Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday February 9, 2007

El Al decision to cut Istanbul route doesn’t fly with Turkish Jews and officials

by yigal schleifer
jta

istanbul | El Al’s recent decision to discontinue flights to Turkey has sparked vocal criticism from the Turkish Jewish community and Israeli diplomats in Ankara, who say the airline’s move sends the wrong signal to Israel’s closest ally in the Muslim world.

“It’s a terrible decision,” said Israel’s ambassador in Ankara, Pinchas Avivi. “I can’t comment on economic decisions, but from a political standpoint it will cause harm, and it’s a slap in the face to the Turkish Jewish community. I’m afraid the Turkish government will look at this as a downgrading of relations between the two countries.”

El Al, which has been flying to Turkey for more than 50 years, will cease its Tel Aviv-Istanbul service March 1, leaving Turkish Airlines as the only company flying the route. El Al, the former national carrier that was privatized several years ago, also announced that it will be discontinuing flights to Cyprus.

Israel’s largest airline has been undergoing a reorganization process during the last year that has seen it introduce additional flights to Hong Kong, Beijing and Miami, and a new nonstop service to Los Angeles.

“The Istanbul and Larnaca routes don’t meet our declared criteria in the reorganization and suffer from high security costs and other operational limitations,” El Al said in a statement.

A Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity, said El Al is free to make its own decisions but the move is disappointing.

“This is not something that we are pleased about,” the spokesperson said.

With tourism and trade between Israel and Turkey growing, the hour-and-a-half Istanbul-Tel Aviv route is a busy one. During the summer El Al was flying the route six times a week. Turkish Airlines has two or three flights a day to Israel all year.

For Turkey’s Jewish community, the El Al decision was unwelcome news. Leaders have called on community members to e-mail or fax letters to El Al CEO Haim Romano asking him to keep the flights.

There may be room for hope. When El Al announced last year that it would stop flying to Cairo, also due to high security costs, the Israeli government stepped in, offering to shoulder a majority of those costs.

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.