Passengers from Flydubai flight FZ1073 walk with their family members through the arrivals hall at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, after their original flight from Dubai to Israel was diverted to Saudi Arabia following a suspected terror attack, September 30, 2026. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
It’s Thursday, October 1, and Israeli social media is awash in a torrent of celebration, praise and gallows humor following yesterday’s miraculous foiling of a terrorist hijacking on FlyDubai flight FZ1073. By every reasonable expectation, the country should have woken this morning to grief: to names and faces, and to the long, familiar litany of condolence. Instead, it woke to memes.
It is a sad reality that for Israelis this is the best of all possible worlds: not safety, but that those who try to kill us fail. Beneath all the celebrations, that is the grim truth engraved anew on every Israeli heart.
Vigilance is Israel’s only real defense in a hostile region, yet optimism about the future and faith in their own competence keep lulling Israelis into complacency. Gaza in September 2023 is the most notorious example, but now even the Abraham Accords conseptzia is crumbling under the reminder that Israel is a villa in a jungle that surrounds even the ostensibly safe haven of Abu Dhabi.
In recent weeks—largely unnoticed, at the bottom of the news—there was a major dispute between Shin Bet Director David Zini and Israel’s airlines over a ban the Shin Bet had imposed on flights to the UAE. The agency’s reasoning was straightforward: it considered security measures at Emirati airports insufficient, and refused to resume flights. The security measures in place for flights to Israel could plausibly have helped prevent this attack, especially given that the terrorist appears to have brought a weapon on board on his person.
It’s worth being precise about jurisdiction here. The Shin Bet is responsible for Israeli flights; the Ministry of Transportation is responsible for foreign airlines departing from Israel; and the Mossad is responsible for thwarting international terrorist threats abroad. The problem is that the Shin Bet can’t control foreign flights, the MoT can’t control inbound ones, and no international carrier is willing to hand the Mossad jurisdiction over its security. While they overlap and face their own unique challenges, the responsibility for Flydubai flight FZ1073 was largely the Mossad’s.
The hijacker is currently being interrogated by Saudi intelligence, a fact I’m sure the international media will find nothing to criticize given Israelis are not involved. Meanwhile, Israel is examining whether the pilot intended to seize control of the aircraft over Jordanian airspace and crash it somewhere inside Israel, a further parallel to 9/11 almost exactly 25 years after the fact. But for now it’s simply one line of inquiry, not an established finding.
One of the most consequential questions has yet to be answered: was this the act of a lone wolf or an organization, and if the latter, which?
It is worth stating plainly that if this man is part of a pack, and that pack is Iranian, Palestinian or Lebanese, the consequences will be kinetic. Fears of irregular warfare being waged across the free world abounded at the beginning of Operation Epic Fury in February. The relative quiet that followed is interpreted as Iran struggling to put its well-developed terror network to military use. That seems more plausible than the argument that it was simply dormant, one more weapon in Iran’s endless secret armory, which the media warned would be activated if America continued the war. Then again, the quiet may be a testament to Israeli and American competence rather than Iranian incompetence. Perhaps, of hundreds of foiled attempts, one finally slipped through.
Benjamin Netanyahu meeting with hero of the FlyDubai flight Yaniv Hayun at Ben Gurion International Airport, September 30, 2026.
Warnings of increased terror have been piling up for months. Just a day before the attack, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly warned that “our enemies will try to attack us” around this time. A prophet who is also responsible for preventing the disaster he foretells rarely gains from being proven right, but Netanyahu may be the exception. His great deliverance was that the worst did not occur. Instead of a failed leader, he remains a prophet, one who can now easily bend the conversation toward his favored topic: security.
When it comes to elections, Israelis have always been worried about something much greater than their quality of life: life itself. In the professional lingo, we call that “security.” A more precise definition would be “insecurity.” But if we are being honest, the right word is “fear,” a resource far more accessible after this most recent brush with tragedy. “Security” is the precise word the opposition wanted to avoid; they are much fonder of “Haredi,” which stirs far less fear and, with security front of mind, far fewer votes.
Yet for all the unanswered questions and the challenges still ahead, remember: this is a festival, both Sukkot and a day of deliverance.
Yaniv Hayun, who subdued the suspected terrorist aboard Flydubai flight FZ1073, arrives at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, September 30, 2026. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
Let us consider for a moment that very likely world in which Capt. Smit Machchhar was slightly less heroic and could not overcome his stab wound to open the cockpit door. Or one in which passengers Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans and Assaf Rajuan did not burst in in time. Or one in which Yaniv, a plumber by trade, had never watched a docuseries on plane crashes and did not know how to pull out of the dive. Or one in which there were no other pilots on board to land the plane safely. The terrorist crashes the plane into the ground, his motivations utterly inscrutable to international media and obvious to those with an ounce of thought.
Today, if the crown prince allowed, Israelis would be on the ground picking through wreckage in search of 174 bodies, 27 of them children.
The central artery of the Abraham Accords, the 30-plane-a-day flight corridor, would be severed, and the steadily warming relations between the Emirates and Israel would freeze. The day would go down as the second-deadliest terror attack in the country’s history, with nearly five times the death toll of the third. Falling just days before the third Hebrew anniversary of the worst attack, it might have permanently cost the Sukkot festival its traditional name: “the time of our joy.”
An outpouring of sympathy would be quickly followed by a return to normal. The world has never understood Israelis well enough to forgive their security, yet almost always understands terrorists well enough to forgive their violence. British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband and his ilk would announce further sanctions on violent Israelis, and the international media would rush to cite a myriad of possible motivations for the massacre. As it is, the terrorist can take comfort in knowing that the international media has not stripped him of his wings. He is still “the pilot,” and what he did is still an “incident,” to borrow Miliband’s label.
Thankfully, we woke up in the other world: the one where the terrorist failed, the festival goes on, planes continue to fly, and Israel’s will to fight burns hotter than before. It is the world created by Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans, Assaf Rajuan and Smit Machchhar, ordinary people who demonstrated extraordinary courage.
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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In North America, I have seen flight crew get expedited screening at security points. I wonder if this needs to stop. Because if the co-pilot brings a knife on board, that's a security failure.
Here's the thing Jews have to get, I mean really GET. Thee are people out in the world who don't care if you are Liberal/Conservative/Religious/Secular/Gay/Straight/Whatever, You're a Jew and they hate you and want to kill you.
OTOH There are those of us who Don't Hate You And Want To Kill You.