So for the second time in as many days, El Al has had a near miss. Today an El Al plane had to make an emergency landing due to a technical malfunction. Before shabbos an El Al plane just narrowly missed crashing with an Israir flight.

During the recent crisis between El Al and the Haredi public, with the Haredim nearing a boycott of El Al, we heard an interesting statement in the name of Rav Chaim Kanievsky, which was then supported by other gedolim. I do not remember now the exact wording (and am too lazy right now to go look for the quote) so I will paraphrase. He basically said that now that El Al does not have the shabbos protecting it, as El Al flew on shabbos, anybody who flies El Al would be putting himself in danger. When the crisis was resolved, word went out that now it is again safe to fly El Al since they have committed to keeping shabbos, so they will have the protection of shabbos.

Shortly after Rav Kanievsky made the initial statement questioning the safety of El Al, there was an incident in which a plane had some sort of emergency and had to make an emergency landing. The frum world went into hysteria about how Rav Kanievsky was right and El Al is not safe to fly, look what happened right after he said what he said, blah blah blah.

So now, just a few weeks after the crisis is over and El Al has committed to keeping shabbos, we see a number of incidents in which an El Al flight experienced similar levels of danger and emergency. So what happened? Isn't the shabbos protecting El Al now? Didn't El Al commit to keeping shabbos? According to what Rav Kanievsky said, these latest incidents should not have happened!!

Or maybe the earlier incident was not out of the ordinary and every airline has a certain number of incidents of this nature and statistically there is nothing to do about it.

Hmmmmm....

Yet another indication that the whole crisis was an exercise in muscle-flexing and they had to manipulate the public in order to get them to go along with it...