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Right, so Israel’s main airport has just gone to pieces on its busiest day. Check-in shut, landings were halted and passengers filled the terminal and Benjamin Netanyahu’s answer was to threaten to fire the workers.
The problem for him? Twenty-four hours earlier, he’d turned up at the same airport for a visit about how those workers were keeping everything going, Israel was ticking over because of their hard work. Anyone would think Bibi turning up in your workplace might be bad for business off the back of this and yet Netanyahu being Netanyahu only he could manage to actually make a poor situation that he has presided over, get even worse by having turned up in person, pressed the flesh and then threatened to fire people for going on strike the next day. Go back to work, you’re making me look bad – I don’t think there is a single way on Earth after Gaza, after Lebanon, after the West Bank and Syria and Iran and Yemen that you can ever again possibly look good, but then it is not we who are the audience here and not the rest of us who are still in possession of compassion or a pulse. Threatening to sack people a day after praising them hardly screams strong and stable leadership though does it?
So what happened between Bibi’s photo op and Bibi’s threats inside a day?
Well, Benjamin Netanyahu and his Transport Minister Miri Regev showed up at Ben Gurion airport for a photo op on the 19th August, walking around as if they had just discovered airports, shaking hands, nodding at conveyor belts, and all the rest of the political inanity in the run up to an election.
And as you are now aware, within a day, the whole spectacle unravelled.
Check-in stopped. Landings were halted. Passengers filled the terminal.
And Netanyahu’s response was not to clarify what had gone wrong.
It was to fire the only people keeping the place from turning into a real-life version of Lord of the Flies, because people were getting pretty aggro and is it just me or does Ben-Gvir pop into your head now when you think of Piggy?
Anyway, yesterday’s self-praise turned into finger-pointing faster than you could say ‘election panic.’ Ben Gurion handed Netanyahu’s rivals a campaign gift so perfect, he might as well have gift wrapped it.
So, Israel’s main airport partially ground to a halt on one of the busiest travel days of the year.
Ben Gurion’s check-in stopped and landings were suspended at 2pm, while a few departures continued, before operations began to return from 3pm.
So the main stoppage only lasted about an hour. Well hell, this isn’t even a story then surely Damo? At least not until Netanyahu himself made it one.
But an hour at an airport handling 600 flights and 100,000 passengers is not the same as waiting for Mrs. Goggins to finish her tea break at the post office.
You can’t just switch everything back on and expect it to sort itself out.
Planes are circling overhead, passengers are queuing for check-in that isn’t happening, crews are watching the clock anxiously, luggage is piling up into what looks like a Dadaist sculpture, and airlines are answering questions with all the enthusiasm of a hostage reading cue cards. Meanwhile, the airport’s communication plan seems to be a mix of wild guesses and hiding under the desk. The knock-on effect quickly becomes a major issue.
“Workers’ strike closes Ben Gurion.”
Very convenient.
The workers did it.
Airport closed. Mystery solved. Now, if only anyone could actually go home.
Or, well, not go home, because check-in had stopped and everyone was stranded in Terminal Limbo.
Except that’s not the whole story though is it?
The airport authority said the workers’ committee had caused the disruption.
The Histadrut, Israel’s trade union centre, said it hadn’t told anyone to stop work.
The workers themselves also insisted this wasn’t some sudden Bolshevik uprising in the baggage hall either. They had been warning for months that the airport was severely understaffed, everyone was running on fumes, and, as Pinchas Idan, the chairman of Ben Gurion Airport’s workers’ committee and a member of Netanyahu’s own Likud Party incidentally said, ‘a baggage handler cannot work 13 hours a day in this heat.’
So before we’ve even left the terminal, there are already several versions of events.
The airport blames the workers.
The workers blame staffing and management.
The government blames anyone whose name isn’t Benjamin Netanyahu.
But while officials argued over who to punish, real passengers were caught in the middle.
A woman called Samantha was traveling with a group from Safe Heart, which is a nonprofit supporting survivors of the Nova festival attack with their mental health. Her group had about 50 people.
She’s not trying to make a political statement here. She’s just trying to figure out if they’re going to go anywhere.
You can hear the frustration, but mostly it’s uncertainty. People are all around them; they can’t check in properly, and nobody seems able to tell them what’s next.
At the same time though, the political blame game was already ramping up.
Netanyahu posted this on X.
“Ben-Gurion Airport will continue to remain open and operate as usual.”
And underneath it sits a proposed Community Note pointing out that check-in had been suspended, landings had been halted and operations were only gradually returning.
Not exactly a glowing endorsement of the “usual” bit, is it?
You can’t claim the airport is operating normally after check-in counters have stopped and planes have been told not to land. People were standing in that terminal looking at the evidence.
Then came the threat.
“Whoever stands in the way will fly home.” So fired then.
He didn’t know who had done what at that stage. The union disputed the airport authority’s version. No investigation had been completed.
But who needs proof when you’ve got a sack to swing and a scapegoat to chase and more than that an election to win? Netanyahu’s biggest muscle is the one he uses to blame everyone else with.
Miri Regev then chimed in from Morocco the following day, because apparently the best place to handle Israel’s transport crisis is poolside in Casablanca.
She told the airport authority to take the workers’ union to the Labour Court.
She called it a “thuggish and illegal strike” and said:
“Whoever made the decision to take tens of thousands of Israeli citizens hostage will pay a heavy price.”
Hostages now.
Over a workplace dispute at an airport.
Nothing dramatic at all there is there? Just tired baggage handlers being turned into Israel’s Most Wanted.
At this rate, the baggage carousel was just one angry press release away from being labelled a terrorist organisation.
The problem for Regev and Netanyahu is that the workers had been saying for months there weren’t enough of them.
The Histadrut said the airport’s account twisted what had happened and distracted from a serious, ongoing staffing crisis.
And you’d think that would be obvious, even to those who believe airports actually run on threats and press releases instead of, say, actual workers.
You can threaten someone with being fired. You can threaten court action. You can call them thugs. You can accuse them of holding the country hostage.
What you can’t do is threaten a human body into not being exhausted.
Apparently, hundreds more staff are currently needed. Existing workers were said to be doing shifts longer than 12 hours. The union said management and Regev had been warned, over and over, that the workforce couldn’t handle the expected summer crowds.
Management disagreed with of that. Here’s why they shouldn’t have done that.
You see, Ben Gurion’s ground-service workforce has been knocked about for years now. First by Covid, then all the Netanyahu instigated warfare, then a sort of stop-start aviation mess driven by the need for military aircraft to use the place, which left trained staff sitting at home one month and being asked to work thirteen-hour shifts the next. The companies say compensation for earlier disruption was left unresolved, workers say they’d been warning about understaffing for months, and the airport authority had insisted only weeks earlier there was no exceptional shortage at all. Then the summer rush arrived, up to 100,000 passengers a day, foreign airlines still hadn’t fully returned, American tankers were still taking up room at the airport despite earlier promises that they’d move from Miri Regev, and suddenly the whole thing buckled. The day after Netanyahu turned up to visit, who’s government has presided over all of this.
After talks between worker representatives and the Airports Authority, staff went back to work, with officials saying they would add staff and address operational needs. No public agreement seems to specify how many workers, by when, or under what terms.
But hold on a minute.
If staffing wasn’t really the issue, why did they agree to add more staff?
What an amazing coincidence. Who could have guessed?
The airport breaks down, workers blame it on too few staff, management blames the workers, so does Netanyahu; and the final solution includes more staff. Its almost like there was a pattern
And summer didn’t sneak up on anyone.
Everyone knew this would be one of the busiest times of the year. The airport was expecting about 600 flights that day.
If you hit the summer peak with baggage handlers doing 13-hour shifts, and a 13 hour shift in a Middle Eastern summer is exactly what you think it is, someone either made a terrible decision or just didn’t bother making one, which in Netanyahu circles would be pretty standard.
Netanyahu and Regev started with punishment, letting the facts trail behind whenever they decided to catch up.
Because once the story becomes “workers are holding passengers hostage,” nobody is supposed to ask why those workers were doing such long shifts.
Nobody asks what happened to the earlier warnings.
Nobody asks why an airport expecting 100,000 passengers couldn’t handle an hour of disruption without the terminal overflowing.
You pick the lowest rung on the ladder, call them a menace, and march around demanding their head on a platter, all while pretending this is what leadership looks like.
Except Netanyahu’s posturing has one great big problem, aside from already knowing the problems on the ground.
He had visited Ben Gurion the day before and acted like everything was fine.
He toured the control tower. He met airport workers and passengers.
The official account of the visit praised the work of thousands of employees maintaining what it called “functional continuity” and giving passengers the best possible service during the busy summer season.
Functional continuity, when the place is short staffed and basically being held together with duct tape and wishful thinking.
On Wednesday, they tour the airport and praise the people keeping it running.
On Thursday, the airport grinds to a halt, and suddenly those same workers are thugs who deserve to pay a heavy price, or obstacles to be sacked. Gratitude that lasts about as long as a kamikaze mayfly.
They tour the building. They get briefed. They nod at random stuff. Photographers snap the moment. The government congratulates itself for a system held together by people working impossible hours.
Then something breaks as it was inevitably going to.
Suddenly those people aren’t the ones keeping the country running. They’re the problem now.
It’s a great system if you’re a minister: claim every success as your own, and blame every failure on the nearest worker in a hi-vis vest.
But Netanyahu can’t pretend he knew nothing about the airport.
He had been there.
He was surrounded by the transport minister, who’s brief it was to know what was happening there and the issues surrounding, airport management, senior officials, and worker representatives.
So what were they talking about exactly if not that?
If nobody mentioned the staffing pressure, why not?
If it was mentioned, what did they do about it?
And if the visit was just a way to look prime ministerial, the airport delivered its review the next day: one star, would not recommend.
Israel votes on 27 October. Netanyahu’s coalition was already expected to fall short of the 61 seats needed for a majority before Ben Gurion’s troubles.
No new poll has been taken since the stoppage, so we can’t honestly say Ben Gurion has changed votes yet. But the background isn’t reassuring for Netanyahu: recent polls had his bloc at 49 to 53 seats, well short of that 61 needed to govern. And yet clearly the airport fiasco is something seen as being worth seizing upon, because Netanyahu’s rival in this election, Naftali Bennett went to the airport and said:
“The airport is silent not because of a natural disaster, but because of a government that is a disaster.”
He doesn’t do subtle, not that he’s any better than Netanyahu himself politically.
Gadi Eisenkot said the chaos showed the Netanyahu government’s failed management culture, its disorder, and its refusal to take responsibility.
Now, Bennett and Eisenkot are Netanyahu’s opponents. Bennett didn’t just wander into Ben Gurion as a concerned travel blogger. He saw a campaign opportunity and took it.
But this is exactly the sort of chance Netanyahu really can’t afford to give them.
He wants to run as the irreplaceable Trump whisperer, the security expert, the only one who can guide Israel through crisis after crisis, most of which, let’s remember, he helped create himself.
And then the country’s main airport partially shuts down on its busiest day, which brings everything crashing down around his ears with all the grace of a dropped suitcase.
Can you staff an airport?
Can you keep check-in running?
Can your transport minister handle a transport crisis without calling in threats from a Moroccan sun lounger?
Can anyone in government admit there might have been a problem before announcing that workers are going to pay for it?
These are very simple questions for voters to understand.
They can see the queues.
They can see the luggage.
They can see people waiting for information.
Then they see Netanyahu promising everything will operate normally when it very clearly hasn’t.
Bennett barely needed to make an advert; Netanyahu had already written, directed, and starred in it for him.
One day there’s the official visit and the praise.
The next day there are the stopped counters and the threats.
And because this story just can’t help itself, the footage even threw in a truly brilliant visual metaphor, to sum everything up for good measure.
An airport full of clowns – two days in a row you might argue.
Now, to be fair, the actual clowns weren’t responsible for the disruption.
They seem to have played a much smaller role in running Ben Gurion than Netanyahu’s government, so let’s not blame the clowns for someone else’s circus.
But the passengers aren’t the joke here either and nor are the people working 12- or 13-hour shifts.
The real joke is a government that spends one afternoon admiring the airport, watches it buckle the next, and then acts like its some kind of personal betrayal rather than their own oversight along with that of airport management.
Netanyahu wanted his airport visit to show a country running smoothly under his control. What he got, in just a day, was a terminal full of passengers watching his government do what it does best: take credit when workers keep things going, blame them when it falls apart, and hope that shouting loudly enough about it, will distract everyone from seeing who was actually supposed to be in charge. But there’s an election on and you’re never going to get away with that, and already trailing behind in the polls, Ben Gurion could yet prove to be at least one, if not the final nail in the coffin of Netanyahu’s far too long premiership.
For more of Netanyahu’s self-induced crises across the Middle East, do stick with the channel here, for regular roastings, such as this recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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