Strip Search: It's How We Say Shalom!

Apropos of David Frum's despicable chuckling over Palestinian humiliation at Israeli checkpoints ("Sounds like an ordinary morning at Dulles Airport"), here's Alison Weir, founder of the excellent website If Americans Knew, on the Israeli practice of strip-searching non-Jewish women and children.

Sometimes mothers and children are strip-searched together, at other times little girls are taken from their parents and strip-searched alone. Women are required to remove sanitary napkins, sometimes with small daughters at their side. Sometimes women are strip searched in the presence of their young sons.

All report deep feelings of humiliation. Many describe weeping at the degradation they felt.

"I remember crying and pleading with my mother," Gaza journalist Laila El-Haddad recalls of an experience when she was 12-years-old, hoping that her mother could convince the Israeli official to allow her to keep her undershirt on. But parents are unable to shield their children, El-Haddad and others report.

"They had machine guns," El-Haddad explains. "We just had to submit." El-Haddad, who holds a Masters degree in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, believes that the intention of the strip searches is to humiliate Palestinians so that they won't return to Palestine.

Oregon attorney Hala Gores remembers being strip-searched at the age of 10. Her family, Palestinian Christians from Nazareth, were leaving Israel because of Israeli discrimination against Christians. Gores has never returned to her family's ancestral home in Nazareth, she says, in part because she does not want to repeat the experience of having no control over what is done to her.

...

Israeli practices vary and seem to be applied randomly, from elderly women to small children. In some instances women are taken into a room alone and are left sitting naked for hours. At other times they are strip-searched in groups, their clothes thrown in a pile. When they are finally allowed to get dressed, they describe having to rummage through the heap of clothing, naked and barefoot, to find their own garments.

Does this resemble David Frum's experience at Dulles? Has his wife ever been forced to remove her sanitary pad, and then left to sit for hours in a pool of her own menstrual blood, as happened to Palestinian-American Maysoon Zayid? If so, as I wrote before, he should consider filing a complaint.

How It Works, pt. CDLVII

Providing a wonderful example of how right-wing Israeli propaganda works in this country, David Frum cherry picks one seemingly innocuous passage from Jamil Hamad's essay about checkpoints, and uses it to minimize the daily brutalities and the intentionally humiliating structure of the Israeli occupation:

Time magazine's Jamil Hamad angrily denounces the latest indignity inflicted upon the Palestinians. In order to enter Israel, they have to ... put their possessions through a scanner.

"Some days they make me take off my jacket, other days, my shoes or my belt. It's very frustrating, especially when you get behind a woman with lots of earrings and bracelets who doesn't know how the machine works — and there are hundreds of people pushing and shoving behind you."

Sounds like an ordinary morning at Dulles Airport.

Right, and when kids had to trap rodents to feed their starving families in South African Bantustans, it was just like Cub Scout Camp. People frantically hiding in latrines during the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto? Hide and go seek!

I've been through Dulles Airport many times, and maybe I've just been lucky, but I've never been held at the security check for six hours while the shift boss ate lunch and took a nap, leaving his underlings to make cruel ethnic, religious, and sexual remarks to me and my family as they took turns trying to lift my wife's dress with the barrels of their rifles. If this has been Frum's experience at Dulles, he really should consider writing a letter.