Flirting at Israel’s main airport can be as dangerous as carrying a bomb, as the creator of the key documentary about the Holocaust has been detained at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion after an employee claimed the 86-year-old tried to sexually harass her.

­According to Le Figaro, the woman complained that French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann “grabbed and kissed her all of a sudden, against her will.” 

The newspaper explained that the filmmaker was only “briefly detained”, adding that security procedures at Ben Gurion airport feature a “long and personal set of questions, often conducted by young women.”

A correspondent for the JSSnews online source, who was on the same flight as professor Lanzmann, however, insists that the filmmaker “never tried to kiss the employee against her will.”

“He tried to ease tension, dropping a phrase like ‘you are charming… If I was younger, I’d be courting you,” Joseph Rosch reports.

“It regularly happens that security employees [at the airport] exceed their duties to prove their incredible zeal, he adds. These employees are the only ‘bad memories’ that tourists flying from Israel are left with,” the journalist writes.

Rosch says that when Lanzmann finally regained his seat in the plane, he was shocked, saying ”Can you believe it? To do this to me, aged 86, after everything I’ve done for Israel…”

Crowned with the highest decoration of France, the Legion of Honor medal, Lanzmann made his name as the author of the nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah, which features interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses of Nazi concentration camps.

He is also chief editor of the journal Les Temps Modernes, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.