Passports
By Sergio Della Pergola*
Israel is living a passport drama this summer. The Ministry of Interior ordered that the new passports will have to be biometric, which means they’ll have a chip with the owner’s picture and fingerprints. This system is quite common in other countries including Italy. The new passport allows faster border crossings using the dedicated readers. But not everything is easy in Israel.
Recently, a movement of purists emerged, united against the assumed privacy violation caused by the new kind of passport. For this reason, the Ministry has established that who doesn’t want the biometric passport can renew the old one, but only within the end of June which coincidentally marks the beginning of holiday season and of journeys abroad. Accordingly, the offices of the Ministry of the Interior were crowded with dozens of thousands of purists, making queues so much longer for people who simply wanted to renew their passports, without being against the biometric ones.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Tourism had enacted a provision under which the Israeli passport should be in force at least six months before leaving, without explaining why, however. For this reason, Interior offices are even more crowded by people whose passports are expiring until January/February 2018. Therefore, before the renewal procedure took normally three days, including the home delivery services, now it takes 14 working days. And what if someone has to leave and his/her passport has not arrived yet? Don’t worry: at Ben Gurion airport in Lod there’s a 24h special office that deals with extraordinary issues. The news has spread and on a daily base a thousand Israelis shows up at the two-window office from all over the country, from Metulla to Eilat, overheated and packed in like sardines. At the office there’s a third employee who hands out the number of the order (the method of the ticket and the electronic display as in the supermarket hasn’t been discovered yet) and the queue proceeds at a pace of 50 issues per hour.
It’s not a bad result, but remember that 500 issues make the queue to be 10 hours long. The crowd grumbles, but there haven’t been victims so far. And the best is yet to come. The small office of Lod doesn’t have the equipment to produce biometric passports (the compulsory ones), so it produces traditional one-year-lasting passports. These passports costs to the country twice the price of the ones legally issued by the Ministry of the Interior. The crowd blusters. In a year, or, better, before, they’ll have to queue again to renew the passport, mandatorily biometric this time.
At last here’s the explanation of the six-months matter: it’s not an Israeli request, but of the destination countries which don’t want Israeli tourists with expired passports. But what if someone owns another passport, maybe European, and wants to travel maybe in Europe? Well, in that case there’s no problem. But always after having queuing a lot.
Conclusion: the start-up nation has still some improvements to be done. For its part, the Ministry of Interior has nothing to fear, even if in another country he would have been hanged in the public square. Seen the current situation of political parties in Israel, Arieh Der’i of the Shas party is sure to be elected again. He can go on holiday in his beautiful little house in Galilea without any concern: he won’t need the passport there.
*Sergio Della Pergola is a full professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Translation made by Ilaria Vozza, student at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, intern at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.