In October, we jetted to Israel for a three-day weekend in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The inherent problem with long weekends in Israel is that weekends necessarily involve shabbat, which I can appreciate if you live in Israel and have family and a home to spend time and rest with, but as a tourist it puts a major crimp in your plans. As a general rule, I do try to do some research before we do long weekends, because it is not uncommon for sights and museums to be closed on Sundays or Mondays. But shabbat took that to a new level.
We flew into Tel Aviv on a Thursday evening. Friday morning, I booked us on a food tour that took up basically the entire day. By the time the food tour wound down in the early afternoon, shops were already starting to close down for shabbat. After the tour, we snuck back to a neighborhood so I could check out a jewelry shop I spotted on the tour. I ended up spending more money on jewelry than I ever had– BUT– they were 24 karat gold, beautiful, hand-shaped into a simple pomegranate motif (pomegranates are ubiquitous in the eastern Mediterranean, where they are a symbol of fertility). There aren’t many things to spend money on in Cyprus (besides horses), especially handicraft-type things, it was my birthday in two weeks, so I said, “Treat yo’self!”
For shabbat, I had an ambitious plan to drive to the Roman ruins in Caesarea (which we knew were open on Saturdays), and then up to Akko, which is an Israeli Arab city and therefore not a ghost town on Saturdays. It ended up being a lot more time on the road than we anticipated, but it worked out perfectly and we made it back to Tel Aviv just as the streets were filling up again after sunset.
We drove to Jerusalem on Sunday morning and spent 24 hours in Jerusalem before driving to the airport on Monday afternoon.
All my life, I had heard about the legendary security of El-Al airlines and Israeli airports in generally. In Larnaca, we checked in online and rolled up to the gate. Since we were still in Cyprus, we showed them our diplomatic passports and other than the routine security checks at Larnaca, we weren’t really screened. When we were leaving Tel Aviv, I didn’t see any epic TSA-style security lines, so I figured that after 9/11 the world had clearly just risen to meet Israeli security standards.
And then…I realized we were totally wrong.
We had entered Israel on tourist passports (which, by the way, don’t get stamped anymore– they took our picture at airport security and gave us a little entry card print out), so of course, we showed our tourist passports at security. And so began the most laborious and insane security search I have ever experienced. We had only brought carry-ons, which went through the x-ray machine as you would at any other airport in the world. Once through the x-ray, they cracked open our bags and began the real search. They quite literally touched EVERY SINGLE THING in my bag– clothes were unfolded, re-folded, and replaced. I carry a small pouch of medications (Ny-Quil, Day-Quil, Pepto, Aleve, etc). They picked up my blister packs of NyQuil– you know, the ones you can see the green gel caps through– and held them in their palms, presumably to decide whether this was the weight of a true pharmaceutical or some more nefarious substance. And then they found the spices I purchased in Jerusalem– fresh za’atar, harissa, and other spice rubs– wrapped in a clear plastic bag. They sliced open the larger plastic bag that had the smaller plastic bags within it, weighed them, and then tossed my harissa in the trash. WTF! Why? I asked, and they told me it was too heavy.
Having finished my suitcase, the officer moved on to my backpack. As she unzipped the last small pocket to search, she found my diplomatic passport. She immediately stopped what she was doing and said something to the woman who was still in the throes of searching Severin’s bags. (I should say, through this process, I think I saw steam coming out of Severin’s ears. He hates it when security messes with his meticulously packed bags. We actually contemplated interrupting them and telling them we were diplomats, but by that point they seemed like they were almost done. Seriously, the search lasted at least 5-10 minutes, enough time for us to get annoyed and then have a deliberative conversation about what to do.) I don’t speak Hebrew, but I know what panic sounds like when I hear it, and the woman stopped searching Severin’s bag and called over a supervisor. They incredulously asked us why we hadn’t identified ourselves as diplomats– we’re traveling on personal business, so we’re not supposed to (and, unspoken, sometimes in some countries revealing yourself as a diplomat only opens you up to more scrutiny, which we wanted to avoid!) They apologized profusely for the search, picked up my bag of harissa out of the trash and sheepishly put it back in my bag, and we were on our merry way.
Security aside, going to Israel was a great experience. It is one of those trips I’d file under the “Amazing trip I’d probably never take if I lived in the United States”– just because we don’t know or care enough about biblical stuff for it to justify the time and cost required to get there from California.
