Si in Tel Aviv, Israel
Simon Lockington

Having done the Egypt experience, it was onto the next part of the trip which was travelling to Tel Aviv, Israel for a training course in some new products that our company is going to be selling.

I’d never really given travelling to Israel any thought until this trip came up. It hadn’t really struck me as a place I’d want to go. Especially given that pretty much the only thing you hear about Israel is when someone has blown themselves up and killed some Israelis, or the Israelis in turn, have blown someone else up. Not really tourist material.

When I mentioned to people that I was going to Israel, the first thing they would say is “Be careful” or “better you than me”. All great positive comments that were really encouraging me to go.

Still I’m of the opinion that you only live once. If your time is up, your time is up, be it back on the farm in New Zealand, in Melbourne City, or what seemed more likely, downtown Tel Aviv.

EL AL – THE MOST SECURE AIRLINE IN THE WORLD
El Al is the Israeli national airline. Given that Israel is one of the hottest terrorist targets in the world, El Al take security EXTREMELY seriously. They’ve been doing for decades what most airlines only started doing after September 11. They’re well known for being tough and somewhat unpredictable in what they might do. They may or may not let you on the plane, and they don’t really care if you don’t get on. It’s your problem not theirs.

You cannot get a visa for Israel, well certainly we couldn’t. You take your chances by flying to Israel and hoping that they’ll let you in. If they don’t, you’re on the next flight out on your dollar. It helps though if the people you’re going to see (in our case the company making these products) submits your information to the powers that be at El Al and Israeli immigration.

CHECK IN
Checking in at an El Al desk is an experience. When Don and I checked in there were more security people walking around than passengers. The process here is that you line up and you are ‘interviewed’ by a security person before you can even get close to the check in counter.

At first a woman came up and started talking Hebrew to me. I gave her the usual ‘naïve helpless person from a small harmless country’ look and she started speaking English. Asking me questions such as: “Are these all your bags?”, “Has anyone given you any presents to take to Israel?”, “Where are you staying?”, “Who are you travelling with?”, “How long have you known each other?”, “Is this laptop yours or the company’s?”, “How long have you had it? Has it been in your possession all the time?”.

I felt very much like you feel when you pull up at a random breath testing station on the road even when you haven’t been drinking. You know you’re innocent but you can’t help but feel guilty.

I was starting to get concerned when the woman left me standing there and turned up with a large Israeli guy who introduced himself as “Head of security for El Al, do you speak Hebrew?” Things are never good when you’re speaking to a head of security.

He ran through the same questions again and a few additional ones, but mostly paying particular attention to my laptop. He then instructed me to stay where I was while he checked me in himself.

Next I was told to put my bags through the x-ray machine. You will have seen these kind of machines at airports all over the world, but never have I seen one the size of this thing. It looked like it needed a nuclear power station hooked up to it to keep the thing going! I was pretty sure that it was going to wipe my laptop and render it useless after bombarding it with all that radiation.

Once my stuff eventually popped out the other end three guys came around and looked at it intensively while chattering to each other in Hebrew. Then a blonde girl said to me “You will pick these up and follow me”, which I dutifully did. You don’t mess with El Al. She led me off to some nasty looking room where I was sure I was going to get the rubber glove.

“You have a laptop in here?” she asked. I was tempted to say “Well it was a laptop until it went through that massive friggin microwave you guys have out there”, but thankfully I didn’t. It would have made things worse – much worse.

She hoisted my bags and disappeared behind a curtain while chattering to someone in Hebrew. Then she popped out and wanted my shoes off. I still had no idea what was going on behind the curtain. Eventually my bags came back out and she said “we are going to keep these bags and will return them to you once you board the aircraft”. Both my bags were carry on, but it didn’t look like I had much choice in the matter. I asked if I could at least have the laptop so I could do some work while waiting. She said “you can, but if they check it just before boarding and it presents a problem again, you won’t be able to board” which I took to mean “no you dumbass, you cannot have your laptop back”.

I was sent on my way, I spared a thought for the dude who was in there when I arrived and didn’t look like he’d be getting out any time soon… It’s not a pleasant process, especially when you don’t understand what’s being said while they’re busy going about their work.

Now that we were free of the check in area we started to make our way to the gate. What was interesting here was there was yet another security check point to get through. The same type of one that everyone normally has to get through on any normal airline. Except at this one there was a sign saying “El Al passengers to the right, everyone else to the left”. The Israelis obviously bring their own equipment to the party at these checkpoints cause everyone else had the normal sized metal detectors and x-ray machines. The Israelis however, had shipped in yet another jumbo sized, Cherynobl powered behemoth that no doubt had the capability of reducing items to a molten mess if something amiss showed up on the x-ray. Given I didn’t have my bags anymore and there wasn’t really much left on me to check, they took my cellphone away for intensive swabbing for traces of chemicals.

BOARDING
We eventually found the boarding gate. That’s another thing that’s not announced until late in the piece. The plane wasn’t at the gate at boarding time and I joked with Don that they’re probably out driving it around the airport randomly before quickly pulling into the right gate just to throw off would be terrorists. Ofcourse I didn’t say this loud enough to be heard by the Israelis…

Eventually the big Jumbo turned up and dumped it’s passengers followed closely by some El Al ground staff who came to the gate and told us all to leave and queue up so they could give us another security check. Just to keep us on our toes I expect.

With me being ‘a marked one’ I had to wait until last so I could collect my carry on luggage that had been taken off me at check in. Ofcourse being eager to do as many security checks as possible, the guy who was serving me proceeded to disassemble my laptop bag, play with the laptop, look at all the cords, ferret around inside my clothes. Then he wanted my shoes off while he played with my cellphone. Finally he lead me behind another curtained off area and asked me to take my belt off. At this point I was thinking “If he wants anything else off, him and his crazy country can kiss my ass, I’m going back to Australia”. Luckily he didn’t the belt was all he wanted (just lucky for him eh!). I was allowed to collect my things again and off I went.

By now, the whole security novelty was starting to wear a little thin.

MAKE IT SO, MR SPOCK
I sitting in the lounge minding my own business and feeling sorry for myself for being the ‘marked one’. Meanwhile Don is scouting the area like a meercat to see what’s going on. Suddenly he bursts out with “There’s Leonard Nimoy!”.
“Eh?”
“It’s Leonard Nimoy!!! Mr Spock!”
“What the hell?”
“Mr Spock! From Star Trek! There he is! I recognise his wife too!”.
Those of you who read my emails from Vancouver will remember Don as the Stargate fan. Infact pretty much anything that begins with ‘Star’ is something Don will be a fan of. I looked for Mr Spock and saw him, but didn’t really recognise him. However, you’ve gotta feel safe when you’re flying on the most secure airline in the world and Mr Spock is right there with you don’t you think?

Finally we start boarding, but not before a dude with an arm load of bullet proof vests goes on first.

Boarding the plane was chaotic at best. I don’t know what in the hell some people thought they were up to. They would find their seats, store their luggage then just stand around for no reason. Hell some even went for a walk around the plane to see if they knew anyone! At boarding time! Security guys are marching up and down the aisles talking into microphones and TELLING (not requesting) people to sit down etc.

The chaos didn’t stop at boarding either. After the pilot wrenched the big Jumbo off the ground in a take off resembling what is probably felt when fighter pilots take off from aircraft carriers, people got up and just started walking around. The aisles were as busy as the Hutt Motorway in New Zealand, or Citylink in Melbourne. One dude just walked up and down the aisles all flight reading his book. I was surprised he was allowed to do that actually.

Dinner came round and I was surprised as all hell to see that they gave you a metal knife. No other airline I’ve been on has ever done that. You’d have to be an absolute fool to do anything stupid on an airline these days, more so for El Al. I wouldn’t be AT ALL surprised to find that the stewardesses are trained in hand to hand combat, and are probably packing pepper spray at the very least.

WELCOME TO TEL AVIV
Applause erupted from all over the plane when we landed at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, followed closely by a whole lot of singing. Some dumbass made the mistake of standing up before the seatbelt sign was off and was told in no uncertain terms to “SIT DOWN!” in two different languages.

Getting off the plane was just as chaotic as getting on the thing.

Ben Gurion airport is a very modern, efficient airport. Everything looks very new and it seems to function very well. LAX should take notes here.

Filling out the immigration form is straight forward. The only difference here is that they don’t ask for your middle name, instead they want your old man’s name. Don’t know what the story is with that…

Actually even getting past the immigration guy wasn’t as hard as I expected either, wasn’t as difficult as Canada that’s for sure. I expect though the Israeli’s already knew everything they wanted to know about me before I even stepped on the plane at Heathrow.

Finding a taxi wasn’t too hard, although it was alarming when the driver called us the equivalent of ‘cowards’ for putting seatbelts on. Although the standard of driving in Tel Aviv is much, much higher than Cairo, there didn’t seem to be too much attention paid to the speed limit was we cruised through a 60 zone at 120km/h…

The area where we would be staying and working is a beach side high technology town called Herzliya. The hotel we were booked into was a resort on the beach looking out at the Mediterranean Sea, not too shabby at all.

The service wasn’t quite what we were used to. The door man (who was stopping everyone at the door to make sure they had a purpose for being in the hotel. He also had a gun) told us flat out that it wasn’t his job to order a taxi, go see someone else. I still wasn’t walking properly after the shafting I received for paying to use the internet to check our email, so I was ‘not amused’ at this point. Very rarely am I amused by any hotel’s internet services, they just about all try and put a shafting on you. The only exception to this was the Metrotown Hilton in Vancouver. Those guys have their act together. Listen up the rest of you hotels around the world, the time has come to stop shafting everyone on internet facilities! It just doesn’t cost that much!

Once the taxi had finally dropped us at the company who was going to be training us, we had to go through security checks to get into the building. An old guy sat at the door and went through our bags and occasionally waved a metal detector over us. He also had a gun.

As I said, we were in the technology heart of Israel. All the big names are here, IBM, National Semiconductor, SGI, SAP and the like.

We met up with our ‘minder’ for the trip, a guy named Yoav who had organised everything for us. Yoav took us around the building and introduced us to everybody. Everyone was impressed we’d made to the trip from Australia and were very nice to us.

We got down to the business of training then Yoav took us for lunch to a nice steak restaurant.

HEBREW
In Egypt, just about everyone picked us as being ‘foreigners’, whereas many Israeli’s can look very ‘western’ in addition to others who look quite Arab. As such just about everyone assumed we were Israelis and initially started to talk to us in Hebrew. Once again I brought out the ‘blank, confused look’ and they quickly realised and switched to English. In Israel, English is compulsory and is taught from kindergarten. Yoav said he also has hired additional English tutors for his children to make sure they are fluent.

Like many Arabic languages, sentences are read from right to left (as opposed to the more common western method of left to right), therefore everything is right aligned.

Yoav explained that like many Arabic languages, Hebrew’s foundation is built upon what I think he said was ‘the language of Babylon’. I can’t be too sure of this cause I was trying to cross a road at the time and I was having flashbacks of what happens to pedestrians in Egypt…

The character set of Hebrew certainly looked similar to that which we saw in Cairo, but because I couldn’t really tell what I was looking at, this is just a REAL rough, laymans observation.

We met a guy who’s name was spelt Chen, but in Hebrew is pronounced “Wwwhhhen”. They replace the ‘C’ with the sound that you normally make when you’re about to cough something up. I don’t mean to be disrespectful or anything, but that’s just what it sounds like.

The weather in Tel Aviv was spectacular the whole time we were there. Beautiful clear days with bright blue skies and normally around 28 degrees celcius. Very nice.

While there are quite a lot of dudes with guns and such, I never felt unsafe. I didn’t see anything untoward going on.

DINNER ON THE WATERFRONT WITH THE YACHTS AND ATTACK HELICOPTERS
Yoav took us out for dinner down at the waterfront, here there were lots of sailboats and lots of bars and nice restaurants. With the weather being what it was, there was no better place to have dinner.

Once we got the car (and ourselves, there’s metal detectors to go through to get into the shopping malls here) through the security checks, we stopped at an Irish bar (uniquely called ‘Murphys’. Not many Irish bars called Murphys huh?) for a couple of drinks before dinner. The waitress flicked between Hebrew and English like a light switch which was impressive.

Hundreds, probably thousands, of people ‘promenaded’ past on their way to who knows where while I bombarded Yoav with questions on Middle Eastern politics and his time in the Army. It comes as no surprise that military service is compulsory for three years in Israel and EVERYONE must do it, including girls. I pointed towards a couple of attractive looking waitresses and asked about the likelihood of them knowing hand to hand combat. “Most likely they will know it, yes. Israeli women are tough!”.

I was about to offer up my solution to Peace in the Middle East when the thunderous sound of a helicopter cruising past hit us. Being a helicopter nerd, I recognised it as a Cobra Attack helicopter. A skinny, mean looking thing bristling with weapons. Very bad news if you’re looking at the wrong end of it. I’d never seen one before in real life so I was pretty enchanted, so enchanted I forgot about my solution to Peace in the Middle East. None of the locals even bothered to look up.

Just as we were about to order dinner another two Cobra’s flew past which I thought was a bit of a novelty. But when two more when over, followed by another four, I started wondering if something was up, so I asked Yoav.

“What are those guys up to?”
“Ah, I think the Army calls it ‘marketing’”.
“Marketing!” I said “That looks like someone is about to get his ass KICKED!”
“Yes, it is likely someone will not sleep very well tonight. I am going to have the chicken wings, what about you?”.
Again, none of the locals looked up. I’m not sure how normal that kind of thing is, but it can’t be too rare if none of them looked up. Yoav thought they would be heading to the border to respond to some sort of trouble.

Two hours later it was dark and a larger helicopter came steaming past from the direction the Cobras had gone. “Possibly he is bringing wounded home”.

Looking higher up into the sky you could see the navigation lights of three fighter aircraft as they streaked back towards home. It seemed they too had been part of the ‘marketing’ campaign. Something tells me the intended audience got the message loud and clear.

Yoav said he would check the news to see what had gone on at the border, but often these things aren’t reported on. It wasn’t.

Welcome to the Middle East.

JAFFA
After dinner, Yoav was very keen to show us some of the sights of Israel. Given we wouldn’t have time to visit Jerusalem, he was enthusiastic to show us something, so we took a drive to the ancient city of Jaffa.

Jaffa is a harbour town 4000 years old. Real old school stuff. Yoav took us down the sea side via some of the old markets and pointed out a couple of the historical landmarks.

By now though, the travelling was catching up to both Don and I and we headed back to the hotel for some much needed rest.

FLYING OUT
After another day’s training we finished up our work and headed for the airport for yet another reaming by El Al. We were flying back to Melbourne via Hong Kong.

Yoav is a gold frequent flier with El Al so volunteered to escort us to the airport in the hope of getting us through security a little easier.

The interrogations started pretty much immediately with the security woman questioning Don and I in English then Yoav in Hebrew. She walked off with our passports to talk to her supervisor for a while. When she came back she waved us through to yet another pickup truck sized x-ray machine where my bags went.

The trouble started when the guy loading my bags onto the x-ray machine forgot to put a sticker on my laptop bag. This prompted the dude who was unloading my bags at the other end to get concerned and so I got waved over to the screening area.

Here they disassembled my laptop bag entirely while they carefully examined each and every cord. Someone else took all my clothes out of my other bag and start swabbing them for explosive chemicals. Not the half assed swabbing attempts you see at other airports, here EVERY article was done. Once happy they faithfully repacked my bags and sent me on.

Through passport control to a different check point and they did it all over again. By now I was really starting to fail to see the humour in this all but managed to keep my mouth shut.

As I said, Ben Gurion airport is a very modern facility, I went and bought some postcards to send back to mum and dad but was told I would be able to send them cause there are no postboxes in the airport, that would have to wait until Hong Kong. Great.

I was glad to get on the plane to Hong Kong. It had been a very long trip. Three out of the seven nights travelling were spent sleeping on planes which wears thin real quick. Israel was great, I would definitely come again. The security was a royal pain in the ass and was more intense than I had expected.

It’s a very modern country, certainly the parts that I saw were. It was a shame we didn’t have time to look at some of the more historical parts.

Not once did I feel unsafe or anything. Obviously you have to be sensible. I asked Yoav if he would take his family to the West Bank to which he gave a resounding “No”. As we saw with the attack helicopters, this is still the Middle East, things are different here.

I’m back in Melbourne now. It’s good to be back.

Till the next trip.

Si