President speaks to Israeli ambassador over alleged mistreatment at airport

President Reuven Rivlin speaks to Israel’s ambassador to Panama, who said security personnel at Ben Gurion Airport delayed him and his family when they found out he was from an Arab village in the country’s north.

Reda Mansour on Saturday published a summary of his conversation with a security officer at the vehicular entrance to the airport on his Facebook page. He said that as soon as the guard heard the name of his hometown, she told the driver to pull over.  She got into the vehicle and told all the occupants, including Mansour’s wife and two daughters, to present their passports and identify themselves, Mansour wrote.

He compared the guard’s tone and body language to an army commander dealing with new soldiers in boot camp. Mansour, 54, is a member of Israel’s Druze community and from the Druze-majority village of Ussafiya, near Haifa. He is a veteran diplomat and has previously served as Israel’s ambassador to Brazil and Ecuador.

Mansour concluded the post with strong language, saying “Ben Gurion, you can go to hell. Thirty years of humiliation and it’s still not over. You used to take us apart at the terminal, and now we’re suspects even at the entrance.”

The Foreign Ministry is investigating the incident.

“Without getting into details of the incident, which is being investigated, I emphasized that what matters is what he felt, and if he was hurt, we must give it our attention,” Rivlin tweets, hailing the alliance between Israel’s Jewish majority and Druze minority.

“We must ensure that we are worthy of this [the Druze-Jewish relationship] at all times, and not merely in times of crisis and war,” writes Rivlin.