It wasn’t a pandemic, and it wasn’t a missile strike. What ground Ben Gurion Airport to a halt this month — stranding tens of thousands of Israelis who’d paid exorbitant prices in hopes of taking their first summer vacation not under the shadow of war in years — was a two-hour period in which check-in and ground staff refused to work overtime on one of peak season’s busiest days.

Or in the words of the workers, who are accused of calling a wildcat strike and blamed for days of cascading delays, the issue was not their walkout but rather rampant mismanagement that left too few staff members to deal with too many passengers, triggering the near-collapse of airport services.

Ben Gurion Airport, Israel’s sole major portal to the outside world, has long been nearing the breaking point, its woes driven by a deep-seated and persistent leadership and infrastructure crisis. But many Israelis were still caught off guard by how quickly the airport fell into paralysis despite the absence of any external threat to operations.

“Israelis already experienced airport closures due to the war, but because this time it suddenly happened not because of the war, it shook many people as the gateway is a symbol of some kind of normality in an abnormal situation,” Ehud Uziel, a transportation policy expert who served as an adviser to former transportation minister MK Merav Michaeli, told The Times of Israel.

“This time a complex of political interests and professional shortcomings came to a peak during a busy summer season after three and a half years of neglect syndrome by the current government,” he added.

The surprise labor action on August 20 was staged a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Transportation Minister Miri Regev filmed clips at the airport with workers, praising them for the hard work they do. The visit was widely seen as campaigning ahead of the October 27 election.

“Workers are very frustrated over more than two and a half years of war when this government didn’t give them the proper support, and there was no backing or leadership to prepare solutions for the lack of human capital to meet capacity during the current high season,” said Uziel. “The action was also a signal for Netanyahu and Regev that they can’t drag [the workers] into their political campaign ahead of the upcoming October 27 national election, when they are not being supportive.”

Airport union chief Pinchas Idan blamed the shutdown of services on a chronic shortage of a few hundred workers, which forces employees to put in overtime hours to handle the large influx of passengers during the summer vacation rush.

The Israel Airports Authority denied that the staffing shortage was that large, contending it had been working intensively in recent months to recruit new employees across all units.

It alleged Idan had exploited the airport’s peak summer days to put pressure on management, aiming public anger at the labor boss. Netanyahu, seeking to distance himself from the fiasco, ordered Idan booted from the Likud party, ending the political recruiter’s long tenure as a member of the party’s central committee.

Notably, Netanyahu made........

© The Times of Israel