In 2019, I was part of a research project. One of the meetings took place in Eilat, Israel. A colleague of mine and me myself took a flight from Frankfurt to Eilat. There where 4 people on the Airbus - basically each of us had their own steward. It was wild. I think I'll never be able to recover my ecological footprint from that. From what I remember, the route was initially planned for the Eilat-Ramon Airport by Lufthansa, but wasn't yet open at that time. We landed on a military airport north of Eilat. Being two blokes in their mid- to end-twenties, we got questioned at the airport. He went to some muslim countries before, so… there were some questions to be asked by authorities.

When we left a few days later, we where greeted by a man at the checkout. No name tag, wearing a black suit. Spoke perfect german. Casually talking to us while we checked out. To this day I wonder if he was from Mossad or something. It was strange. It‘s pretty easy to develop some kind of paranoia in this setting.^^ Eilat itself was nice, though. Many Russians where on vacation there back in the days.

On our flight back, we boarded the plane with three other people.