The airport
security apparatus’s routine act of strip-searching Ezies Elias Shehadeh, an
Arab teacher in a Jewish school, has generated too much media noise including Israeli
TV and radio reports and interviews and the main editorial in Haaretz http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.576995
Local Arabic
language papers veered off from their focus on the earthshaking Nazareth
mayoral election rerun destined to decide the future of the Middle East and the
world’s balance of power and nuclear armament, all to report on the teacher’s claims
of injured pride. At the risk of angering friends and foes alike, let me be the
devil’s advocate in pointing out the obvious:
For one thing,
Ezies exaggerates. What she underwent is the routine that Arabs have to put up
with as long as they refuse to swear allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state.
Let us not forget the special circumstances of this incident, an Arab woman put
in charge of Jewish youth for two decades. This, of course, triggers caution in
the minds of all sane security officers. All they did was to have the woman
take her clothes off and to feel around her arms, legs and scalp for explosives
worn as hairpins or jewelry or as a chastity belt. You go figure what a sick
Arab mind can concoct. In other sensitive circumstances requiring caution, such
as in high security incarceration facilities, all body cavities are inspected including
the performing of rectal and vaginal exams. We didn’t do anything of the sort
to this woman though the risk we have to weigh, that of endangering Jewish
lives, far outweighs such security infractions as drug smuggling in suspects’
orifices.
And this Ezies
is upset because she was the only one in the entire group, students and
teachers, who got the extra security inspection. You look at the woman in the
picture in the paper or on your screen on the Internet and you realize what
must be going through her mind. She must delude herself, as she manages to do
to most readers, that she is a westernized female. Think for a moment how an
Israeli Ashkenazi woman trying to pass herself as a Moslem Arab in Lebanon,
Syria or Iraq nowadays would fare. I for one wouldn’t trust her. And lack of
trust was all that we displayed towards Ezies. She must have forgotten the
favor our government has just done her community, the Christian citizens of
Israel. We passed laws designating them as our favorites, our pets, the least
despised among the non-Jews in the country. We openly declared them non-Arabs.
And the woman still complains!
And this sham of
Ezies trying to pass herself as a western woman has a wider implication than
first meets the eye: Think for a moment how much media time and how many
newspaper pages we would have wasted had we paid equal attention to every Arab
man or woman who underwent close scrutiny at the airport. We do that regularly
day in and day out without anyone making a fuss about it as long as the subject
is some old Moslem woman wrapped in hijab or an old Palestinian man donning a
kufiyah. So what if they miss their flight? It is our airport and our security
that counts. Think how much more is the damage that one such terrorist can
cause. When was the last time that a Palestinian woman in the image of a modern
Western model exploded on an El Al plane, you ask? Every day is my answer. It
is what goes on in their sick minds, not what they actually do, that worries
us.
Let us put
ourselves in the shoes of this Arab teacher at a Jewish school: She must ask
herself why do we have separate educational systems. And if separate, why do
Jews decide on our curriculum and policy issues. And if separate, why blatantly
unequal? She and the likes of her must think that their children deserve the
same as ours. She teaches at Tirat Carmel. Just join me for a tour inside
her mind, please. The woman knows that this town on the beautiful mountainside
overlooking the Mediterranean shore just south of Haifa was once, in the
lifetime of her parents, a prosperous Palestinian Arab village. And yet she and
her family couldn’t buy a home there and gain acceptance in its current Jewish
milieu. And she knows just as well as we do that many stone homes in the town
were built by Palestinians who are now unwanted refugees in South Lebanon or
being starved in Yarmouk or, at best, are internally displaced, Present
Absentees, who are transparent to Israel’s justice system. Believe me, when we
think about it, what the Palestinians have forced us to do to them is enough to
turn them all to terrorists. Regardless how flashy or wide Ezies’s sunglasses
are, she remains a suspect. We have to remain on guard for the likes of her as
long as she and her ilk deny us peace in our promised land, our Jewish only
state. It is them or us, believe me.
