Sarfraz Manzoor

I am in Israel this Easter weekend, a more appropriate place is hard to imagine. I am here for a panel discussion organised by the British Council but this evening was spent wandering around the old city in Jerusalem through narrow alleys lamp lit and cobble stoned paths. It feels so special to be here, for all the obvious reasons- the importance of this city to Muslims, Jews and Christians as well as just this sense of all this place has been and meant to so many. I was fully expecting the immigration experience at Tel Aviv airport to be a bloody nightmare. Let’s be honest there are few times when being a Muslim male with a Pakistani heritage, born in Pakistan albeit now with a British passport is a USEFUL profile to have as a traveller but right now it downright sucks. Those arrests in Britain, the general pervasive concern that Pakistan seems to be an incubator for all sorts of extremists means that to be honest if I was an Israeli airport official I’d be pretty suspicious of someone like me. Someone like,me, not someone who is actually me. Because I expected there to be some tough questions I took the precaution of taking two Observer travel articles that had me on the cover as well as my book. If that doesn’t prove who I am what the hell will? In the end I was met by a lady as I got off the plane who asked a few questions, I then reached passport control and the woman there asked me some questions and she then pointed me to a room at the back where I waited til a bloke called for me. He took me to another room, asked me the purpose of my trip, what my job was, where I was staying and so on. As it happened I had good answers for all that so he said all fine and asked me to go back to the room and wait and then some time later ANOTHER bloke asked me pretty much the same questions and I answered them too and then he asked me to wait some more and then finally I got my passport and everything was fine. In the end the whole thing took around an hour longer than if I didn’t have a Pakistani name, birthplace and heritage.
As I say, on the whole I am not massively upset by it. I honestly think that everyone has a right to be careful who they are letting in and that’s especially true in this country and I was never disrespected, the questioning was never beyond appropriate and in the end I didn’t feel hugely humilated. It would of course be nicer if I could have just swanned past passport control like everyone else, but right now perhaps that’s too much to ask for. The thing it did make me wonder was if I wanted to come again to Israel just for a holiday would it be even harder than this time which was for work? And the other thing it made me wonder was what if anything someone like myself can do to demonstrate that I’m not a security threat. I am lucky in having my articles and book but if I was similarly well intentioned but without that sort of visible evidence how could I show that I wasn’t worth hassling?