Thirty-five years ago, I decided to cast my travel lot with American Airlines and worked hard to gain preferential treatment as a frequent flier. My goal was to accumulate 2,000,000 miles, which would then give me Platinum Status for life. I often joked that by the time I achieved that status (it actually happened on a flight to JFK in May 2023), I probably wouldn’t be flying any longer.
However, I never thought that the reason I wouldn’t be flying would be because American Airlines wasn’t flying here. Bummer! Still, that’s where we are today, totally at the mercy of our supposed “national” carrier, El Al.
The recent Israel-Iran 12-day war exacerbated the difficult situation that existed when it was only Hezbollah and the Houthis lobbing missiles at us. In a full-fledged war, basically everyone except El Al stopped flying here, and even El Al was restricted for some time when we closed our air space.
The abrupt closing of our air space left tens of thousands of Israelis stranded abroad with no easy way to return. While most are now safely back home – how some of them got here would fill an interesting book, to be sure – the process of rescuing them and bringing them back left something to be desired.
We all recall the initial “rescue flights” by El Al when the IDF Home Front Command finally allowed limited service into Ben-Gurion Airport. For security reasons, the planes could carry only 50 passengers, as the authorities did not want more than that number of people in the terminal at any one time.
Obviously, rescuing 50 people at a time was simply not an efficient way to make a dent in the large number of Israelis stranded in Cyprus alone, which was the destination to which most Israel-bound flights were diverted when Ben-Gurion Airport was suddenly closed on the first day of the war.
When the skies finally opened up, it turned out that El Al did not allocate all of its resources to bringing back stranded Israelis but began bringing others here who had reservations for a given day and allocating just a small number of seats on each flight for those who were stranded.
An article in the June 27 edition of The Jerusalem Post detailed the travails of stranded Israelis in London, for example, who were told to come to the airport each day and wait in the hope that seats would be available, only to be turned away day after day when the one daily flight to Tel Aviv became full. That created the absurd situation of the airline carrying ticketed local passengers who were not coming from a place of physical distress, while Israelis stranded abroad for weeks who were also El Al ticket holders watched in total disbelief.
All of this added insult to injury as El Al was facing class action lawsuits amid allegations of price gouging during the 20-month war against Hamas.
What should the government have done?
What should have been the action of the Israeli government regarding bringing the stranded Israelis home? What is the responsibility of the “national carrier” as well in such a situation?
For those of us living here, we used to have a general feeling that we could always depend on our government to rescue us. It gave us a sense that we were safe, that someone would always protect us and rescue us. October 7 did a number on that myth, and what happened with those stranded abroad by the war shattered it further. However, if we accept that this is still a goal to which we are committed, two things should happen if, heaven forbid, we get into yet another war.
The first is that what the government must do in such a situation is to temporarily nationalize El Al. The government does have the power to nationalize industries, particularly in times of crisis or when deemed strategically important.
In 1983, for example, the major banks were nationalized. During the COVID epidemic, there was talk of nationalizing El Al as well, although a compromise was achieved when the government agreed to provide specific funding. So, there is precedent.
The next thing that should happen is that El Al be told that its first obligation, if it wants to keep its status as the national airline and retain the Magen David on its plane’s tails, is to get the stranded passengers back to Israel. The government would need to work out a compensation plan to cover El Al’s operating costs, but the framework of such a plan should be developed now, so that it could be used as a reference should it be needed in the future.
Finally, given that many of El Al’s passengers who will be holding tickets to and from Israel during this rescue period will not be able to travel, the airline should be exempt from paying any penalties to those passengers except to guarantee that they will be put on flights of their choosing sometime within 12 months with no additional fare required.
We can do all of this. What has always bothered me about living here is when we do something badly even though we know how to do it well; or, worse yet, when we refuse to use a technology that we developed and sell to the rest of the world. For example, we developed self-checkout technology for supermarkets but did not implement it here for some years after we were already selling it abroad.
In the case of rescuing stranded Israelis, I have no doubt that we have the brainpower to construct this simplified approach to what we hope will never be a problem again. Nevertheless, as the Scout motto says, “Be prepared.”
As taxpaying citizens, we deserve nothing less from our government and the airline that purports to be our “national” carrier.
The writer is the founder of Atid EDI Ltd., an international business development consultancy. He is also the founder and chairman of the American State Offices Association, a former national president of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, and a past chairman of the board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.