I left San Francisco at 8 am Monday and finally arrived at Ben Gurion Airport at 4 pm Tuesday. It is a long trip, especially with New York and Brussels stops. As expected, security for the El Al flight from Brussels to Tel Aviv was much tighter than usual. The security person asked a lot of questions about my trip. Interesting details like .... what is the name of the person who gave you those maps??? Fortunately the name of my friend Marvin Cohen did not provoke any alarm in the mind of the security person. She just carried on with more detailed questions like .... Where does Marvin live?? Is he married??It seems to be an effective technique ... I had nothing to hide but was momentarily trying to remember Marv's last name!
Luggage check is also much more thorough than usual when flying El Al: they make you go to the luggage transfer area, identify your bag, open it up and show what is in it. One of the other passengers was not so lucky: his large whiskey bottle had broken in transit so his clothes were smelling ripe and with broken glass throughout.
As I was boarding the plane I was thinking maybe I should have avoided El Al. With the conflict and Israeli bombings in Gaza and threats of retaliation, wouldn't El Al be a target? But then I remembered .... the association of airplane bombing with Palestinians is a myth like so many others.
Plane arrived on schedule at Ben Gurion Airport. No problem getting visitor's visa .... then headed for Jerusalem by shuttle service. As we dropped off other passengers it was interesting to see the different areas. Israel is very hilly and the hills are populated with apartment buildings as far as the eye could see. The area near the highway is heavily populated. It was also interesting to see how many Orthodox Jews are in the communities ...... they make a large portion of the population in the areas we drove.
