A Flydubai plane carrying passengers from flight FZ1073 arrives at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, September 30, 2026. (Flash90)
It’s Monday, October 5, and a few days ago, we believed that without the heroism of the passengers on Flight 1073, the almost 180 people aboard, 27 of them children, would have been killed. Now we know that without the bravery of Capt. Smit Machchhar, Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans and Assaf Rajuan, we would be facing a catastrophe likely worse than October 7.
Under interrogation, Hamam al-Hammami, the Omani co-pilot, confessed that after killing the pilot his plan was to fly a normal landing approach and, in the final seconds, when interception was no longer possible, crash the plane into Ben Gurion Airport. That is why, rather than striking at the outset, he attacked the captain only once the plane was over Jordan.
The flight was due to land around 9:30 a.m., at the height of Sukkot, when traffic through the airport peaks. Tens of thousands of travelers would likely have been in the terminal when it arrived, and the death toll could easily have run into the thousands. Under interrogation, al-Hammami admitted that on previous trips to Israel he had “gathered information,” perhaps on where a crash would claim the most lives.
Had he managed to crash the plane into the Saudi desert, as we originally believed was his intention, the aftermath would have been catastrophic. The day would have gone down as the second-deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history, with nearly five times the death toll of the third. The central artery of the Abraham Accords, the 30-flight-a-day corridor, would have been severed, and the steadily warming relations between the Emirates and Israel would have frozen.
Had his original plan succeeded, it would have been, by a wide margin, the worst attack in Israel’s history, and it would have closed far more than one flight corridor. Even if the physical damage at Ben Gurion could be quickly repaired, no airline would risk flying to Israel. The country would face an aviation isolation worse than anything it experienced even at the peak after October 7.
The tourism industry, barely hanging on by a thread after three years of war, would plunge into the abyss. Above all, the damage to the sense of safety of Israelis, chronic world travelers, would be incalculable.
The most obvious and striking parallel is that Israel almost had its own 9/11, nearly exactly 25 years after the first. Not in the loose, figurative sense in which the phrase is so often used, but literally: a plane turned into a weapon, with a death toll that may have been comparable to that disaster, and far greater relative to Israel’s population. And the effect would have been even more disastrous. The World Trade Center was a symbolic target, while Ben Gurion is the heart of Israel’s connection to the outside world. It would have done more to isolate Israel from the world than any single Hamas attack.
No thanks, medals or rewards are sufficient for the heroes who prevented what would undoubtedly have been the most devastating single attack on the State of Israel.
Green Party leader, Zack Polanski at a rally in April. (@ZackPolanski/X)
In this week’s Sunday Telegraph, I wrote about Jewish Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s shameful capitulation to anti-Israel and terror-supporting elements in the British electorate. The next day, the Green Party’s Jewish leader, Zack Polanski, rushed to remind us that the title of “worst Jew in British politics” is hotly contested.
At its conference over the weekend, the Green Party of England and Wales adopted a resolution that Zionism be “treated as any other form of racism,” and called for “a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine… with equal rights for all.” Few sentences have contained as much hypocrisy and ignorance: hypocrisy in branding Jewish nationalism racist and Palestinian nationalism just, and ignorance in believing that any such Palestinian state would be a democracy, let alone guarantee equal rights.
In a dance playing out across left-wing parties, moderates tried to add a fig-leaf amendment stating that the motion “shall not be used to pressure, proscribe or discipline members based on affiliation with Jewish community institutions, such as synagogues, community centres or denominational groups, that describe themselves as Zionist,” only to be swiftly slapped down by the radicals. Their attempt at a two-state compromise was rejected out of hand as well. So radical are those holding the wheel at the Green Party that they didn’t even offer the Mamdani smile veneer of condemning antisemitism, not even with the customary spoonful of sugar for their fanatics: a matching condemnation of Islamophobia.
That is hardly surprising from a party that had to investigate more than 30 council candidates this spring. One, posting under an Anne Frank parody account, called for “every single Zionist” to be killed, branded Zionists “vermin” and “rats,” and shared a shredder she dubbed a “Zionist juicer.” Another referred to “Jewish cockroaches,” and two more were arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. Several were suspended, but few were expelled, and some won their seats anyway. Polanski condemned the posts and promised tougher vetting, while insisting the party had no particular problem, a lie that became much harder to tell after Sunday.
In response to the resolution, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar barred Polanski from entering Israel. To be fair, Sa’ar most likely did Polanski a favor. Had he visited the Jewish state, he would likely have risked a lynching at the next Green Party conference. As it stands, Polanski has essentially been skinned, his Jewish exterior worn by a party intent on destroying the Jewish state and none too warm toward Britain’s Jews either.
One would hope that, watching one of the country’s parties go off the deep end into antisemitism, the government would tread more carefully around the issue. But the fact that a large share of the electorate he is flirting with wants to destroy the entire Jewish state, on both sides of the Green Line, will likely not stop Ed “as a Jew” Miliband from sanctioning Judea and Samaria. Undoubtedly he imagines the antisemitic crocodiles will eat him last.
When the first “Zionism is racism” resolution passed at the U.N. in 1975, Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog famously tore it in half, declaring: “For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper, and we shall treat it as such.” Israel will likely do the same again. It can afford to ignore the UK Green Party; Britain cannot.
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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Bibi should resign. This is an awful security oversight and the buck stops with him.
The rejected amendment has a precedent behind it. In 1977, two years after the UN resolution, the Union of Jewish Students reported that student unions at York, Salford, Warwick and Lancaster had passed motions expelling their Jewish societies "on the grounds that they are Zionist and therefore racist." That is the road the amendment was trying to close.