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Elusive and Difficult - Peace in the Middle East
by S.K.
The journey
I recently had the opportunity to participate in an educational trip to Israel as part of a delegation from Taiwan, which participated in the Middle East Peace Initiative (MEPI) of the IIFWP – the International, Interreligious Federation for World Peace. For a German, who couldn’t help but observe the development in the Middle East with pain ever since I began watching TV forty years ago, this area of the world is certainly one of the more challenging spots and certainly not a place where I would chose to spend my vacation.
The experience began when we checked in at the EL AL counter in Bangkok. EL AL is not an ordinary airline. It is the airline of the nation of Israel. When you board an international flight you usually need to come an hour in advance due to the standard procedures like check in and immigration controls. That’s three hours with EL AL.
Standard procedure here meant personal interrogation by EL AL security personnel as to why we wanted to travel to Israel, have we been there before, did we know all the people in our group, did anybody join at the last moment, were we always in control of our hand luggage etc.? If there are 400 people on the flight these questions would be asked 400 times. Each interview took about ten minutes. Only who receives a pass in this step gets a stamp on his boarding pass and can proceed to EL AL check in, where it is exchanged for an EL AL version. The seating assignments, however, remained unchanged, IT systems have apparently been integrated.
Also, even though I checked my luggage in Taipei all the way to Tel Aviv, I learnt that every peace of luggage would be opened again for an extra security check up to EL AL standard. This happened in parallel to the interrogations. Our presence was not required.
But these administrational hazards were limited to the startup phase. Once we arrived in Tel Aviv the local representative handled all administrational issues transparently and effectively.
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