If a “flydubai moment” hasn’t yet become a phrase, it should. There aren’t many incidents when the exact confluence of circumstances creates a miracle, but last week’s oh-so-Israeli, do-it-yourself rescue falls into that category. Talk about flying on a wing and a prayer.
Although details are still being released, it is now well known that on September 30, a radicalized Omani co-pilot on FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv attacked the Indian captain using the cockpit’s emergency ax, with the intent of crashing the plane with nearly 180 people on board, most of them Israeli. His plans were thwarted when Israeli passengers sprang into action and improvised, the way Israelis do.
The heroic Captain Smit Machchhar managed to open the cockpit door; Tali Manes, a mother taking her young daughter to the bathroom, heard the commotion in the cabin and managed to shake the flight crew into action.
Meanwhile, Israeli guys took command of the situation – tackling the terrorist and using in-flight headphone cables to restrain him. Among the heroes were Tali’s husband, finance executive Zvi Manes; insurance agent Assaf Rajuan, and dentist Dr. Shota Musaye, who treated the badly wounded captain.
Plumber Yaniv Hayoun earned his 15-minutes of global fame and eternal Israeli gratitude by grabbing the control sticks to pull the plane out of a nosedive, as he had seen on the TV aviation disaster series Mayday, and the reserve cabin crew managed to safely land the damaged plane in Saudi Arabia.
There, the traumatized passengers were, by all accounts, treated well, before they were evacuated to Tel Aviv, where on landing they sang “Am Yisrael Chai!” (The People of Israel Live!). Even secular Jews recited “Birkat Hagomel,” the blessing on surviving danger.
It was a cross between an improbable episode of the two TV hit series Fauda and Tehran. What could have been an Israeli 9/11 – just ahead of the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion and mega-atrocity – was averted by a matter of seconds.
I was reminded of Hatikvah 6’s popular song “Am Shel Giborei Al” about the ordinary Israelis from all walks of life who turned up for IDF reserve duty after October 7: “True, everyone looks normal, but we are a nation of superheroes, and within each one hides a soldier ready to save the world.”
The near-disaster, of course, raises many questions. Attention focused on how Hamam al-Hammami – who had an Omani father and Syrian mother, displayed openly jihadist sympathies, and had been kicked out of airlines in Oman and Morocco – was flying a plane for the United Arab Emirates, let alone a jetliner with Tel Aviv as its destination.
Under UAE-Israel agreements following the Abraham Accords, pilots on this route are meant to be nationals of countries with which Israel has diplomatic relations.
While there are meant to be checks of the passenger and flight crew lists (partly under the auspices of the Tax Authority), I’ve long been more concerned with the harder-to-detect terrorist threat from baggage handlers and other airport staff abroad.
Qatari and Iranian influence
Entire University campuses, professional organizations, NGOs, and government offices are being hijacked, partly financed and fueled by Qatari and Iranian influence. Israel has become the central issue on the agenda, even in local politics.
Across the globe, October 7 events have been perversely turned into vigils and rallies to support Gaza – from where the Hamas perpetrators invaded and murdered 1,200, and where they held 251 hostages in homes and terror tunnels. According to a report by the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry, at least 262 pro-Palestinian events were scheduled in 37 countries in the first half of October.
In the Netherlands, where a law was recently passed banning products from “The Occupied Territories” – including Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights, and east Jerusalem – the luggage of passengers arriving on flights from Tel Aviv is subjected to a rigorous search to confiscate any illegal products.
Perish the thought that Israeli dates from the Jordan Valley, wine from the Golan, or Dead Sea cosmetics from the (Chinese-owned) AHAVA company should taint Dutch soil. One can only pray that the local airport staff is as vigilant in preventing terrorist threats.
In the UK, the US air force has removed its bomber planes from the RAF Fairford base in Gloucestershire following the arrest in London of a British-Iranian citizen allegedly plotting a terror attack. Altogether, six people reportedly have been detained (and released on bail) following an incident in September when an alert farmer spotted trucks and masked men near the base.
This is definitely not Britain’s “finest hour” in Churchill’s immortal words. Current British Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Foreign Minister Ed Miliband have a hostile approach to the Jewish state.
Following the latest declaration of UK sanctions last month, Israel announced the closure of the British consulate in Jerusalem. This would leave open the embassy in Tel Aviv but closes the Jerusalem facility, which extraordinarily handles only Arabs, not Jews, and serves as the de facto embassy to the Palestinian Authority.
Britain is reportedly threatening to retaliate by expelling 27 Israeli diplomats, thus further escalating the tension (and probably boosting already high antisemitism).
Even though the British sanctions (similar to the Dutch ones) have yet to come into force, there were reports last month of staff at London’s Luton airport pulling aside some Israeli passengers for an added search – as if Israelis were the threat and not the frontline fighting global jihad.
On Sunday, Britain marked the 90th anniversary of “The Battle of Cable Street,” the clash between Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and anti-fascist demonstrators, who refused to let them pass through the heavily Jewish area of the East End of London. Today the fascist forces have joined with the far-Left and Islamists in an unholy alliance against the Jews.
As Nicole Lampert wrote in The Telegraph, “[This week]… there were two demonstrations for Cable Street. A real one and a fake one. One filled with Jews and allies who sang: ‘Ninety years on, we are still here.’ At the front were people whose parents and grandparents had been at the first battle…
“The other demo was filled with people who looked to be as obsessed with Jews as Oswald Mosley and his fascists were.”
Covering this second demonstration as a journalist, Lampert was accosted for being “a Zio.” She described the distressing experience as “a microcosm of what has been happening to Diaspora Jews since the October 7 attacks three years ago – the taunts, the hatred, the violence.”
Meanwhile, at the annual conference of the Green Party of England and Wales, a motion defining Zionism as “racism” passed by a large majority (although only a fraction of the membership participated in the vote).
The motion calls Israel “colonialist” and supports replacing it with a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital. Jewish national self-determination, unlike Palestinian nationalism, is strictly “Verboten.”
Green Party members can now be “disciplined” for being members of synagogues. Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who is nominally Jewish but a strident opponent of Israel, was not present for the vote.
Elsewhere, the violent riots that started in Paris neighborhoods that are heavily populated by immigrants – ostensibly over conditions in high schools – have spread beyond the capital and even beyond French borders. Here, too, a theoretically domestic issue has become wrapped in the keffiyehs of both the far-Left and Islamists.
In Spain, socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who has taken the country on a virulently anti-Israel and pro-mass immigration course, was forced this week to call snap elections. It remains to be seen whether Sanchez, beset by a series of scandals, can return to the cockpit or whether safer hands will take over the controls.
As Douglas Murray summed up in The Free Press on September 30: “What happened in the skies above Saudi Arabia on Wednesday morning stands as a metaphor for three years of war.
“The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course. The rest of the West will have to decide whether it will follow the Israeli model or let its own future be dictated by terror and the hijacking of its entire society.”
We can’t count on miracles, but we can count our blessings, and we can stand up and be counted.