the same treatment. There was one gentleman who's discussion I overheard a bit. He was from the west bank area, and had considerable more security procedures to endure.
As for me, besides taking a long time (and being a bit sick at the time) it was pretty straight forward.
1. Security started outside the terminal. We passed through a checkpoint in the rental car. 2 or 3 guys there with M16's (or some such thing). A quick glance inside the car, and they waved us through.
2. Inside the terminal, find Lufthansa get in line to xray luggage. This was a crazy slow line. It seemed to take forever. While in this line, a young lady in a security uniform interviews passengers. Business or please? Business. What business? Training IAI. Do you have a formal invitation? yes- here. After a short consultation with a co-worker? supervisor? everything is in order. Then: Passport? Here. Thankyou- next.
3. X-ray luggage. Finally. On bag does not look so good- go to another desk. Young uniformed lady at this desk looked at x-ray. Do you have any Dead Sea products? Yes. Did you buy them, or are they a gift? I bought them. Ok, go ahead.
4. Check in at lufthansa. Bags gone boarding pass in hand.
5. Personal screening next. x-ray carry on, take out laptop etc. No grope. No naked xray machine. Also no taking off steel toed boots. You simply stand on a little machine with foot outlines. Light is green- go ahead. Done. very painless
6. Passport control. short line, show passport. passport stamped next. no fuss at all.
7. one last checkpoint- a bit of a bottleneck exit to ensure passport is stamped with an exiting stamp. then at the gate.
Done- through. I am told there are plenty of plain cloths security types wandering about, but I could not pick them out. No reason to think I could I suppose. They seemed (to me) to rely more on passenger profiling than technological gizmo's. I certainly did like not having to take off work boots for a change. They seem to have mastered this security thing with pissing a lot of people off. At least for an operation of their size.
