'Deliberate anti-Semitic act': Bus drivers leave 300 Jewish people stranded, preventing them from attending pro-Israel event

Approximately 300 Jewish people were stranded on an airport tarmac for 11 hours on Tuesday after bus drivers walked off the job in a deliberate attempt to prevent the passengers from attending a pro-Israel event, according to the Jewish Federation of Detroit.

The Jewish organization arranged to have three private airplanes transport members from Detroit to Washington, D.C., to attend the March for Israel event.

After landing at Dulles International Airport, 900 passengers were scheduled to be picked up by several buses that would then transport the group to the National Mall, where the march was being held. However, a third of the passengers were prevented from leaving the tarmac after some of the buses failed to show up to shuttle the group.

A spokesperson for the Jewish Federation of Detroit told the New York Post that a "significant number" of bus drivers had organized a "mass sick day" in a deliberate attempt to prevent the pro-Israel passengers from attending the event.

"We have learned from the bus company that this was caused by a deliberate and malicious walk-off of drivers," the spokesperson told the Post.

The stranded passengers were briefly allowed onto the tarmac and into buses but were quickly instructed to reboard the plane after it was discovered that the buses were not meant for the group. They were then forced to wait several more hours for those in the group who did make the rally to return to the airport for the flight back to Detroit.

Jonathan Kaufman, one of the passengers left stranded by the walkout, stated, "I thought it was nuts, I thought it was crazy that we're blocked from getting to the rally."

"Our right to assembly is a constitutional right — and this was straight up blocking that," Kaufman added.

He called it a "deliberate anti-Semitic act" and noted that the walkout "would have been called a hate crime" if it had happened to any other minority group.

David Kurzmann with the Jewish Federation of Detroit said, "In the way that this action prevented proud Jewish Americans from exercising their freedom to speak, protest, assemble, gathered today at the nation's capital, that to me was a malicious act. It was an act targeting the Jewish community as far as their participation in this rally."

William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, one of the March for Israel organizers, confirmed that the drivers "refused" to transport the passengers to the event.

Brooke Goldstein, a human rights lawyer with the Lawfare Project, told the Post, "Any company that so blatantly refuses to provide services to Jewish people engages in unlawful discrimination."

"The scale of what allegedly happened to these Jewish people is outrageous; on a day when hundreds of thousands of allies gathered to spread a message of unity with, and support for, the Jewish community, and to demand the release of hostages taken by barbaric terrorists, we see firsthand the discrimination that Jewish people face on a daily basis in the United States," Goldstein added.

Despite the bus drivers' deliberate walkout, the Jewish Federation of Detroit insisted that the transportation company did everything in its power to remedy the situation.

"They were wonderful, cooperative. It was just an unfortunate logistical snafu that they had no control over," Kurzmann said. He repeatedly refused to share the bus company's name with the Post, stating, "The answer is simply no, that that's not an act that we're doing at this time."

Members of the Jewish Federation of Greater Fairfield County headed to the D.C. march from Connecticut were also left stranded after two buses failed to pick them up. The transportation company stated there had been a scheduling error. The group piled into 38 cars to complete their trip to D.C. to attend the march.

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