A senior Israeli Druze diplomat has said his family's treatment at Ben Gurion Airport left him wanting to "vomit", as he hit out at being aggressively questioned by security.
In a Facebook post on Saturday, Reda Mansour, Israel’s ambassador to Panama, said his family were at a checkpoint on the approach to the airport when the security guard heard the name of the town they come from - Ussafiya - and pulled the car over, got inside, and demanded to see everyone's passports.
Mr Mansour described the security guard’s tone and attitude looking at his family as making him “want to vomit”, and said his daughter had described it as “irritating”.
“Ben Gurion, you can go to hell”, the diplomat wrote.
“Thirty years of humiliation and it’s still not over. You used to separate us at the terminal; now we’re suspects even at the entrance.”
The country’s Druze community numbers close to 150,000.
Mr Mansour, 54, recommended the security officers at the airport visit Ussafiya, which is home to the country’s main military cemetery for Druze soldiers who have died protecting Israel.
The airport issued a scathing response, saying: “When you meet more than 25 million travellers each year, there will be some who will choose to be insulted by their meeting with the security guard who is only doing her job.
“We too have friends and family, like you do, buried in IDF cemeteries. I suggest the honourable ambassador tell his daughter next time that security is doing everything possible to protect her and the country.”
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Yaakov Katz both publicly supported Mr Mansour.
Mr Netanyahu tweeted that he had spoken to Mr Mansour and “expressed deep appreciation for the way he represents the State of Israel in Panama.
“The Druze community is dear to our hearts and we will continue to work in every way to strengthen our brotherly covenant with them.”
Meanwhile, Mr Katz vowed to “act to ensure that this type of incident does not happen again”, telling the ambassador he embraced “you, your family and the entire Druze community.”
Nitzan Horowitz, leader of the Meretz party, described in a video how “for some of us, Ben Gurion is a place of humiliation.”
He said that Mr Mansour had been “humiliated in front of his family and children just because he is Druze, and this is what happens to Arabs and others too,” he said.
“It’s called profiling, where they evaluate a person according to his appearance, [ethnic] background and religion and this must stop.”
