This week, a group of 44 French children on a trip with their Jewish summer camp, Kineret, were kicked off a plane to Paris from Valencia, Spain, after a confrontation with the airline crew.
The airline, Vueling, claimed the children were “disruptive” and that they “mishandled emergency equipment,” but has provided no evidence to support the claim. Public accounts so far suggest that all the children had done was sing or say a name in Hebrew. Another passenger on the plane, who had no connection to the group, later testified that the children, ages 10 to 15, were nothing but “calm”—directly contradicting the airline’s claims. And the mother of one of the evicted campers later said that law enforcement officers demanded the children place their cell phones on the ground to check no one had recorded the incident.
I found out about the incident thanks to a video which went viral showing Spanish police arresting the campers’ 21-year-old supervisor, pinning her down as she squirmed on the floor with her hands held behind her back.
The counselor had reportedly insisted on reboarding the plane with the children, and that’s when officers with the Spanish Guardia Civil stepped in and “violently restrained” her, according to Mark Goldfeder, the director of the Antisemitism Law Clinic at Touro University. Goldfeder is now representing some of the children and their families. Kineret, the organization which runs the yearly summer camps, has already announced it is suing the airline on behalf of the group.
