John Kerry landed at Ben Gurion Airport despite the FAA flight ban.
24/07/2014, 16:31, Korin-Lieber, Globes
President Barack Obama is the supreme commander of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which suspended flights to Israel Tuesday night, extended to Thursday morning (in the middle of the night, Eastern Standard Time).
Was this due to an aviation risk? An anxiety attack? A hasty clerical decision? Was it bureaucracy, technocracy, or the politics of threats? US law grants the FAA the authority to make decisions in professional matters. It usually confines itself to giving "advice" that amounts to a professional recommendation. This week, it issued a notice to airmen to refrain from landing in Israel. In a press release, FAA spokesperson Kristie Greco wrote that the decision was a response to the rocket that fell less than 1 km from Ben Gurion Airport. She was referring to the rocket that fell in Yehud.
The instruction, however, was issued without checking the actual distance between the airport runways and where the rocket fell in Yehud. The official claim raised in the intensive talks conducted by Minister of Transport Yisrael Katz and Israel Civil Aviation Authority director Giora Romm was that the step was an automatic clerical measure that met the terms for authorization, with no ulterior motives. On Wednesday, the following day, while the ban and risk were in force, US Secretary of State John Kerry landed at Ben Gurion Airport.
If a major US agency says the risk is clear, how did senior US security personnel allow him and themselves to land there? If the flight risk was so clear cut, how could major airlines like British Airways and Aeroflot continue their routine flights to Israel? This is where we get to the hot potato on which Israeli senior politicians are unwilling to be quoted on the record: whether there was political involvement in the decision.
It is believed that the decision was originally a hasty and unchecked clerical response. The later extension of the ban, however, was obviously politically motivated.
Senator Ted Cruz (Rep., Texas) referred to this when he recently said, "The facts suggest that President Obama has just used a federal regulatory agency to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands."
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