Going, Coming, Going
By: Larry Gordon
The young men and women who struggled to find a flight back to New York from Israel prior to Pesach are hopeful that the new reality with Iran and the tough stance of President Trump will allow them to return to their yeshivas and seminaries with fewer complications.
These days, Israel’s primary carrier, El Al, is either busy announcing a marked increase in the number of flights between New York and Tel Aviv, or declaring they are halting service, leaving passengers frozen in place like an international version of Freeze Tag.
For the most part, let’s hope that the lopsided, unpredictable flight schedule can return to its normal routine. And that seems to be the goal, with El Al saying just a few days ago that they are adding over 50 flights a week from the Northeast, with seven additional flights leaving New York on a daily basis starting in the near future.
As we head into spring and summer, normalizing the flight schedules could not come at a better time. Going back to the 1960s, our family had a tradition that our parents would spend the summer in Israel. Since then, if Israel was not wildly busy with tourists during the summer months, then something had to be terribly wrong.
To that end, the last few years for travelers heading to Israel have been rough. This situation with Iranian ballistic missiles being slung from every direction is far worse than the Covid pandemic. It may sound insensitive, but if you traveled during Covid and took ill, that was mostly your problem. War is a different matter.
Over the last two months, we’ve been dealing with radical, deranged people, and not just the crazed Mullahs and Ayatollahs in Iran. If you understand the nature of their brand of radical Islam, then you know they’re waiting for their Twelfth Imam to reappear, and some of the more extremists among them are actively paving the way for their “global Islamic rule” by inflicting terror on their enemies. Whether this Imam ever existed in the first place or is imaginary is up for debate.
This bubbe meise doesn’t go that far back as this Twelfth Imam disappeared in Lebanon in 1978. He’s known as Musa al-Sadr, the spiritual leader of a Shia sect of Muslims, whom many radical Muslims believe will reappear at the end of time.
That’s not only a wild and crazy story, but one that Iranians have bought into and is the reason why they feel free to attack their Sunni Muslim brothers in countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, etc. These other Islamic countries might buy into this legend, too, but they seem more inclined to be moving in the direction of modernity as opposed to the Iranians, whose leaders live in high style while the rest of the population lives in a situation of squalor and oppression.
We’ve pointed out in the past that countries like Turkey and Iran are Islamic but not Arabic, which is why there’s a great deal of tension between the Arab and non-Arab countries.
But more than anything else, this is about Israelis and people like us who look forward to traveling to Israel without being intimidated by Iran and its proxies in Lebanon and Yemen—Hezbollah and Houthis, amongst others. This has to stop and right now we have the best way to get to that point.
If things go well and hopefully, they will, there are a number of airlines getting ready to resume regular daily service to Tel Aviv. For example, even though El Al tends to start and stop on a constant basis, major airlines like Delta and United are not planning on resuming flights to Israel until September. In the meantime, American Airlines is planning on resuming flights in July. Air France resumed this week, and Lufthansa and Swiss Air are planning on resuming flights to Israel at the end of May.
Lots of students have flights scheduled for right after rosh chodesh this weekend to continue their studies in Israel. Fortunately, except for a Hezbollah missile here and there, things have quieted down. The killer air show has subsided for now. Hopefully it will remain that way. Israel has unique but also terrible enemies. These awful people know how important Israel is to the worldwide Jewish community. They love interfering with our comings and goings. In the meantime, a good deal of Iran was destroyed during this war. Was it worth it to them? They are politically deranged enough to have to think about that one.
Read more of Larry Gordon’s articles at 5TJT.com. Follow 5 Towns Jewish Times on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for updates and live videos. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome at 5TJT.com and on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
