Europe needs to coordinate its anti-jihadist measures
Israeli security experts warn that the Schengen Area — which allows Europeans to move freely around the continent — makes it easy for jihadists returning home from Syria or Iraq to move around and plan attacks.
I've been going in and out of the European Union several times over the past few weeks, using a European passport I obtained several years ago. Each time, the border control agent took a cursory glance at the binding of my old-style passport, which has no biometric information, and handed it back to me quickly. It seems as if he didn’t bother to check or confirm a single detail in the document, which then allowed me to wander freely across the 28 countries that make up most of the European landmass.
This sense of “free movement” is particularly apparent when compared to parallel experiences at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport. Every encounter I have with the border control police in Israel is accompanied by glances back and forth between my passport and me, steady typing into the computer and constant flipping between the pages. This procedure for entering the country is yet another layer in an intricate process of identification and prevention developed by Israel’s security apparatus. It is a long and sometimes arduous process of testing and deception that is an integral part of the battle of wits being waged with terrorist organizations.
The filtering and identifying techniques that Israel uses to prevent terrorist attacks on civil aviation and to keep terrorist operatives from entering its territory frequently provoke the ire of government agencies and human rights activists alike. They conclude that the procedures constitute a serious infringement of the individual’s basic civil rights. On the other hand, ever since the nations of the West in general and of the European Union in particular identified the potential threat posed by the “Islamic State’s Foreign Legion,” Israel has been receiving requests from intelligence agencies in those countries to share, study and implement the extensive know-how in this field, accumulated and developed here.
In the earliest phases of the Syrian civil war, Israeli intelligence noticed a growing movement of Muslims with an eschatological worldview, or jihadist mercenaries if you will, from Europe to sites where fighting was taking place.
