Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) is urging U.S. airlines to reconsider their prolonged suspensions of flights to Israel “in order to prevent the appearance and the substance of discrimination against the Jewish State.”

Torres, who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, sent a letter on Wednesday to the CEOs of American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines expressing his concerns over their decisions to suspend flights to Israel without FAA guidance that such flights are unsafe. Torres’ letter comes just over a week after American Airlines announced that it would extend its suspension of flights to Israel through April 2025. 

“The suspension has been so prolonged and so pervasive that El Al, an Israeli airline, has become the sole carrier offering direct flights from America to Israel. The lack of competition has made air travel to Israel less available and less affordable, putting customers at the mercy of a de facto monopoly that can easily gouge prices with impunity,” Torres wrote to American Airlines CEO Robert Isom, Delta CEO Ed Bastian and United CEO Scott Kirby. 

Torres pointed to the Federal Aviation Administration’s controversial 36-hour ban on flights in 2014 from U.S. carriers to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport during Israel’s war against Hamas that summer, noting that the Federal Aviation Administration had not issued a similar order at any point since Oct. 7, 2023. Instead, Torres accused the airlines of “arbitrarily and unilaterally” imposing “its own ban on travel to Israel, independently of an order from the FAA.”

“Airlines should be prohibited from effectively boycotting or otherwise discriminating against the world’s only Jewish State. It is one thing to temporarily suspend air travel to Israel on security grounds as defined by the FAA. But to unilaterally suspend air travel indefinitely until mid-2025, as American Airlines has done, has the practical effect of a boycott,” he wrote. “Given the arbitrary length of the suspension, one could be forgiven for thinking that the BDS movement had taken over the American aviation industry without anyone noticing, much less crying foul.”

“By what logic and in what universe is it safe for El Al to travel to Israel but too dangerous for American Airlines, Delta, and United to do so? It is worth noting that UAE airlines like Etihad, FlyDubai, and Wizz Air Abu Dhabi continue to fly to Israel without incident,” Torres asked, questioning the logic of their refusal to fly to the Jewish state.

An American Airlines spokesperson told JI in a statement at the time of the company’s suspension of flights to Israel that “To provide additional flexibility, we will extend our travel alert allowing customers whose travel plans are impacted by this adjustment to rebook without a fee or cancel and receive a refund. We will continue to work closely with our partner airlines to assist customers traveling between Israel and European cities with service to the U.S.”

News of American Airlines’ suspension until 2025 followed Delta’s recent announcement that it will not fly to Israel until Sept. 30 of this year, months after revealing since-scuttled plans to resume flights from New York’s JFK Airport to Tel Aviv in June. With United Airlines having suspended flights to Israel indefinitely after briefly resuming limited service in March, American fliers have been left with El Al as their only option to travel directly from the U.S. to the Jewish state.

U.S. airlines further suspended flights after Iran launched an attack on Israel in April, firing hundreds of missiles that were almost entirely intercepted by Israeli and regional air defense systems. More recently, Iran has been threatening retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political leader, in Tehran since the strike that took him out last month. 

“One of the things that Iran is trying to accomplish is to isolate Israel economically. This is just another sign of that,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told JI at the time of the canceled flights. 

United Airlines noted the flight disruptions in its earnings report for the second quarter of this year, recognizing the Israel Hamas war as one of the “geopolitical conflict[s], terrorist attacks or security events” that had interrupted usual travel routes in a section about “forward-looking statements.”

The quarterly report explained that, “[T]he suspension of our overflying in Russian airspace as a result of the Russia-Ukraine military conflict and interruptions of our flying to Tel Aviv as a result of the Israeli-Hamas military conflict, as well as any escalation of the broader economic consequences of these conflicts beyond their current scope,” were among the areas where the airline’s “actual results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to numerous factors.”

In the days after Oct 7, American Airlines pilots’ union ordered its members not to fly to Israel until they could “be reasonably assured of the region’s safety and security.”

Another union associated with the industry has since called for measures against Israel. The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), the flight attendants’ union, joined a coalition of unions to call for an end to “the death and devastation” in Gaza and a cessation of all military aid to Israel.