elia suleiman puts the nakba on film

New developments continue apace in Egypt, and I'll write about them shortly.  But I have to take a break from current events to write about Palestinian director Elia Suleiman's latest film, The Time That Remains, which recently screened at Columbia as part of a film festival organized by the new, wonderful Center for Palestine Studies there.

I'm tempted to say The Time That Remains has eclipsed Annemarie Jacir's brilliant Salt of This Sea as my favorite Palestinian film, but that's really an unfair comparison.  Salt of This Sea is an extraordinary first feature by a filmmaker who surely has many great things ahead.  The Time That Remains is the masterpiece of a mature artist completely in control of his craft.  It's rare that you see a director's aesthetic and political vision so perfectly, flawlessly realized.

Suleiman is best known in the US for his 2002 film Divine Intervention, a series of loosely connected tragicomic vignettes (or tableaux, as Suleiman refers to them) about life under Israeli occupation.  Metaphorical, surreal, and often bitterly funny, they showed the banal absurdity of Israeli colonization, but many of the subtleties are probably lost on an American audience with little knowledge of Palestine's history.

In The Time That Remains Suleiman brings his trademark visual inventiveness and gallows humor to a far more linear narrative--the story of his own family from 1948 to the present day.  It is mostly the story of his father Fuad (Saleh Bakri), who was a young man in Nazareth in 1948, using his basement workshop to make guns for a Palestinian resistance that was hopelessly outmatched by the conquering Zionist militias that became the Israeli army.

Suleiman has an unparalleled eye for the individual moments of domination, humiliation and resistance that make up life under a repressive system.  He has a knack for creating scenes that are simultaneously blackly funny and deeply horrifying, as in the case of a madcap chase between doctors and soldiers over an unseen, wounded Palestinian who will end up either patient or prisoner in an Israeli jail.  When he turns his gaze to the original moment of conquest, the results are breathtaking.  The whole film is good, but the 1948 section is unforgettable.  Under the unflinching gaze of his breathlessly still camera, scenes of casual cruelty and brutality play out in long takes, businesslike and implacable, and we are unable to look away, because he won't let us. 

There is one scene in particular, a scene of stunning violence that takes place in a postcard-perfect olive grove, that may be one of the best scenes I've ever seen in a movie.  It is a perfect microcosm of the dynamics of occupation and resistance.  It should be studied by every film student ever as an example of how to film violence effectively.  There are no smash cuts or dramatic music here, and none are necessary.  At a key moment, the only sound is the wind in the olive trees.  The horror of the action speaks for itself.

As I watched the 1948 section of the movie, which is largely based on Suleiman's parents' letters and journals, it occurred to me that I had never seen some of these things on film before.  Is Suleiman really the first person to depict the Nakba in a non-documentary film?  I can't believe that's true, and yet I can't think of another example.

As we move closer to the present day, the narrative fragments into Suleiman's trademark vignettes, only tenuously connected and often dreamlike or abstract.  At the Q&A I attended, Suleiman said this was because the film becomes less his father's story and more his own as it progresses.  But I think there is a political message too.  The past is vivid, whole, and horrifying, while the present is suspended, fragmented and opaque, its meaning unclear.  The past is more real than the present, always there in the margins, as if it too is a present absentee.

Suleiman's family's story, like Palestine's, is a tragedy for now, its ending yet unwritten.  Out of it Suleiman has made a splendid film: beautiful, funny, breathtaking, and also heartbreaking.  More than anything, it made me want to make a movie, which is the highest praise I can think to give a film.

goodbye mubarak!

Man, I'm glad I stayed up late last night to write the previous post.  Because it's now out of date.

Mubarak is gone, toppled from power by a popular revolt and a mass strike wave.  Power has been transferred not to torturer-in-chief Suleiman (which I think the US would have preferred but the Egyptian people never would have accepted) but directly to the military.

The coming days will tell what military rule will bring to Egypt.  It seems very likely further battles must be fought.  But there is no doubt that the first stage of this revolution has ended with a resounding victory for the people and a defeat for the US empire.

No matter what else happens, several myths should be smashed forever: that Arabs and Muslims don't want or can't handle democracy, that ordinary people don't have the power to change things from below, and that the US government, powerful though it is, always gets what it wants.  This is a victory not just for Egypt, not just for the Middle East, but for the whole world.

Tonight the Egyptian people and their comrades everywhere will celebrate.  Tomorrow the struggle continues.

Tahrir Square tonight.  Photo credit: Matthew Cassel.

egypt's revolutionaries: smart, brave and lucky

I keep trying to sit down to write another post about the Egyptian revolution, but things are changing so quickly I can't keep up.  I woke up Thursday to reports that Mubarak was expected to step down.  Egypt was ecstatic.  But he didn't step down and now Egypt is furious.  Who knows what today will bring?

One of the defining features of the Egyptian revolution has been its amazing tactical flexibility.  Using tactics reminiscent of everything from the French Revolution to the Palestinian intifada, the protesters have consistently outmaneuvered a police state with as much repressive strength as any foreign military occupation.  Now a fascinating article in--of all places--the Wall Street Journal gives us an insight into how the protest that started it all was planned.  Answer: extremely well.

I'm not going to spend time recapping the article--you should just read it--but it involves a secret meeting point, some low-tech, decidedly non-online organizing, and the desperate hope that if a few hundred people turned up in the street with no cops around, thousands and then millions would follow.  And it shows the brains, creativity and sheer nerve of Egypt's new generation of radicals, mostly people my age and younger, who have never known an Egypt without Mubarak.

The mainstream media have repeatedly called this a "leaderless" revolution.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  There are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of leaders.  Just because we don't know their names doesn't mean they don't exist.  They do exist, they planned this revolution, and they planned it well.  For weeks they brainstormed how to get around the central tactical problem of any protest in Egypt: the fact that the police have huge numbers at their command and can physically surround (or "kettle," as the Brits say) any demonstration to keep it from moving.  They planned their demonstration like a guerrilla military operation--which, in a certain sense, it was--organizing in cells at times, using disinformation to confuse the cops, and accepting that some of the protests on the 25th could be broken up as long as at least one succeeded in marching.

These activists knew their city, their fellow citizens and their state, and the strengths and weaknesses of each.  They knew Cairo's enormous size could be used to their advantage by calling for many separate protests and spreading the riot police thin across the sprawling metropolis.  They knew how to avoid arrest and being spied on--frequently switching phones and sleeping locations, trusting certain information to only a few people--because they had been organizing under condition of dictatorship for years, whether in support of the Palestinian intifada, in solidarity with the strike waves that have rocked Egypt regularly for the past several years, or against the brutal police murder of Khaled Said last summer.  They knew the poor neighborhood where they planned to march was a place where no one used Facebook or Twitter, so they organized the old-fashioned way, with photocopied leaflets.  They had allies in the older generation--like the mother of one of the organizers, a veteran of Egypt's last wave of mass struggle, the 1977 bread riots.  And overall, after the success of the Tunisian revolution, they believed the moment was right in Egypt and had the courage to seize it.

In retrospect this plan looks brilliant, because it worked.  But it could have collapsed at so many points.  The police could have gotten wind of the secret 21st location.  The organizers could have been spied on or infiltrated and all arrested before they even got to the meeting point.  The mass of people they were counting on to protect them could have failed to materialize, hanging back out of fear instead of surging into the street.  If any of these things had happened, the leaders would have been isolated, arrested and tortured like so many before them--like many of them had been in the past, in fact.  This could so easily have been a suicide mission.  I'm sure at times organizers thought it was.  To even attempt such a plan required incredible courage--and the political astuteness to know that the time was ripe for the spark to start a blaze.

The times was ripe, as it turned out, and people have joined the protests in ever-increasing numbers.  Although there is no guarantee that the revolutionaries won't make a tactical mistake somewhere down the road, they haven't made one yet.  The proof is in the fact that the movement is still going and has gotten stronger.  Meanwhile the regime has pulled trick after trick out of its bag to try to crush the protests, with no success.  When Mubarak pulled his police off the streets to try to create chaos and looting, neighborhoods organized committees to defend themselves.  When he sent thugs into the street to attack the protests, people fought back, barricaded the square and drove the thugs out.  In a flash mass protests turned into street battles--highly organized and successful ones--and it is now possible to speak of front lines and positions taken and held around Tahrir Square.  When the regime stalled for time with fruitless negotiations (sound familiar?) the protesters used that time to widen and deepen the revolution, expanding the borders of the "liberated zone," organizing street protests that have only gotten larger, and in the last few days, organizing strikes that have the potential to bring the considerable weight of Egypt's working class fully behind the revolution in an organized manner.

In order to win a revolution you need to be simultaneously smart, brave and lucky, because when the stakes are so high one wrong move can kill you.  As dawn breaks over Cairo on the 18th day of protests--a Friday, the start of the weekend in Egypt--organizers are calling for a march to the presidential palace.  It promises to be massive.  At least 10,000 people have also surrounded the state TV building, with, it seems, the goal of taking it over.  The role of the army is still an unknown, and is the factor that I'm told many people on the ground are now discussing.  Momentum is still on the protesters' side, and at this point I doubt even a total bloodbath would roll it back.  No one knows what will happen today, but this revolution may very well be just beginning.

this isn't chaos. it's a revolution.

Events in Egypt have been unfolding too quickly for me to both follow the news and blog about it (while also doing other things like work, eat and sleep...no surprise, that last one is the first to go).  So although my last post was only three days ago, several important things have happened that need discussing.

On Tuesday there was a call for a "March of Millions," and the Egyptian people responded.  Somewhere between six and eight million people protested across the country--not just in Cairo but in Alexandria, Suez, and smaller cities like the industrial center of Mahalla, the scene of militant strikes in the past few years.  Somewhere around a million people poured into Tahrir Square.  The atmosphere was festive, elated, and completely peaceful.  All day people rallied in the square, doing things that would have been unthinkable a week before: chanting, singing, reading poetry over the rave-worthy speaker systems that have been set up, hurling insults at the dictator and talking, talking, talking--thirty years' worth of banned political discussion bursting forth in an exhilarated flood.  When it was time for observant Muslims to pray, hundreds of people prayed in the street, and Christians formed a human chain around them to keep them safe.

The announcement that Mubarak was going to speak "shortly" came on state TV around eight p.m.  Nearly four hours later, Mubarak turned up.  He announced he wouldn't run for a new term as president in September (something he also said when he was first sworn into office...30 years ago) and offered some other token concessions that may or may not ever be delivered.  No mention of lifting the emergency law, which gives police sweeping powers.  No mention of changes to the constitution that would allow freerer elections.  No hint of remorse for those killed and wounded by police and paid thugs in the past week--but rather aggressive rhetoric blaming the demonstrators for "chaos" and "violence."

Shortly after Mubarak's speech ended, two things happened in quick succession.  First, the streets erupted.  People were furious.  It was clear the speech didn't placate anyone.

Very shortly after that, crowds of armed pro-government thugs began converging on the protests in both Cairo and Alexandria.  The army checkpoints that had searched every protester for weapons--sometimes several times--mysteriously melted away in the presence of a mix of plainclothes police and paid thugs.  They were armed, organized, and attacked the protesters almost simultaneously in Cairo and Alexandria.  Clearly this had been planned in advance.  In retrospect, Mubarak's message was perfectly clear.  "This is all you're going to get.  Now get off the streets--and if you don't, we'll make you."

All night and into the next day, wave after wave of government-backed goons attacked the protesters, trying to drive them out of Tahrir Square.  But the protesters resisted--courageously, brilliantly, over and over again.

Western media had tended to report these events using phrases like "descended into chaos and violence."  That is not what happened on Wednesday.  It was not chaos or aimless rioting.  It was a pitched street battle, and an extremely well-organized one at that.  Protesters fought back with any weapon they could improvise.  Paving stones were torn up for ammunition, delivered to the front lines in bags and buckets and rugs.  Barricades bloomed out of scrap metal, Dumpster lids, furniture, even massive streets signs of the size that hang off overpasses.  People assembled shields and helmets out of anything they could find.  A makeshift hospital went into operation in a storefront mosque, the cubbies where people normally leave their shoes filled with medical supplies smuggled in through army checkpoints.  Hour after hour, men and women, young and old, fought back with incredible bravery and resourcefulness against stones dropped off rooftops, an "endless supply" of Molotov cocktails, and snipers shooting live ammunition.  And they won.  They held their position, refused to be driven out of the square, and by the end of the day had recaptured territory from the pro-Mubarak forces.

Those who lament the "descent" (really, escalation) into violence should consider the alternative.  The thugs were going to attack no matter what the protesters did.  There were only two choices--retreat or fight back.  Retreat and protesters would have been chased like animals through the streets, scattered, isolated, beaten and possibly killed in dark alleys, or arrested and dragged off to be tortured by a regime that has shown no mercy against far less threatening political movements.  The loss of control of Tahrir Square, so soon after the huge protest on Wednesday, would have been a huge psychological blow to the movement and might have demoralized people who came out to their first protest on that day.  The inexperienced and those with something to lose would have retreated in fear.  The militants would have been isolated and savagely repressed.  The only reason that didn't happen was that people decided to fight back.

The current reports are of between four and twelve people killed, all on the side of the demonstrators.  There are hundreds of wounded.  But if people had not fought back it would have been far bloodier, a massacre that could have broken the movement.  A young female protester, calling in to Al Jazeera English in the middle of the night, articulated the stakes very plainly.  "If we give up now, they will hunt us down," she said.  Her voice was shaking with fear.  But she wasn't planning on leaving the square.

All day today, protesters reinforced barricades, treated the wounded and fought off further attempts by thugs to penetrate the square.  They developed communication systems--banging on the iron railings all around Tahrir to signal when danger was approaching.  Someone jerry-rigged a street light so people could charge their cell phones.  By evening Tahrir was again home to several hundred thousand people.

Now dawn is breaking in Egypt on the day people have declared the "Day of Departure" for Mubarak.  In the past ten days the Egyptian people have demonstrated the full measure of intelligence, creativity, solidarity, courage and determination that human beings are capable of.  Regardless of whether Mubarak leaves today, they can win.

cracks in the american bloc

Once upon a time, a nuclear-armed superpower ruled over a host of client states by backing brutal dictators, who used state-controlled media, prisons, torture, and vast armies of secret police to repress dissent among their populations and ensure that the superpower's economic philosophy and foreign policy aims could be carried out unimpeded.

These dictators ruled for decades.  Any revolt was swiftly and violently crushed.  Their regimes seemed unshakable.  And then, within a year, all of them collapsed beneath the tide of a mass, democratic, nonviolent popular movement.  The movement not only swept away the tinpot client dictators, but washed back over the superpower itself and caused massive changes there.

I'm talking, of course, about the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91.  But surely you see where I'm going with this.  Today the "American bloc" in the Middle East is being shaken by a titanic wave of struggle that may be only in its earliest phases.  The Tunisian people overthrew a US-backed dictator who had ruled for 23 years--and have continued to toss out multiple interim governments that contain members of the old guard.  Protests (smaller, certainly, but still significant) have erupted in Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Syria, Yemen--even Saudi Arabia.  Not all of these nations are ruled by US-backed dictators, but their people all face similar, interrelated problems: a lack of basic democratic freedoms, skyrocketing food prices, infrastructure and social services gutted by IMF-mandated privatization and austerity, and chronic unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, while a handful of cronies at the top enrich themselves by selling off the country's natural resources to the Global North.

While all of these revolts have galvanized the Middle East, and the world, none has created so much hope and joy, and so many problems for the US, as the intifada that is shaking the cornerstone of America's imperial control of the Middle East, the most populous Arab country--Egypt.  Egypt's "president" Hosni Mubarak has ruled for 30 years--longer than two thirds of Egyptians have been alive.  His state security forces are ubiquitous, violent and terrifying.  His country was the first one the CIA turned to when setting up its torture-outsourcing extraordinary rendition program.  His government cooperates with Israel to maintain the siege of Gaza, against the wishes of the vast majority of his population, and is rewarded with $1.5 billion a year in US military aid.  After Israel he is certainly the US government's most important strongman in the region.  And now he teeters on the brink of being toppled.  For six days now, protesters have defied tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, live ammunition, savage beatings, mass arrests, threats of curfew, tanks in the streets and helicopters and fighter jets in the sky.  They have effectively driven Mubarak's internal security apparatus off the streets--not just in Cairo but in Alexandria, Suez, and many other cities across the country.  In a nation where political gatherings of more than five people are illegal, the people own the streets.

While these uprisings may appear to have erupted out of nowhere, like all mass struggles they are the result of contradictions in the system that have built up over many years, of long-suffered grievances and the learning curve of many small struggles.  The revolutions of 1989 seemed sudden and unexpected, even to people who participated in them.  But in retrospect we can see some of the signs that spelled the demise of the Eastern bloc a decade before its final collapse, things like the Solidarity movement in Poland and the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  (Hmm, sound familiar?)

Looking back, it's clear that the current round of revolt against the US agenda in the Middle East started with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, when young people all over the Arab world, born in the '80s and '90s, saw other young people just like them standing up to the tanks and bullets of a US ally.  In Egypt, the last three years have seen large, militant strikes by many sectors of the country's working class, which is diverse, powerful and well-organized.  What the revolution in Tunisia provided was hope.  Tunisia was the last place anyone expected a revolt, and yet just four weeks of protests drove out a dictator who had ruled for more than two decades.  It was only logical for people all over the Arab world, facing similar conditions, to ask "If they can do it, why can't we?"

Let us be clear on some things.  These are real revolutions in progress--the Muslim world's first revolutions since 1979--the first living revolutions many of us have seen in our lifetime as political activists.  They are democratic revolutions--against torture and police brutality, against one-party rule and for free elections, free speech and free assembly, and other basic civil liberties.  They are not social revolutions that battle the ruling class for control over the economic system...yet.  And no matter how much mainstream media pundits may froth at the mouth about "radical Islam," none of these movements are led or controlled by Islamists.  They are movements of Muslims, Christians and atheists, young and old, workers, students and unemployed.  Instead of being driven by one particular religious ideology, they are destroying the divisions between them.  On New Year's day a bomb ripped through a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, killing 21 people and injuring dozens more.  Today on the streets of Cairo one of the most popular chants is "Muslims, Christians, we are all Egyptians!"

It is far too early to tell how far things will go in the Middle East.  In Egypt, Mubarak totters but has not yet fallen.  The role of the army remains decisive and no one is quite sure how things will play out.  It is too early to start calling this the Arab world's 1989.  But it is not too early to imagine it.

I've written a lot and yet I'm not sure I've been able to convey the explosive joy radiating from Egypt's appropriately named Tahrir [Liberation] Square, the blaze of hope and courage and power and liberation that has lit up not just the Middle East, but the whole world.  But this video does a pretty good job.

their power and ours

There are at least three kinds of power.

1. Power over, which we might also call dominance, violence or force. This is the kind of power we normally associate with the term, because it is everywhere in our world. It's the kind of power that bosses and the state use to keep us under their control: the ability to extract a price for disobedience. In its milder form it may be the threat of being fired from one's job; in its more virulent strains it is imprisonment, torture, political murder. It is not quite accurate to think of this type of power only as violence, although violence is at its root. Really it is force and the threat of force, combined and working together. The threat of force has kept far more people in line than any actual act of violence.

2. Power with, which we might also call solidarity. The power of communities united in struggle, of collective self-activity, self-organization and self-defense. The practical application of the maxim "An injury to one is an injury to all." Solidarity is not just a slogan; it's a concrete weapon against attack by those with power over. Solidarity means both the most vulnerable and the most visibly militant are protected. A high degree of solidarity means a low number of collaborators, which is why oppressors will always do everything in their power to destroy solidarity--to break up communities, stoke divisions and mistrust, apply pressure to the weak and make examples of the strong.

3. Power within, which we might also call will. We're not talking here about the willpower not to eat that cookie (life is short--eat the damn cookie!) but about political will--the strength to keep fighting in the face of the various punishments those with power over can deliver. This is not an abstract quality delivered in a fixed measure to a person at birth, but something that can be nurtured and developed.

Will and solidarity are the secret weapons of the oppressed--the weapons that those who rule by force will never understand and therefore always underestimate. They are unlimited, renewable, and indestructible. They are shareable and giftable, available for use by any who are willing to share the risks of struggle. They may be smothered under the weight of repression for years or even generations, but they're never completely extinguished.

Will and solidarity are mutually reinforcing. We draw strength from others' strength, from the support of our friends, allies, comrades and community, from the knowledge that we're not fighting alone but are part of a whole much greater than us. Individual acts of courage and defiance inspire others, and communities keep individuals strong in the face of repression. This is why oppressors work so hard to isolate leaders, organizers and agitators--through prison, exile, intimidation, smear campaigns, etc. They understand that activists rooted in communities have a power far beyond their own individual actions.

This not to say that our side, the side of the oppressed and exploited, cannot or should not use force. I'm not a pacifist. I think if you're being attacked you have a right to defend yourself by any means necessary. It's not that we cannot use the tools of force--it's just that much of the time, we don't need to. Violence is not the last word when it comes to power. Even in situations of armed conflict between oppressed and oppressor, the oppressed side is never going to be able to match their oppressors gun for gun and bomb for bomb--the lion's share of the means of destruction will always be on the oppressing side. We make up the difference with the other weapons we have.

When dictatorships fall and empires collapse, the people who run them are often genuinely surprised. That's because they don't understand that there are kinds of power other than their own. Seeing only the value of power over, utterly convinced to the very last moment of the unbeatable supremacy of their array of tanks, guns, bombs, prisons and torture chambers, they have no idea that those they oppress could have weapons of their own, weapons more powerful than any they wield. They never realize, until we prove it to them and to ourselves, that we are stronger than them. 

Hat tip to Lisa Fithian, from whom I stole the basic framework for this post.

why you don't want american airport security to be more like israeli airport security

The TSA has been in the news a bit lately, what with their new naked-body-scan-or-groping policy, implemented just in time to be tested by on the bajillion people traveling over the holiday season.  The conspiracy-inclined might infer that the timing had little to do with actual threats of holiday-themed terrorism and everything to do with the fact that people are less likely to stick up for their civil liberties when airports are crowded and travelers are preoccupied with holiday stresses.

Then along comes this guy, an anonymous pilot who seems genuinely concerned about airline security, who points out some glaring and obvious security flaws at SFO.  Of course for doing this he had to be punished by the TSA.  But the real reason he's getting a security-state smackdown is not for posting potentially exploitable information on Youtube, but for reminding us that US airport security is a ludicrous dog-and-pony show.

Airport security in the US is mostly for show, and a little bit for profit.  Its primary purpose is to remind everyone flying on a plane to be scared of Terrorism, while making a big performance of examining your liquids and genitals, to promote the idea that the government is Doing Something about it.  Its secondary purpose is to serve as one of the leading edges of the security state, a mass social experiment in conformity, where Americans can practice quietly and uncomplainingly submitting to authority figures who do things like frisk small children.  And of course, the security industry is big big money for some people, like the companies who make those naked body scanners, who, you can bet, have friends and lobbyists in Washington.

In discussion of airport security and Doing Something About Terrorism, it's never too long before someone says the word "Israel."  Israelis, we are told, enjoy effective and efficient airport security despite the fact that their country is menaced by Terrorists all the time.  We should be doing it more like them.  Having recently flown out of Israel's Ben Gurion Airport, perhaps I can give you a picture of what Israeli security looks like up close.

There is a widely-believed myth that since Israel has spent more than sixty years waging a counterinsurgency campaign against the indigenous people they have dispossessed and held under military rule to create their country, Israelis must be really smart when it comes to anything involving security.  This is not actually true--although plenty of former Israeli soldiers and secret police officers have built profitable careers as "security experts" by claiming it is.  Israeli security personnel aren't smarter.  They're just more brazen and less apologetic about what they're doing.

The system of racial profiling at Ben Gurion Airport is so naked it makes the US's "random checks" look sophisticated and subtle by comparison.  Of the three people of color arriving with our Interfaith Peace-Builders delegation, all were tagged by security.  One was intercepted by a plainclothes officer as we left the jetway; the other two were flagged for interrogation at passport control, along with one white dude who made the mistake of visiting the Terrorist Nation of Sudan to work on a documentary film project.

Leaving the airport, there's a different routine (maybe to keep people on their toes?) that involves a number-based profiling system.  After a few initial questions at a security checkpoint outside the main terminal building, a profiler (yes, they call themselves that) slaps a little sticker on your passport and luggage, with a number from 1 to 6, which determines how much shit you have to go through before boarding your plane.  1 is safe (Israeli, Jewish, white); 6 is ZOMG TERRORIST (person of color; anyone looking remotely like they could be Arab or Muslim; "suspicious" internationals).  Yes, it's really that obvious.  No, I'm not making this up.

When I departed Israel via Ben Gurion Airport in August, I got a 5 at security on sight, just based on the fact that I was a young international traveling alone, without an obviously Jewish surname.  Once I got inside the terminal, the woman at the second security checkpoint ran my passport through their computers, at which point (I presume) some kind of security flag popped up, probably owing to the fact that I had been interrogated by Israeli security at a different border crossing a few days prior.  After running my name, Profiler #2 promptly upgraded me to a 6, the highest security threat.  I resigned myself to a strip-search and possibly more questioning.  As it turned out, I got away with "only" a closed-door pat-down with clothes on and a thorough bag search.  The security personnel I interacted with at the airport were not hostile and even seemed somewhat apologetic for the delay.  But far more aggressive treatment by Israeli security is commonplace if you're Palestinian, Arab or Muslim.  If anything, this just reveals the racism of the whole system.

Of course, this system is just as dumb as any other system of profiling you can come up with, because it relies on over-generalizations of "suspicious" behavior and persons--definitions which are of course written by the state based on its own prejudices.  This creates a circular logic as perfect as that found in any dictatorship.  You are suspicious because we define you as such.  I'd argue that the US has already gone pretty far down the road of Israelification, adopting practices of racial profiling that Israel has been deploying with impunity for decades.  In Israel we can see the grotesque spectacle of this system in its fully developed form.  It should be a cautionary tale, not an example to emulate.