Should Airliners Be Forced To Fly Through War Zones?

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D–N.Y.) claims that airlines are engaging in discrimination and enabling price gouging by canceling flights to the Middle East without government permission.

Airlines have a very strong incentive not to risk their planes getting shot out of the sky. And it's not just a hypothetical fear.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union shot down a South Korean passenger jet and the United States shot down an Iranian passenger jet, both mistaken for hostile military aircraft, killing hundreds of people. During more recent conflicts, Russian-backed militias shot down a Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine in 2014 and the Iranian military shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet over Iran in 2020.

So when Israel and Iran started rattling the saber at each other last month, foreign airlines took no chances. Many companies suspended service to Israel as well as neighboring Lebanon, which has been in a low-intensity border war with Israel, and Jordan, which was in the path of a previous Iranian air raid on Israel.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D–N.Y.) believes that this risk calculation is really an act of "discrimination against the Jewish State." In a letter first reported by Jewish Insider, he demanded that American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines "restore air travel to Israel" unless the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says otherwise.

"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 on security grounds as defined by the FAA," wrote Torres. "But to unilaterally suspend air travel indefinitely until mid-2025, as American Airlines has done, has the practical effect of a boycott."

Israeli and Emirati airlines are continuing to operate in Israel, noted Torres, so the real effect of the cancellations is that American travelers in Israel are "at the mercy of a de facto monopoly that can easily gouge prices with impunity." 

Torres did not mention the flight cancellations to Jordan or Lebanon, both of which also host large numbers of American citizens.

A spokesperson for United Airlines says, "We look forward to resuming flights as soon as it's safe for our customers and crew." Delta Airlines declined to comment. American Airlines did not respond to a request for comment.

In a follow-up social media post, Torres claimed that he was only "calling for a reform of the process by which air travel is suspended," not "an immediate resumption of flights without regard to security." He cited the FAA's decision to ban flights to Israel during a 2014 war as an example of sensible regulations.

On Tuesday, Rep. Marc Molinaro (R–N.Y.) reportedly asked the FAA for its guidance on flights to Israel, complaining that he has "hundreds of constituents who had booked flights to Tel Aviv that are now canceled by the air carriers, with no timeline for resuming."

But airlines don't always wait for government warnings to cancel flights—and doing so can be a costly, fatal mistake.

Iran kept its airspace open during military clashes with the United States in January 2020, allowing a Ukraine International Airlines jet to take off from Tehran and fly straight onto the radar of a jumpy air defense crew, who shot it down. A court in Canada, where many of the victims lived, found that the Ukrainian airline should have canceled its flight as soon as the missiles started flying, despite the lack of guidance from authorities.

In 2021, the government of Azerbaijan issued an air traffic control warning about clashes with Armenian forces, then took it back the same day. Foreign airlines suspended flights through the region anyway, not wanting to risk any surprises.

Twice over the past few months—once in April and again in August—Israel had to suddenly close its airspace due to incoming missile fire. Tel Aviv's airport shut down again on Monday morning due to a workers' strike protesting the government's handling of the war.

"It doesn't make sense for airlines to constantly launch service, only to then suspend it when the next security concern arises," wrote travel journalist Ben Schlappig in response to Torres' letter. "Airlines need to be able to do consistent fleet planning, and they can't just have planes sitting around, in hopes of maybe being able to fly to Israel."

Airline industry consultant and blogger Matthew Klint pointed out two reasons why Israeli airlines continue to service Tel Aviv while American ones don't. First, Israeli airlines do not have the same fleet planning concerns as international companies, since all the Israeli airlines' planes are based locally. Second, the Israeli national airline, El Al, can afford greater risks because it keeps dedicated antimissile technology on board its jets.

Klint called Torres an "imbecilic congressman" who is "acting like a petulant and stupid child" and "out of his mind in suggesting that US carriers are nefariously boycotting Israel."

The accusation of anti-Israel bias raises the specter of legal trouble for the airlines, because several laws impose financial penalties for boycotting Israel. Even though most of these laws protect companies' ability to make "normal business decisions," Torres' "threat itself is a power move," says Lara Friedman, president of the nonprofit Foundation for Middle East Peace.

"No private company wants to be dragged into these disputes over whether they're being antisemitic by boycotting 'the Jewish State,'" Friedman says.

Both the U.S. tax code and the Department of Commerce's Office of Antiboycott Compliance ban U.S. businesses from cooperating with foreign boycotts of U.S. allies, including Arab states' sanctions on Israel.

Several U.S. states have passed laws specifically to protect Israel from the Palestinian-led boycott movement. Many of these laws require state contractors to sign a pro-Israel oath, ban state pension funds from investing in companies that refuse to do business in Israel, or both. In 2022, the 8th Circuit Court ruled that antiboycott laws were constitutional, and the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.

Antiboycott laws have often been applied to protests against specific Israeli policies as well; multiple states punished Ben and Jerry's after the ice cream company announced that it would keep doing business with Israel but stop selling to Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories.

The market reaction to violent instability in Israel might end up doing more economic damage than any intentional boycott campaign. In June, the chipmaker Intel suspended a $15 billion factory expansion in Israel for unclear reasons. In July, the company running the Israeli port of Eilat went bankrupt as shipping companies avoided it for fear of missile attacks.

And so Israel's supporters have shifted from countering political pressure to actively intervening in the market. In August 2022, officials from over a dozen states successfully pushed the financial services firm Morningstar to remove "anti-Israel bias" from its investment ratings.

They accused Morningstar of singling out Israel and implicitly supporting a boycott through its research on political risks. In October 2022, the firm agreed to stop counting connections to the Israeli military or business operations in disputed territory as an investment concern.

Last week, Iowa's attorney general announced an antiboycott investigation into the investment firm MSCI Inc. because it gave a poor environmental, social, and governance rating to a company involved in Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territories.

Torres' letter can be understood in the same vein. Of course, getting investors to overlook reputational risks or international legal concerns is one thing. Getting airline pilots, crews, and passengers to fly into physical danger might be a much taller order.

"Unless the U.S. government says so, you can't make a decision in the best interests of your shareholders and the safety of your crew," Friedman says Torres' letter implies. "If that's what he believes, that's almost nationalizing the decisions of the private sector when it comes to Israel."