Invisible Discrimination

Last week a colleage of mine pointed out to me a newspaper report, claiming changes to airport security in the Ben-Gorion airport in Israel. The article reported that from now on Arabs and Jews will receive security tags of the same color; before the tags came in three different colors: Green, Yellow and Red. This report had provoked a positive reaction from Arabs, including me, but our joy was premature, apparently the colors will be the same, but the length of the security checks will remain different; instead now they will use numbers on the tag for racial profiling.

A few years something similar with done with id cards. Identification cards used to contain a race (or ethnic group) entry, usually it either said Jewish or Arabic, but then they changed it, they did not completely remove the entry, instead they just used stars; the number of star specifying whether one is Jewish or Arabic.

The conclusion? They don't want to go away with racial profiling, just hide it and make it less obvious.

In an earlier posting I made a case against racial profiling of Israeli citizens at the Ben-Gorion airport. Last week I even had a discussion with a Jewish colleague over the matter. Two days ago an Arabic Muslim religious man from Kofor-Manda, a town adjacent to Shefa-Amr, grabbed a gun from a security guard, and try to shoot Jewish people in Jerusalem. My argument was based on statistical considerations, and one single incident should not effect my rational. Yet these kind of incidents will push back any effort to reduce racial profiling. The arguments may still be rational but they are likely to fall on deaf ears.