Profiling at Israel’s International Airport starts the second passenger walk in the door and your answers to a few questions determines your fate inside the world’s most secure airport. 

Before the check-in counter, friendly 20-somethings, trained in behavior analysis, greet you with a barrage of questions.  “Why are you here?” “Who did you meet?” “Where did you stay?” Your answers combined with how you act (nervous, sweating, darting eyes, indifferent) earns you a sticker on the back of your passport with a number 1-6.  1-3 means you keep your shoes on and can take as many liquids as you want.  A 5 means each piece of luggage is unpacked by hand and checked for explosives. As one frequent traveler told me, “a 6 means you should just turn around and go back home.”

The former head of El Al security, Offer Einav,  explained the process gives screeners more time with the people who are  considered more of a risk: on average a young man traveling alone receives more screening than a family with kids.  He said over and over, the TSA method of treating every passenger the same puts every traveler at risk.  “If you are taking 100 passengers passing in front of TSA agent and none of them posing any kind of threat the curve is going to fall down and when the real threat is in front of him he won’t be able to recognize it. Its well known…the system is not working.”

What you don’t see at Ben Gurion airport are the body scan machines or invasive pad downs of kids.  Einav, now a consultant to the world’s airports, dismisses them as ineffective at best, “its meaningless its publicity its cheap populist  publicity to say we are doing something”. 

Of course the criticism of Israel’s method is that it ends up being racial profiling–Mohammad gets more scrutiny than Moshe—having been though the process often it sure doesn’t feel that way.  I have been singled out a number of times for questions so clearly the system is more than skin deep.