Israeli airport security intentionally weaponizes uncertainty and surveillance against all travelers

Evidence

On a recent visit to Israel we had an impossibly early morning flight that required a 3 a.m. airport check-in. Expecting relative sleepiness at the airport, we were shocked to find ourselves in a terminal busier than any airport worldwide at the height of rush hour. Pressed between seven or eight layers of formal security passage from the drive into the airport until one boarded the flight were irregular lines of people pushing and pulling, stress-making uncertainties about what line one was in or what the line was for, where one was headed or how long it would take. Watching over all of this seemingly random chaos were further layers of all-seeing eyes, some mingling easily in the crowd, others overhead, picking out panic, distinguishing difference amidst sleep-deprived activity: a too quick movement, furtive looks, sweat on the brow, foam at the corners of the mouth, too obvious attempts to blend in, a mixed couple traveling under different names, on different national passports signaling different places of origin. Israel’s vaunted security management apparatus, as Ella Zureik calls it, immediately available for export to the rest of the world. The civic equivalent, one might say, of carpet bombing Baghdad. Insecurity manifest through unnerving norms, shock and awe. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 676

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the argument in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ about how state control operates through norms — here security theater as spatialized control of bodies.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘airport security as epistemic violence’ — how state surveillance quietly subjugates everyone by design, not just suspected targets.