There's a frood who really knows where his towel is

The first rule of intergalactic travel, according to Douglas Adams, is "don't panic." This is undoubtedly good, but hopelessly impossible advice for life abroad, so we're just going to move right along to the second rule: always know where your towel is. A towel is the interstellar hitchhiker's universal passport. A good metaphor comes to mind for international travelers, which is your actual, um, passport. But for most countries I've been to, the towel is infinitely more useful. According to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, not only is the towel your ticket to space rides in spacecraft in SPACE--already pulling a lot more weight than my passport--I can use it for warmth as I " bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta"; I can "sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon"; or if I am especially enterprising, "use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth or wet it for use in hand‐to‐hand‐combat." These are just a few of the myriad possibilities of life with a towel.

My passport, in contrast, allows me to cross some imaginary lines without being shot by some very non-imaginary guns--but not always! (Hello to our North Korean friends.) To be fair, it also occasionally gets me preferential treatment at currency exchanges--but not always! (Hello to our British nemeses.) In Russia, the requirement that you carry your passport around at all times is a critical driver of economic growth, because it allows the police to extort bribes when they catch you without it. Woo. Compared to the towel, my passport is looking mighty underachieving.

That was, until I came to Israel.

Some things you need your passport to do in Israel:

-Enter the country
-Exit the country
-Get a visa to work for no money
-Pick up a package from the post office
-Join the gym
-Acquire a discount card from the grocery store
-Purchase a public transportation card

Your towel will help you do none of these things. Moreover, your towel isn't even that useful for normal, towel-like functions. This is currently my favorite part of the Internet:

Drying off is not a goal with which Israelis regularly encounter difficulties.

But do you know where they do encounter difficulties? Getting anything else in life the fuck done because you have to have your passport on you for everything. Why does my grocery store need it to give me discounts? Why does the gym care if I've been to Cuba? Of what possible use can my visa be to my bus driver? This isn't just a rant, I actually know the answers to these questions.

You see, when these places take your passport, they never just glance at it and give it back to you. They give you forms to fill out with all of your personal information, then they take your passport and forms to a mysterious back room for several minutes before returning it to you, with no explanation of what they have done with it in the meantime. Possibly because I don't have the language skills to ask. The point is, as Princess Leia once astutely observed, they're tracking us.

No doubt the Israeli government would dispute the notion that they're following my bus transfers in the hopes that I'll lead them to the rebel base. I've had some experience with how the Israeli government justifies the tabs they keep on the population, because I had to go through a rigorous background check to get my security clearance to work at the Supreme Court. Yes, the court officer asked me a series of very rigorous questions, all of which could be basically paraphrased as, "Have you ever talked to an Arab person ever?" and the penetrating follow up, "Good God, why?" Then she checked the box for alcohol use without bothering to ask me about it, made me waive my medical confidentiality, and sent me on my way.

Let's back up to the part where she made me waive my medical confidentiality. I made a bit of a stink about this, which surprised the security officer almost as much as encountering a Jewish person with no family or friends in Israel, not to mention one who had talked to Arabs ever. After failing to soothe my ruffled feathers with the ol' classic "If you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't mind if we comb through the results of your last pap smear" line (note: if I had anything to hide, I certainly wouldn't be hiding it there), she assured me, in a pretty legit display of quick thinking, that they would never look at these records unless I had a medical emergency at the Court and they needed to know how to treat it. I suppose because having the security guards access my medical records themselves in this situation would somehow, in an amazing feat of efficiency and competency by the intelligence bureaucracy, be more useful than calling an ambulance?

Uh-huh. And the bus service is tracking my movements in case I'm on a bus that gets blown up and they need to identify the victims. No, I'm pretty sure the buses are recording my whereabouts in case I am, in fact, the terrorist, and the security officers who want a peek at my medical history are about equally concerned with my personal well-being. But with the crack team of grocery store cashiers, bus drivers, and postmen on the case, they know I'd be a fool to try anything. Next time someone in Israel asks me for my passport, I'm handing them a towel.


Mossad, this one's for you:

Note: I sat on this post for a several days, until I found out that I did, in fact, pass my security check. I may be indignant, and as my friend Miguel has helpfully noted, functionally illiterate, but I'm not stupid.