editorials
Collective Punishment for
Looking Jewish
W e struggle to contain our
indignation. The story is
upsetting. The video is chilling. The
apology was milquetoast. Lufthansa
Airlines blew it. But very few seem to
care. The saga began on May 4, when
a large group of Jewish passengers
were denied boarding on a connect-
ing Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt,
Germany, to Budapest, Hungary,
after several passengers reportedly
failed to comply with the airline’s
mask regulations on the first leg of
the trip from New York.

It is not clear how many pas-
sengers on the JFK-Frankfurt leg
ignored the mask rule. But it is clear
that all identifiable Jewish passen-
gers on the connecting flight were
punished for the offense. According
to the Lufthansa supervisor whose
remarks were recorded by passen-
gers, the airline’s intent for group
punishment was explicit: “Everyone
has to pay for a couple,” said the
supervisor. “It’s Jews coming from
JFK. Jewish people were the mess,
who made the problems.”
And so, a phalanx of German police
brandishing machine guns barred
identifiable Jews from boarding the
connecting flight, and Lufthansa
banned those passengers from pur-
chasing another ticket to Budapest
or anywhere else for 24 hours.

According to reports, there were
an estimated 135-170 Jews on the
Lufthansa flight, 80% of whom were
dressed in Chasidic garb. During
the flight, a pilot announced that
flight attendants were frustrated with
people blocking the galleys while
praying, and with having to repeat
themselves to remind people to
wear masks. Some of the Jewish
passengers on the Lufthansa flight
were part of a group on an annual
pilgrimage to visit the grave of Rabbi
Yeshaya Steiner, a wonder-working
rabbi who died in 1925 and is buried
in northeast Hungary.

But dozens of the Jewish pas-
sengers on the flight were not part
of the group or even going on the
pilgrimage. Nonetheless, anyone
who “looked Jewish” was denied
boarding in Frankfurt. As a result, the
connecting flight to Budapest, which
reportedly had close to 200 seats,
took off with only 20 passengers on
board. After reports and videos of the
incident went viral, Lufthansa issued
a lame “apology,” which failed to
acknowledge the enormity of the
offense, failed to articulate mean-
ingful remorse and sought to cast
blame for the mask violations on
a “large group” of Jewish passen-
gers on the first leg of the trip.

When that “apology” was roundly
criticized, Lufthansa’s CEO, Carsten
Spohr, called Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal
in Berlin, and told him that the antise-
Political Self-preservation
T he recent return of the Ra’am
Islamic party to Israel’s
precariously balanced government
shows just how significantly political
self-preservation motivates the
members of the eight-party coalition
led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett
and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid.

When first formed a short 11
months ago, the Bennett-Lapid coa-
lition had 61 members — a razor-thin
majority in the 120-member Knesset.

Few believed the delicate coalition
could survive the rough and tumble
realities of Israeli political life. But it
has survived, even through the res-
ignation last month of Yamina party
leader Idit Silman, which shrank the
coalition ranks to a 60-seat dead-
lock with the opposition. Since the
loss of one more seat will topple the
Bennett-Lapid regime, every effort
is being made to keep the coalition
together, even as Bennett and Lapid
10 MAY 19, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
themselves jockey for positioning
for the prime minister post should
the government collapse and require
new elections.

What keeps the parties from stray-
ing too far is the fear of defeat in the
next election. Each of the coalition
parties compromised some aspect
of its historic aims in order to join
the ideologically diverse coalition,
and each faces an uncertain future
were new elections to be called now.

Ra’am, with four Knesset seats, is a
case in point.

Led by Mansour Abbas, Ra’am
is the first Arab party to join an
Israeli government. In doing so,
Abbas made a pragmatic decision
to table the Palestinian issue and
work instead to get practical ben-
efits for his constituents, many of
whom are Bedouin in the Negev.

Abbas has focused on issues like
housing and fighting crime. And he
has made some progress. But he
needs the coalition to survive in
order to achieve more.

Abbas’ pragmatism set an import-
ant precedent that will enable other
Arab parties to join a Zionist-led
government, similar to the Haredi
Orthodox parties that have histor-
ically put their disagreement with
Israel’s existence aside to join gov-
ernments and reap the benefit in
generous budgets for their schools
and social services, in protecting
their exemptions from the draft and
in maintaining Haredi hegemony
over the rabbinate.

Last month, however, Ra’am froze
its membership in the coalition in
response to the outbreak of violence
on the Temple Mount. Almost imme-
diately, Netanyahu’s Likud sched-
uled a no-confidence vote in the
Knesset, hoping to topple the gov-
ernment. By rejoining the coalition,
mitic incident shouldn’t have hap-
pened and that employees involved
had been suspended. No details
were provided.

What is almost as upsetting as
the deeply troubling Lufthansa
offense is the lack of more vocal
and active expressions of indigna-
tion and outrage about the incident
from the organized Jewish com-
munity and others. We complain
regularly about antisemitism and
its pernicious infection of our soci-
ety. We complain regularly about
the hateful victimization of Jews
and the targeting of the Jewish
community. The Lufthansa story
checks all those boxes. And yet, the
broader Jewish communal reaction
to the Lufthansa outrage has been
remarkably restrained.

Why is it that when the targets
of blatant antisemitism are Chasidic
Jews we don’t seem quite so
offended? JE
Abbas doomed, for now, any no-con-
fidence vote.

Similar political self-preservation
played out late last week when
Matan Kahana of the Yamina party
announced his resignation as minis-
ter of religious services. As a result,
Kahana will resume his seat in the
Knesset, pushing out Yom Tov Kalfon,
who is viewed as a “weak link” in
Yamina, and who many feared would
follow Silman and join the opposi-
tion. With Kalfon gone and Kahana in
place, Bennett strengthens his coali-
tion and helps ensure that one less
right-wing resignation threat could
topple his government and enable
Lapid to become interim prime min-
ister. The permutations are mind-bend-
ing, with political self-preservation a
recurring, potent motivator to keep-
ing the coalition together. How long
that lasts is anyone’s guess. JE