"Has this luggage ever been used by someone else?" asked the El Al security official, a woman with a soft smile and long ponytail at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris before my departure to Tel Aviv last weekend. She eyed my weathered black bag, sitting on the floor next to a cubicle used for body searches and interrogations. "My husband sometimes uses the suitcase," I said. "Where has he flown?" she pressed. "Once to the Persian Gulf, I think," I replied. That might have set off alarm bells in her mind, but the "selector," as screeners for Israel's national airline are known, had meanwhile found a bigger problem.
Examining each stamp in my passport, she froze at a page with Arabic lettering.
"Where's this for?" she asked. "Syria," I said — one of Israel's bitterest enemies. I hurriedly explained: "I'm a journalist. I went there for the president's funeral."
She summoned a muscular male colleague.
"You traveling alone?" he asked. I replied I was.
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