Two weeks ago I was packing for a cruise to the Adriatic and the Mediterranean when a friend called. The State Department had just issued a travel advisory for Israel, he said. Government employees have been prohibited from traveling to the West Bank and Gaza and urged to avoid East Jerusalem, including the Old City. It was my wife. I was just talking with someone at the office who said he's canceling his family's trip to Turkey next week because he's afraid they'll get caught in riots.
Vacationers are understandably skittish.
But sometimes it isn't easy to make last-minute travel changes. Sometimes business travelers are scheduled to attend critical meetings in a region they would otherwise avoid. In addition to scouring the Internet themselves, travel security firms draw on global networks of intelligence operatives to help make their own risk precautions and predictions. I must confess, right here, that basically this whole industry partly creepifies me and partly outrages me. The outrage arises from the fact that, ironically enough, given their obsession with intelligence details, such firms intrinsically play off and promulgate old fears, stereotypes and divisions.