The Flight 002 Election

gingertop

Thu, Nov 22 2018, 11:16 am

I thought this article about the ElAl fiasco last Thursday was very good:

Last Thursday, as New York was struggling with the obstacles presented by 5 mighty inches of snow, El Al Flight 002 to Tel Aviv, scheduled to depart at 6:30 p.m., was delayed. It finally took off at 11:45 p.m., which, ordinarily, is hardly the stuff of front page news. Except that shortly after its landing, the flight became not only the subject of explosive nationwide controversy but also a perfect metaphor for so much that is wrong—and so much that is right—with Israeli society.

The first accounts of Flight 002, appearing in the Israeli press on Saturday, were grim. The snowstorm, in this version of events, caused an inevitable delay, and when the Haredi passengers on board learned that the flight would arrive in Israel only an hour or so before Shabbat, they began to riot. A poorly lit, grainy video was produced, taken onboard the flight, showing religious men flailing their arms and shouting. And a famous passenger—Shimon Sheves, the former director of the Prime Minister’s Office under the late Yitzhak Rabin—posted a widely quoted account of the flight on Facebook featuring “hands raised in the air,” as Sheves described it, “hitting stewardesses, who, in turn, burst out crying.” El Al’s official statement said bluntly that the company will pursue legal charges, “with determination and without compromise,” against any passenger behaving violently.

For 24 hours, the impudence of the Orthodox was all many Israelis heard about, online, on air, and in print. But then Shabbat ended, and the religious passengers on board Flight 002 returned from Athens—where the flight eventually made a pit stop to allow those who wished to observe Shabbat to deplane—with a very different story.

So what really happened en route from New York to Tel Aviv? As we now know, three noteworthy things: First, the delay was caused because the crew arrived at the airport three hours late. Sure, it was snowing, and the roads were a slushy hellscape, but virtually all of the flight’s 400 passengers realized that and had the good sense to allow plenty of time for travel. The professionals of El Al weren’t quite as attentive or wise.

Even more maddening, once the passengers, still on the ground and growing irate, learned that the flight would not land in Israel in time for Shabbat, many asked to return to the gate so that they could leave the plane and spend the weekend stateside before making other travel arrangements. The flight’s captain asked everyone to sit down and buckle up, promising his passengers that he was merely taxiing back to the gate. Instead, without providing any further updates, without adhering to the requisite safety protocols, and in blatant violation of his promise, he simply took off for Israel.

Under the circumstances, you’d understand why the passengers, having been disrespected and lied to, might be upset. But the best was yet to come: When Yehuda Schlesinger, a passenger aboard Flight 002 and a reporter for Yisrael Hayom, returned home from Athens, he saw the viral video that allegedly documented those rascally Haredi men flexing their muscles and threatening violence. He recognized the clip, because he had shot it with his smartphone on Thursday night and shared it on social media. There was only one small problem: The video Schlesinger took was of Haredi men singing and dancing to cheer each other up under difficult circumstances; the video shown on Israeli TV was edited and given a radically different soundtrack, one featuring men shouting in a menacing fashion. When Schlesinger, incensed, pointed this out to Israel’s Channel 10, they apologized and claimed that the soundtrack was swapped due to technical trouble. The term for that in Yiddish is fake news.

But while Israel’s national airline proved to be incompetent, its media mendacious, and its mandarins seething with contempt for their observant brothers and sisters, there’s another side to the story of Flight 002 that deserves to be heard. Far from being uniformly Haredi, as early press reports insisted, the passengers who rushed against the clock in Greece were a wildly diverse bunch: black hatters and wearers of knitted kippot, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, men and women from all across Israel with nothing much in common save for the tradition that has bound us all for millennia. Welcomed by Rav Mendel and Rebbetzin Nechama Hendel, the local Chabad emissaries, these stranded passengers, according to their own accounts, passed a joyous Shabbat, enjoying each other’s company and the spirit of the holy day despite being separated from their luggage and their loved ones waiting at home.

If Israelis are indeed slouching toward elections—as of this week, the government is still teetering on the brink of collapse—you need only look to Flight 002 to discover the nation’s real divides. With the Israeli left having eroded into irrelevance by insisting that only further concessions can stop the surge of terror, voters aren’t divided by significant ideological differences. Instead, Israelis, like Americans, fall squarely into the two camps visible on board the Boeing that snowy night last week. In one corner are those who keep their faith, who come together in times of crisis, and who expect the conversation to remain respectful and those in power to remain accountable. If you’re wondering about their values, just watch Schlesinger’s undoctored video and ask yourself when was the last time you reacted to a major inconvenience by finding some stream of inner happiness and bursting into song in public.

The group in the other corner, sadly, isn’t quite so cheerful. A former senior government official, news reporters and editors, a major airline: All could’ve returned quietly to their homes, taken a long shower, brushed off the ordeals of their ill-fated flight and gone on with their lives. Instead, they felt a need to concoct a sickening little story of the religious behaving badly, drawing on very little evidence and a lot of animosity toward the deplorables who dare expect that the national carrier of the world’s only Jewish state might show some consideration when it comes to observing Shabbat. There’s a term in Yiddish for that, too: It’s prejudice.

One group sang songs and broke bread together, grateful for the gift of community. The other wasted not a moment before taking to the media and portraying their fellow passengers as a benighted mob disdainful of all that is enlightened and good.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to politics anywhere in the world, you already know which group is likely to prevail in the long run: In Tel Aviv, in Tampa, in Tottenham, and elsewhere, cataclysmic coalitions of tired citizens are coming together, forming movements that are as much personal as they are political. Often, these movements are composed of folks who have no real coherent agenda except the pain of yet again turning on the TV and seeing themselves cast as the butt of the joke, listening to the news and hearing themselves blamed for all ills, reading the paper and learning that their self-appointed moral and intellectual betters have again dug up an opportunity to scorn them. They’ve had enough, and when they vote, they often just vote against that well-dressed person in the emergency exit seat who gently shook her head at the mere sight of a beard and sidelocks or a covered head.

That’s the troubling news. The good news is that while the aircraft of Israeli statehood may, like Flight 002, suffer some occasional turbulence, it always lands safely, and there’s plenty of room onboard for anyone, of any denomination or disposition, capable of coexistence and respect.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewi.....ction

etky

Thu, Nov 22 2018, 11:38 am

And this was the Jerusalem Post editorial today. Seems like ElAl made the wrong judgement calls every step of the way:

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/.....72477

Airline horror stories are legendary, and there is hardly a flyer in the world who does not have a tale of woe that they have experienced. But what happened last week has already become legend for an airline’s denigrating treatment of its passengers, a conduct exacerbated by the ensuing handling of the incident. The result was a public relations debacle and a stain on El Al that claims “it’s not just an airline. It’s Israel.”

The story begins last Thursday in New York City, where predictions of snow led everyone to plan ahead, including the 400 passengers flying to Israel on El Al flight #002, all of whom made it to the flight on time.
Except the crew.

So they arrived late. Passengers boarded at 8:30 a.m., but with the runway backed up in the snow, #002 had to wait its turn. The clock was ticking. Soon passengers started doing the math: it’s a nine-and-a-half-hour flight, Israel is seven hours ahead and Shabbat starts in Jerusalem at 4:04.

The pilot announced that the plane would soon take off and would land before Shabbat. After two-and-a-half hours sitting on the tarmac, it was now 11:40 a.m. and several dozen passengers stood up and asked to exit the plane. When flight attendants told them that they would forfeit their tickets they still agreed, because of course they would not willingly break Shabbat.

The pilot announced that he would return to the gate as soon as everyone sat down, and that anyone who wanted to deplane would be allowed to do so, while those who wanted to continue to Israel could stay aboard.

That’s what the captain said. But what he did all of a sudden to everyone’s shock, was taxi down the runway and take off.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Yehudit Rossler from Monsey, New York, said: “They kidnapped us from New York. They told us we were going back to the gate, and took off instead.”

Fanning the flames of discontent building among the passengers, four hours into the flight the captain told the passengers that because of the Haredim, the plane would stop in Athens to disembark the religious passengers who would spend Shabbat there. Non-religious passengers would also have to deplane and wait for a new one to take them to Israel.

Naturally, the non-religious passengers started blaming the religious passengers for the situation – but the pilot never explained that El Al rules prohibit landing in Tel Aviv on Shabbat.

Blaming the flight’s diversion on the requests of the religious passengers naturally fueled the growing tension. Voices were raised, but violence? Almost every blog and column denies seeing any mass violence taking place, although it was falsely reported that passengers did jostle a flight attendant.

When the plane landed, and the story started to get out, El Al was caught in a pickle: Whose fault was it? Who can be blamed?

El Al dumped it on the haredi passengers: it was an unfortunate weather problem, we were handling it OK, but then the religious ones went crazy – they rioted, they assaulted the crew!

Asked by the Post on Sunday what happened, El Al refused to answer, releasing only the same feckless statement two days in a row.

Four days after the incident, El Al CEO Gonen Usishkin said the company would set up a committee to investigate what happened. What took so long?

The next day, Usishkin admitted that the Haredi passengers had not gone wild or attacked anyone on the flight.

El Al needs to investigate why the flight attendants were late; why the flight was not canceled; why the religious passengers were not allowed off the plane in New York; why the captain outright lied to the passengers when he said he was returning to the gate and then took off; and why the 400 passengers had to wait until 11:30 p.m. Saturday night to get a flight back from Athens to Israel when Shabbat was over just after 5 p.m.

El Al also said that it would be filing a complaint to the police for violent behavior on the flight. The public deserves to know how many passengers it is filing complaints against or if the violent-Haredi narrative was just a ploy to begin with.

Don’t hide, El Al. Tell the truth.