Israeli airline El Al is the only commercial airline to equip its planes with missile defense systems, and is considered one of the world's most secure airlines, thanks to its stringent security procedures, both on the ground and on board its aircraft. El Al offers only kosher in-flight meals, and does not fly passengers on the Jewish Shabbat or religious holidays. Now they’ve decided they will "immediately" remove any person from a flight who won't sit next to another passenger following the outrage of four ultra-Orthodox men who refused to take their assigned seats because they were next to women.
Airline employees cannot ask female passengers to move seats to accommodate men, according to a last year landmark decision by an Israeli court that could curb increasingly common requests from ultra-Orthodox Jews. The case was brought against El Al by Renee Rabinowitz, NBC News reported last year:
The case pitted Renee Rabinowitz, an 82-year-old who fled the Nazis during World War II, against Israel’s national carrier El Al.
"This is revolutionary," Rabinowitz's lawyer Anat Hoffman said in a statement after Judge Dana Cohen-Lekach handed down the decision on Wednesday.
"As it would be unthinkable to move an Arab passenger at the request of a Jewish passenger, a female passenger cannot be moved at the request of a Haredi passenger," added Hoffman, referring to a member of an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism.
Despite that decision from 2017, an incident last Friday at Kennedy Airport on El Al's New York-Tel Aviv flight prompted one of Israel's largest tech firms to say it would boycott the national airline. The women in that case were moved away from the men.
NBC News reports:
Barak Eilam, CEO of Ra’anana-based software company NICE Systems, said his company would not fly with the Israeli flag-carrier until it changed its “practice and actions discriminating [against] women.” "At NICE we don't do business with companies that discriminate against race, gender or religion," he wrote on LinkedIn.
While the flight attendants were busy “putting personal practice of faith ahead of individual rights and civil order,” the flight missed its turn for take-off and departed one-and-a-quarter hours late, Rotem wrote in a Facebook post.
"Anyone who flies in Israel's national airline company feels the values on which we built our company: egalitarian regardless of religion, race or gender," El Al CEO Gonen Ussishkin said.
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