Around 900 Jews from Detroit flew to D.C. to join a protest march against Hamas, seeking return of hostages taken on October 7th. However bus drivers who had been contracted to pick up the group from Washington Dulles airport learned of the purpose of the trip, and reportedly engaged in a sick out, refusing to pick up the group. After scrambling for transportation around 600 people made it, while 300 – stuck on the tarmac for hours – eventually returned home.
David Kurzmann of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit reported that the bus company informed the group that they were facing a driver sick out in response to the group’s plans.
They informed us … that they had drivers, who, when they were aware of the assignment today, called in, more than a few, a number of drivers called in sick.
[The bus company] committed to fulfilling the obligations for our group and we had all expectation that they would they demonstrated a desire and full intention to do, and today they seemed to encounter some challenge…caused by a deliberate and malicious walk-off of drivers. Fortunately, many were able to travel to the march, and we are grateful to the drivers of those buses that arrived.
Ultimately with a limited number of buses, people sat “on each other’s laps” and stood in the aisles.
#BREAKING: hundreds of Jewish Detroiters were prevented from attending today’s pro-Israel rally in DC when bus drivers staged a deliberate and malicious walkout.
Nearly 1,000 people flew from Detroit to DC on chartered flights and buses were hired to take them from Dulles Airport… pic.twitter.com/j3BVg0UrGw— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) November 15, 2023
There were tens of thousands of people marching, sans around 300 Jews from Detroit. The march was joined by prominent leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jefferies (D-NY). For Jefferies perhaps this helps him to atone for, or inoculate him against, his own earlier involvement in anti-semitism.
Six weeks after the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history, where as a percentage of population around 15 times as many Israelis died as Americans on 9/11, it’s believed that Hamas holds over 200 hostages. There has been no access provided to the Red Cross. Following their mass rapes and torture, Hamas hides amongst civilians and operates out of tunnels beneath hospitals. They’ve stolen billions of dollars in aid for Palestinian people.
Footage showing operations of Flotilla 13 and the 401st Brigade Combat Team in the Rantisi Hospital: pic.twitter.com/1d60sCWWmm
— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) November 13, 2023
War is horrible, it has always been so, and it’s doubly so when combatants hide amongst civilians. 20,000 civilians were killed in the Battle of Normandy. Over 100,000 were killed in the battle of Berlin. Hamas is responsible for Palestinian deaths, just as they’ve been responsible for blowing up a peace process for decades that has consistently offered a Palestinian state with nearly all of Gaza and the West Bank, a connection between the two, and a capital in East Jerusalem.
Al-Jazeera TV was asking this poor wounded old Palestinian man to give his eyewitness testimony; he said: what’s happening is criminal! Why is the resistance (Hamas) hiding among us? Why don’t they go to hell and hide there? They are not resistance!!
The journalist cut him off! pic.twitter.com/evrVfpCfj5
— Aimen Dean (@AimenDean) November 14, 2023
The world needs to call on Hamas to return hostages and to stop holding Palestinians as hostages inside Gaza. If Arafat could have agreed to the Camp David deal in 2000, a majority of Palestinians today would have grown up under their own state – better off than they are today. Not with everything their leadership wanted, but a whole generation’s lives would be substantially improved. Hamas, and whatever replaces Hamas, needs to be eliminated. And this has to be a priority for Palestinians or they will never have their own state.
1. Those who took a sick-out are sick alright (sick in the mind)
2. @Gary – reliable reports are that the number at the protest was approx 200K
3. “Journalists” in Al-Jazeera exist in the same way they exist in Putin’s RT.
4. Bring out the popcorn, here come the usual couple of J-haters on this blog in 3…2…1…
Very well said
What is the name of the bus company that refused to serve the customers?
Why is this being posted on a site that’s supposed to be about travel and points. Aren’t other readers getting frustrated that boarding area is now turning into CNN? Can’t we have a nice place to just read about travel instead of war and airline stock prices ? Isn’t there other sites for that stuff ?
Last time I’ve visited this far-right blog that is encouraging and justifying genocide and supporting countries that are violating international law. So pathetic you would post this on a travel website.
Yo SMR:
This is about travel. Dulles, airport, and more.
It is 100% relevent.
@SMR: I’d say that this is a perfectly relevant subject for a travel blog. And thanks to Gary for highlighting one example of how ignorance, hatred and religious biases can cause travel impacts.
BTW, those bus drivers should be fired for discriminating against these activists, as they surely would have been had they abandoned hundreds of BLM activists on the tarmac back in the Summer of 2020.
You would think that the WashingtonPost would at least have a mention of this in their newspaper. But you would be wrong.
If this was a pro-abortion protest, this would be a front page story in the Washington Post.
And they wonder why we call the WaPo fake news?
Those drivers should have been fired instantly for insubordination! What country do I live in now? Clearly not the same one I was born into!
Since those who attended this rally were promised $250 each, surely they could have just chipped in and taken multiple taxis to the rally start point?
Hat’s off to the driver for calling in sick though. I would have done the same.
@UN – what an appropriate moniker this dummy picked! His “opinion” matches what anti-Semitic and anti-democratic corrupt UN says and does.
@Dude26 “Reliable reports” I think you mean the march organizers and allied organizations.
Independent, unaffiliated crowd estimates put the number at about 30K.
Even looking at the pictures, you would have to believe that 95% of the attendees were invisible to believe that there were 200K people there.
Gary, Camp David was an insult of a deal. A state in name only, with no control over their own airspace, their own borders, their own coastline or rights to the sea off of Gaza, Israel took all of the fertile lands and would have required that Palestinians agree that the IDF could come into their territory whenever they wanted. Similar to Oslo.
Barak offered the deal, Arafat took it and spoke about it with other Arab leaders, and during that time, Ariel Sharon swore publicly that he would never even honor any deal made by Barak.
So, yea, the Palestinians should have taken an insult of a deal that Israel was never going to honor anyway.
Don’t forget, the Palestinians HAD a state. It was called Palestine. And with the extensive financial and military backing of Western powers in the middle of the last century, they were violently expelled from that state to establish Israel.
(That said, the bus drivers should have just taken the people to the protest because, well, they’re allowed to protest).
CBS News: “…estimating that 290,000 people took part.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/march-for-israel-today-tuesday-november-14-washington-dc/
NY Post estimate: “Almost 300k supporters descend on DC’s National Mall”
https://nypost.com/2023/11/14/news/almost-300k-supporters-descend-on-dcs-national-mall-for-the-march-for-israel-rally-photos/
Dallas Morning News: “March for Israel draws estimated 290,000 to D.C.”
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2023/11/14/march-for-israel-brings-throngs-to-dc-to-show-solidarity-and-denounce-antisemitism/
Dimwitted @DMNYC apparently works for Hamas information agency.
@DMNYC said “the Palestinians HAD a state. It was called Palestine”
Enlighten up, when was there a state or country called “Palestine”?
There was British mandate called “Palestine”, but never a state by that name. Before that, land belonged to Ottoman Empire for 400 yrs. Before that…but I hate to waste my time explaining history to morons…
It really helps to sometimes learn history instead of listening to Al Jazeera and Hamas information.
@dmnyc
Where was Palestine? And when did it exist?
What was the reason that the bus drivers called in sick. Were they pro Hamas? They should be penalized the same as they would be if they did such an action based on race.
What a bus company! Unless the passengers are malicious and known to be dangerous you transport them, these were peaceful people. All politics aside I would say the staff at this bus company are bigoted and anti-Semitic. Other groups they will not be transporting: Inner-city bands with an abundance of black students, anyone attending an Asian conference, the list goes on and on… shameful.
I was at the march and actually had chartered a plane for one of the groups – This was not just limited to Dulles – Bus drivers Left hundreds stranded in Connecticut and New Jersey as well – I know there is legal action being looked into – Hopefully, all of these drivers will be terminated. And no – there is and has never been a state or country called Palestine – If you really want to get technical you need to look back to ancient Roman times- The Romans named this area in an effort to expel the Jewish People- The “Palestinians” are nothing but Arabs – they are not a different group- They are not any different than their brothers/sisters in neighboring Arab countries – Except for the fact that none of these countries wish to support them.
The rally was phenomenal – Amazing contrast between the violence of the Palestinian rally a few weeks back and the peacefulness of the pro-Israel rally. Palestinian rally was a pro-Hamas rally – Anti-western supporting terrorism – Yesterdays rally was Pro-Democracy, Pro United states
Pet peeve: the use of “tarmac” to describe aircraft delays, stranded passengers, etc. Tarmac = material. Ramp, apron = area.
@Jordan
@Gennady
Oh you’re right. There as never a modern country called Palestine. But are you really so thick as to not understand the irony of invoking the BRITISH COLONIAL MANDATE of Palestine as part of your justification for why Palestinians are not entitled to land they have been on for millenia?
That’s exactly the point. The British and French colonial powers decided in secret in 1916 how they would divide up control of the region. And British control of the region that THEY established as Mandatory Palestine laid the foundation for the establishment of the state of Israel, something for which the British had ample economic and strategic reasons.
The British (as was their colonial model) helped establish an economy and infrastructure for Jewish settlers that was segregated from the local Arab population, characterized by massive inflows of foreign capital that far outstripped GDP. In the 1936-39 Arab revolt against British occupation, the British killed, wounded, or forced into exile up to 1/5 of the adult male population, and killed many others in a campaign to crush Arab resistance that employed more than 100,000 military personnel.
Coupled with the wave of European Jews fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany and other countries, this created a demographic critical mass that laid the foundation for the ethnic cleansing of large swaths of the territory in 1948.
The founders of modern Zionism themselves (including Herzl, who was explicitly aware of and wrote about the reality that it would require mass relocation of the at-the-time indigenous population) were quite open about the colonial model of the project. It was only toward the 1960s when it started to pivot away from that understanding.
I’m actually not against the existence of the state if Israel. I think Jewish people have a legitimate claim to the land. But they do not have the ONLY claim, or the even the PRIMARY claim. And they certainly do not have a claim that entitles them to force other people OUT.
Thanks, @AngryFlier !!! For sure I could not have stated it better: “Thanks to Gary for highlighting one example of how ignorance, hatred and religious biases can cause travel impacts.”
Yeah, I don’t believe it. The sources are the march organizer (who conveniently can’t remember the bus company) and/or the bus company (which has a vested interest in excusing its problems by making it political). Do we really believe that a number of random bus drivers *each* spontaneously decided on a sick-out because they had to drive people in to the airport? Bus drivers keep up with Middle Eastern politics, do they?
Also, the whole “they got stuck at the airport” thing smells fishy. There is, oddly, an actual public transit system that goes to the center of the city from Dulles. It is possible to get downtown without ever using a bus at all.
I’d bet the bus company was incompetent and ran short on drivers/buses, and came up with an excuse that would make them look less incompetent. I have no idea why the protestors brought it or why they didn’t just pile on the Metro to get to the protest.
How many of you on this blog would say the same if it were Palestinian- Americans sitting on the tarmac ?
Jews no longer rule the world – just the media.
Just returned from two weeks in Europe and what we see on the news media in the USA is tightly controlled. Real story is on European Media & tV – Yes even CNN International has a different spin.
“I think Jewish people have a legitimate claim to the land. But they do not have the ONLY claim, or the even the PRIMARY claim”
Arabs (who weren’t even called “Palestinians” at the time, check it out) had their chance after UN decided in Nov. 1947 to partition British mandate. Jews formed their country, Israel; Arabs were convinced they will soon wipe the Jews and push them into the Mediterranean, so 800,00 or so of them left, promised that they will be able to return in no time. And 5 (!) Arab countries attacked Israel.
And in the more recent history, they (Palestinians) were given multiple chances to create their own country, which they never took.
The Bus Company says they did not contract enough Busses for their group, and they didn’t have enough Busses available at the last minute.
This is why they are not naming the Bus company for fear of slander.
For those asking about why they didn’t take taxis, uber, metro – the planes were not at the terminal. The chartered planes from Detroit landed in a restricted area that did not allow passengers to walk to a terminal. As best I know, there are no passenger buses at IAD (as there once were at DCA for the late, not-lamented Gate 34 or the effing bus gates at DOHA).
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2023/11/15/metro-detroit-jews-washington-national-mall-march/71588122007/
It’s not published in the Washington Post because unlike “travel” blogs, they have a modicum of journalistic standards, and aren’t going to publish without at least talking to some of the drivers to very that’s what actually happened.
The story seems farfetched… How does anyone get stuck on the tarmac for hours due to lack of busses? The airline is going to kick you off their plane whether your bus is there or not.
To the situation in the middle east, Hamas is evil, but the government of Israel has shown itself to be even more evil, at least if you’re measuring by civilian body count.
@Grennady I think you and I will just have different interpretations of this history.
No Arabs were not called “Palestinians.” Arab is an ethnicity. It’s entirely fine and OK to use names like Palestinian to describe the the recent ancestors of the same group of people as we define them today. National identities coalesce over time and in response to historical forces (see every single nation that exists on Earth).
I agree that it was, historically, in hindsight, a strategic mistake not to accept the British partition, But again, the argument that the BRITISH partition—of the territory that colonial Britain occupied—in furtherance of what was, at the time, an explicitly colonial project (even it was other things) was the legitimate definition of any national boundaries in the region is deeply problematic. As is the argument that flows from that—that that should be accepted because Israel, backed by Western powers and military force, was able maintain and expand those boundaries militarily.
The argument that all 800,000 Arabs just left is not historically accurate. Some of them fled, as refugees, from fighting, as many people do during war. Some chose to leave and try to establish roots elsewhere. Many were forcibly removed as part of an ethnic cleansing of the region.
And finally, the recent examples of Palestinians having “chances to create their own country” are actually, to me, laughable and insulting. Agreements like Oslo and Camp David, in which they would have no territorial integrity, no ability to govern their borders, no control of their air or sea or coast, would have to to agree that the Israeli police and military could come in whenever they wanted, are not agreements the seriously would have respected any kind of national sovereignty.
And with Camp David in 2000, Ehud Barak made an offer that Arafat took and consulted with other Arab leaders on, during which time Ariel Sharon said he would refuse to honor any agreement that Barak entered into.
So, if your contention is that the Palestinians should have taken bad deals that would render them a state-in-name-only, and which the Israeli government would refuse to honor anyway…then yea, I guess they had some real missed opportunities.
How uncreative and spoilt are these “protesters”????If you truly believe in your cause you’ll find a way. Just take the metro, Uber or Lyft and have some busses drive 300 to the metro station and taken the others to the protest site. It’s an absolute joke that 300 could not figure out a way to get there and back. Next time, just stay home and watch it on TV with some caviar and champagne. Whatever happened to problem solving skills and common sense?
“ But some buses hired to transport “a significant number” of the groups’ participants from Dulles International Airport to the site of the march, according to Kurzmann, failed to appear,”
@ABC: apparently, if you charter a flight into high-security area like Washington, DC, you can’t just leave the area (airport) until your designated and approved transportation provider came to pick you up. You can’t just hop on Metro or Uber into the city.
Now, I’ve heard this from a (usually) reliable source, but I’ll wait for @Gary to confirm or dispute this information, as it’s news to me, too.
@H.t “those who attended this rally were promised $250 each…”
So, why didn’t you drag your anti-Semitic a$$ to the rally, and make a quick buck?
Oh, wait, I know – because you’re stupid, as all anti-Semites are.
@DMNYC: first, it’s Gennady, not Grennady (but my name is misspelled a lot, so it’s ok).
About 2000 Camp David – you insist that “Camp David was an insult of a deal”. This contradicts what Pres. Clinton, Hillary Clinton and every American diplomat, like Dennis Ross, involved in negotiations, say about the deal Arafat turned down. I wasn’t part of negotiations, so you need to argue with them – they all say Arafat got 97% of what he wanted, and only turned down the deal (and started 2nd intifada) because he was afraid he won’t physically survive this when he brings it to his people, PA.
We can discuss why a group of ppl who were responsible for some of the most atrocious acts of terrorism in the 70’s and 80’s, like Munich 1972, or September in Jordan in 1970, weren’t given their own army, airport, air force, navy, etc.
I would rather be stranded and miss the march than live my life as a racist bus driver!
@dmnyc Arabs come from Arabia, while Jews, Druze, and Middle Eastern Christian come from the Levant where Israel is located.
Iranians are not Arabs as they do not come from Arabia they from Persia. Do not ever call a Turkish person an Arab because they take it as an insult.
So, if Palestinians are Arabs, then they are colonizers in the Levant. The Rock of the Dome was built on top of the holiest Jewish site the second temple, another example of them being colonizers.
“How uncreative and spoilt are these “protesters”????If you truly believe in your cause you’ll find a way. Just take the metro, Uber or Lyft”
We’re now at the point where people who couldn’t legally leave the Dulles tarmac are getting criticized for not leaving the Dulles tarmac
The only thing this war has given more rise to than anti-semitism is self-parody
The march was nothing more than a genocidal, pro-war rally calling for the slaughter of innocent civilian populations featuring noted anti-semitic speakers like televangelist John Hagee. No wonder those bus drivers did not want to be involved with such an event.
Anyone who lives in DC knows what a big march looks and feels like (the city and Metro are usually swamped) — absolutely fake news that the crowd was anywhere near 200k-300k. No way the crowd density and space occupied on the mall reflects that.
Every one of the despicable stooges who took part in this should be fired as well as anyone who facilitated it. They are not better than the animals who committed the atrocious on the Jewish people in Israel.
People have the right to not support the actions of Israel, PERIOD. Calling people anti-Semitic (who cares). People do not have to like Jewish people. OR the agenda of Israel.
People have been programmed to hate Palestine, forgetting people are people.
They are pitting one side against the other, and dare you say you do not support Israel ( I DO NOT). You are called anti-Semitic.
WELL, I support people, not agendas, so I support Jewish people, and I support Palestinians.
Call me whatever you want, I couldn’t care less.
I also support the bus driver’s decision. Perhaps a lot of the bus drivers are Muslim (has anyone even stopped to think about that)? 99% of people do not even know that Israel formed Hamas in the first place. Yeah, go read…
@Gennady sorry, I think it was my autocorrect.
I take your points, but do think there is plenty of responsibility to go around for the failure of the talks in 2000, including on Israel and the United States.
There were a lot of sticking points, including the right of return, and the parameters of that. Arafat had begun the negotiations demanding a return to 1967 borders, which of course was not going to happen, but made big concessions with respect to that starting point.
But Israel wanted to maintain control of Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, pushed for extremely unbalanced mutual land transfers, despite Palestinian concessions to Israel regarding Jewish neighborhoods and existing settlements in the West Bank, and also wanted to keep Israeli control of key natural resources in the West Bank.
I can understand the desire to have them demilitarize, but the agreement would also have barred them from entering into any treaties/alliances without Israeli approval.
And let’s not even get started on the rest of Jerusalem, especially the holy sites, which are always a flash point and would need to be part of any shared settlement in the future.
So while there is certainly blame to go to Arafat, the “97%” number is a talking point that American leadership like Hillary Clinton use to make it seem like they offered Palestinians almost everything and they still rejected it. Even Barak’s Foreign Minister later said that the Palestinians were right to reject the deal. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t…but it is certainly not as simple as what Hillary Clinton (whom I trust as far as I can throw her) and other American leadership claim.
Has this turned into an actual civil argument? 🙂
@TW: Don’t get carried away with your rhetoric. If the bus drivers refused to serve the Jewish ralliers, as much as I disapprove of that, I don’t think you should suggest that they are no better than the Hamas terrorists.
FACT:
If Hamas terrorists lay down their weapons, there will be peace.
If Israel lays down their weapons, there will be mass genocide.
There is a difference.
@DMNYC: “Has this turned into an actual civil argument? ”
Yes, all of sudden, a civilized discussion broke out 🙂
I see many of your points. But, we can only go by what participants said, and see what happened. Everyone involved in negotiations blamed and still blames Arafat, who didn’t do any good by Palestinians. Did Israel offer everything to PA? No! But there were provisions to do more , in time.
Do Palestinians deserve their own state? Yes! But so far, their past just doesn’t make it very likely: after Abbas was elected, 15 yrs ago, he never allowed new elections. When in residents of Gaza were allowed to vote, they chose militant Hamas. 2 million people are controlled by a bunch of terrorists who steal untold gazillions of dollars in financial aid (as did Arafat, for years, I’m told).
Great content and insight, Gary, as usual! Thank you!
@Chris Raehl: “Hamas is evil, but the government of Israel has shown itself to be even more evil, at least if you’re measuring by civilian body count.”
Wow, Chris! You’re going to determine how “evil” (or “not evil”) the gov’t is by civilian body count?? Really? Do you know the count? Do you have the numbers? If so, please share, as well as the reference to a *reliable* source, not Hamas Information Agency.
If allied forced killed more Germans than brits during WW2 (and I believe they did), does it make Britain “more evil”?
And you think Hamas which kills (and records) people on purpose, including elderly, children, is “less evil” than gov’t of Israel which notifies civilians ahead of time, so they can leave the area before they try to kill terrorists??
“For those asking about why they didn’t take taxis, uber, metro – the planes were not at the terminal. The chartered planes from Detroit landed in a restricted area that did not allow passengers to walk to a terminal. As best I know, there are no passenger buses at IAD (as there once were at DCA for the late, not-lamented Gate 34 or the effing bus gates at DOHA).”
And they couldn’t figure out a solution to that? Stop it.
An ex-USSR immigrant Gena, please stop insulting other forum members. You aren’t as smart as you’re trying to sound and should be banned from making any comments. Keep playing with your dog instead.
@Rob & @Total, don’t be silly. Open your minds for solutions. Busses arrived, picked up 600 of 900. The busses could first have taken 300 to the metro station, gone back and picked up the remaining 600. This isn’t rocket science. It’s easier to act like a victim.
Sorry. this bus is OUT OF SERVICE. I would not want to have any part of driving these Pro-Genocide protesters to a hate rally either. These people are cheering for the annihilation of the same poor brown people they terrorized into exile beginning in 1948. They cheer for the oppression, genocide and the annihilation of one of the oldest indigenous civilizations in the world.
I don’t know how many people were there, but it was more than Trump’s inauguration. 😛