Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York is calling on U.S. airlines to reconsider their long-standing suspension of flights to Israel “to prevent the appearance and substance of discrimination against the Jewish state.”
Torres, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, sent a letter to the CEOs of American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines on Wednesday expressing concerns about their decisions to suspend flights to Israel without the FAA advising that such flights were unsafe. Torres’ letter comes just over a week after American Airlines announced it would extend its suspension of flights to Israel through April 2025.
“The suspension lasted so long and was so comprehensive that El Al, an Israeli airline that offers direct flights from America to Israel, is now the only airline offering direct flights from America to Israel. The lack of competition has made air travel to Israel less available and less affordable, leaving customers at the mercy of a de facto monopoly that can jack up prices with impunity,” Torres wrote to American Airlines CEO Robert Isom, Delta CEO Ed Bastian and United CEO Scott Kirby.
Torres referred to the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) controversial 36-hour ban on U.S. airlines flying to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in 2014 during Israel’s war against Hamas this summer, and pointed out that the FAA has not issued a similar order at any point since October 7, 2023. Instead, Torres accused the airlines of “arbitrarily and unilaterally” “imposing their own travel ban to Israel, independent of any FAA order.”
“Airlines should be prohibited from effectively boycotting or otherwise discriminating against the world’s only Jewish state. It is one thing to temporarily suspend air travel to Israel for safety reasons as defined by the FAA. But unilaterally and indefinitely suspending air travel until mid-2025, as American Airlines has done, has the practical effect of a boycott,” he wrote. “Given the arbitrary duration of the suspension, one would think the BDS movement had taken over the American airline industry without anyone noticing, let alone calling foul.”
“By what logic and in what universe is it safe for El Al to fly to Israel, but too dangerous for American Airlines, Delta and United? It is worth noting that UAE airlines such as Etihad, FlyDubai and Wizz Air Abu Dhabi continue to fly to Israel without incident,” asked Torres, questioning the logic of their refusal to fly to the Jewish state.
An American Airlines spokesperson told JI in a statement at the time of the suspension of flights to Israel: “To provide additional flexibility, we will expand our travel advisory and allow customers whose travel plans are affected by this adjustment to rebook or cancel at no charge and receive a refund. We will continue to work closely with our partner airlines to support customers traveling between Israel and European cities with connections to the United States.”
News of American Airlines’ suspension of flights until 2025 followed Delta’s recent announcement that it will not operate flights to Israel until September 30 of this year, months after announcing now-scrapped plans to resume flights from New York’s JFK airport to Tel Aviv in June. After United Airlines suspended flights to Israel indefinitely after briefly resuming limited operations in March, American was left with only El Al as a direct option to travel from the US to the Jewish state.
US airlines continued to suspend flights after Iran launched an attack on Israel in April, firing hundreds of rockets that were almost entirely intercepted by Israeli and regional air defense systems. More recently, Iran has threatened Israel with retaliation for the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in Tehran since the attack that incapacitated him last month.
“One of the goals Iran wants to achieve is to economically isolate Israel. This is just another sign of that,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told JI at the time of the flight cancellations.
United Airlines mentioned the flight disruptions in its earnings report for the second quarter of this year, acknowledging in a section on “forward-looking statements” that the war between Israel and Hamas was one of the “geopolitical conflicts, terrorist attacks or security events” that had led to disruptions to usual travel routes.
The quarterly report states: “The suspension of our overflights in Russian airspace as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict and the interruption of our flights to Tel Aviv as a result of the Israeli-Hamas military conflict, as well as any escalation of the broader economic consequences of these conflicts beyond their current magnitude” are among the areas in which “the airline’s actual results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to numerous factors.”
In the days following October 7, the American Airlines pilots union ordered its members not to fly to Israel until they could be “sufficiently convinced of the security of the region.”
Meanwhile, another union linked to the industry called for action against Israel. The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) joined a coalition of unions to demand an end to the “death and devastation” in Gaza and an end to all military aid to Israel.
