Ministers such as Bechor Shitrit also opposed the maintenance of martial law to govern the Palestinians as conflicting with the article guaranteeing the equality of all citizens set forth in the Israeli Declaration of Independence: the involvement of low-level officers in looting, theft, rape and murder would, he thought, also complicate matters.
It was the permit system that formed part of the body of non-statutory regulations, enforced from the earliest days by the new-found military, that, in Shira Robinson's view, 'created a culture of racial profiling and served to criminalize the Palestinian public at large'.
The overwhelming majority of those arrested, be they Palestinians returning late for missing a bus, peasants retrieving flocks that had wandered from their set pastures, old men overstaying a permit during an evening visit to a mosque, women taking buses to markets to sell produce, were tried not in civil tribunals, but in military courts.
Local activists, fearing they would become residents of a 'new Johannesburg' but also reacting to the deaths of 22 Palestinian children from land mines and military exercises nearby, protested that the plans were based on racial grounds.
[5] Israel first introduced a new set of protocols for profiling potential terrorists for airport passenger screening after the hijacking of an El Al plane on 23 July 1968, and these have persisted down to the present day (2012).
He directed the airport authority to implement a policy of 'visible equality' and thereby put an end to the practice, regarding as humiliating, of racial profiling, in particular of Palestinian Israelis which had been in place for decades.
The result has been, in his view, that rather than seeking anomalous behavior ticks as risk identifiers, the Israeli system reflects the larger structural nature of Israel as a Jewish state, with 'ethnic and religious profiling' making up the core of the vetting.
[15] Many passengers have complained of the discrimination they claim to have suffered on entering Israel from intrusive searches based upon suspicion related to their Arab or Palestinian identity, or association with such people.
"[24] Scholars in Canada have recently written that:[25] "Israel has marketed itself as a global expert in combating the 'Islamic' or 'Arab' terrorism held to be responsible for the type of security threats associated with the 9/11 attacks, and with an intensification of profiling based on the techniques and experiences of the conflict zone of Israel/Palestine.
This is despite the reality that what might be labelled terrorist attacks—such as the one by an anti-Muslim activist that took the lives of 91 victims in Oslo and Utoya Island in Norway in July, 2011—often in fact defy the efficacy of racial profiling.