US airline industry implementing effective 'boycott' of Israel by suspending direct flights: Dem rep

The U.S. airline industry is implementing what a Democratic member of Congress calls an effective boycott of Israel by suspending all direct flights in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. 

More than one year after the Hamas attacks, as the war between Israel and Iran-backed terrorist groups in the region continues, no major U.S. airlines are flying directly from the United States to Israel. Travelers departing the United States can only catch a direct flight to the Jewish state via the Israeli airline El Al. Meanwhile, airlines in Arab countries like the United Arab Emirates are still flying there. 

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., described this as an effective boycott in a letter to the CEOs of American, United, and Delta in August. 

"My understanding is that in order to travel to Israel, your only option is El-Al, which is gouging prices. So the lack of availability of air travel from [U.S. airlines] has led to price gouging. It has made air travel to Israel far less accessible and affordable to Americans, which is fundamentally unfair," Torres told Fox News Digital. 

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Torres said in his letter that the "lack of competition has made air travel to Israel less available and less affordable, putting customers at the mercy of a de facto monopoly." 

Fox News Digital reached out to El Al for comment but they did not immediately respond.

Unlike in 2014, when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) directed all U.S. carriers to suspend flights to Israel due to safety concerns amid rocket fire toward Tel Aviv, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines have decided on their own to stop all direct flights from the U.S. to Israel since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, absent of an order by the FAA. 

Since August, Torres said his office has had conversations with the airlines, but he has not received an explanation in writing regarding the motivations for stopping direct flights to Israel. 

"If the FAA were to conclude that it is too dangerous to travel to Israel, then every airliner should defer to the security assessment of the FAA. The trouble is that the FAA has said nothing. The silence has been deafening," Torres told Fox News Digital. "If the war were to end tomorrow, why would you need to prolong the suspension until 2025? And so the suspension of air travel from the United States to Israel has been so prolonged and so pervasive that it has the practical effect of a boycott." 

"The American airliners have done far more damage to the Israeli economy than the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] Movement against Israel could ever dream of doing. And I worry without a security assessment from the FAA, without an objective process, a dangerous precedent has been set on the politicization of air travel, for the weaponization of air travel as a means of boycotting Israel. And it's a powerful tool for boycott," Torres said. "In what universe and by what logic is it too dangerous for American Airlines and United and Delta to travel to Israel? But it's safe for UAE airlines to do so? Like just something is rotten in the state of the American aviation industry." 

Torres said he's described it as a "boycott in effect" and not an actual boycott because he cannot speak about the companies' intent, but he indicated that it is possible that the BDS movement could be involved.

"There was a concerted effort by the BDS movement to penetrate every sector, every industry of the American economy in the service of boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning Israel. And so there's no reason to think – it would be naive to think – that the American aviation industry is immune from the larger pressures of BDS," Torres said, speaking broadly. 

"If you're going to indefinitely suspend air travel to an American ally like Israel, then you owe the public an explanation," Torres added. "I mean, the United States is home to the largest Jewish population in the world, possibly second only to Israel. So we owe Jewish Americans an explanation as to why [U.S. airlines] have indefinitely suspended air travel to Israel." 

When asked about this, a spokesperson for United Airlines simply told Fox News Digital, "Our flights to Tel Aviv remain suspended – we look forward to resuming flights as soon as it’s safe for our customers and crew." 

The statement did not elaborate as to why the flights have been suspended. 

"Delta is continuously monitoring the evolving security environment and assessing our operations based on security guidance and intelligence reports and will communicate any updates as needed," a spokesperson for Delta told Fox News Digital. El Al is a partner airline of Delta. 

The FAA said in a statement to Fox News Digital that it "has not instructed airlines to suspend flights to Israel." 

"The airlines make their own independent decisions related to flight schedules based on their corporate safety and security risk assessments, among other factors," an FAA spokesperson said. "The Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) mirrors the alert issued by the Israeli government." 

Fox News Digital also reached out to American Airlines, but did not hear back. 

After seeing Torres' letter, Anat Alon-Beck, a corporate law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told Fox News Digital she has been looking into whether there is an effort to "deceive stakeholders, shareholders and regulatory agencies" regarding the U.S. airline companies' true motivations for suspending direct flights to the Jewish state. 

"Is it really an issue that revolves around safety, or are there other motivations, for example, political bias? Is there any bias coming from directors, from management, perhaps radical union pressure?" Alon-Beck said. "So I really don't know what's happening. And we have a responsibility to take a look at that because companies have fiduciary obligations. And if companies incur any financial losses, if shareholders are going to be affected, then companies in those situations might be liable for damages if there's really a failure to disclose what's going on." 

The professor said she is evaluating whether there's antisemitic pressure driving discrimination against Israel.

"And if that is the case, then we have anti-BDS laws, we have other laws, and companies should really take profit motivation into account and not subject themselves to political pressure," she said. "And so really our intention is to monitor the behavior of companies and hold them accountable." 

Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told Fox News Digital that he has seen "airline labor unions introduce BDS initiatives into their bargaining agendas, which obviously results in wrongful practices and coercion, for example, in terms of our conversation." 

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"The union has used BDS-related demands to pressure certain airlines' management to alter flight routes or to suspend business relationships or to revise operational policies related to Israel. And that coercion undermines management authority and forces decisions based on political agendas rather than lawful commercial considerations," Goldfeder said, without specifying which unions he was referring to. 

Like Torres noted in his letter, Goldfeder agreed that "of course, it is appropriate for airlines to suspend service based on safety concerns as defined by the FAA," but the current situation "was imposed by the airlines themselves without any order or directive from the U.S. State Department or the Federal Aviation Administration." 

"At this point, we can't say for sure that the airlines are definitively discriminating against Israel as a matter of policy," Ben Schlager, senior counsel at the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told Fox News Digital. "What we do know is that the airlines are facing groundswells of pressure within their own organizations regarding Israel and routes to Israel. That comes from labor, that comes from their employees, and that is manifested in their treatment of passengers and their treatment of Hebrew speaking and Jewish employees of these airlines." 

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"It's certainly, at this point, fair to raise the question about the exceptionality of the Israeli exclusion from flights, whether these two things are related," Schlager added. "In the end, nobody benefits because the only people that are most affected are obviously passengers and shareholders. And this is already proven to be, at least for some of these airlines, a costly decision for their shareholders."