The Flydubai flight FZ1073 was en route from the UAE to Tel Aviv, carrying more than 170 people, most of them Israelis. A violent altercation broke out inside the cockpit between the co-pilot and the Indian captain of the flight, Sumit Matchar. The captain was injured and the aircraft went into a steep descent. Crew members who were on standby, along with several passengers, intervened, and the incident ended with the aircraft landing at Tabuk Airport in Saudi Arabia.
The ruling establishment in Israel seized upon the incident with a speed resembling the speed at which the aircraft veered off course, and immediately turned the story into a malicious political and electoral public-relations campaign. It began with assertions that the motive was terrorism, even though the UAE immediately announced that an investigation was underway. Israeli officials spoke of a ‘jihadist terrorist act’, claimed that the attacker had used an axe rather than a knife, alleged that he had received ‘extremist Islamic indoctrination’, and claimed that he had links to Iran. They also portrayed the incident as a broader threat requiring security measures and heightened alert, while linking it to a regional axis. At the same time, the narrative celebrated ‘Israeli heroes’ who confronted the attacker, including a plumber, and highlighted a ‘clever little girl’ who supposedly helped thwart the attack. In this way, Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies created a rapidly reacting chemical equation: incident – terrorism – jihad – extremist Islamic indoctrination – Iranian responsibility… leading to the presumed logical conclusion: vote for me!
This is not merely a matter of word choice. The transition from a ‘serious incident’ to ‘jihadist terrorism’, then to ‘Islamic indoctrination’ and ‘Iranian links’, represents a movement between entirely different levels of responsibility and meaning, each carrying its own security, political and potentially military implications.
While the question of how control of the aircraft was ultimately regained remains unanswered and is a matter for investigation, Israeli officials have already taken control of the meaning of what happened, on the eve of Israeli elections that Netanyahu is contesting under intense domestic political pressure.
The Flydubai incident provided ideal material for reconstructing the narrative that Netanyahu has manipulated for years: Israel is surrounded by danger, enemies are constantly plotting against it, and security is its foremost concern; therefore, he is the man capable of dealing with all these threats. The irony, bordering on black comedy, is that some of the domestic political pressure Netanyahu has recently faced has focused on his deliberate disregard of warnings from the UAE about a Hamas attack on October 7, days before it occurred.
Supporters of the Israeli prime minister also spoke of a warning Netanyahu had supposedly issued about a security incident, and portrayed what happened as subsequent proof that his warning had been correct. But Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid said that the security briefing had not been about this incident. This, in turn, illustrates the extent of Netanyahu and his supporters’ obsession with turning contradictory meanings in their favour.
Furthermore, Netanyahu’s and his defence minister’s references to a ‘jihadist/terrorist act’ and ‘Islamic indoctrination’ deliberately take the incident out of the framework of an individual act and place it within an anti-region, anti-Arab and anti-Islamic discourse whose central message is: Israel versus the Muslims. It frames what happened as part of a cultural war in which the enemy is all Muslims and Arabs – something whose violent manifestations we are witnessing against Palestinians, whether in Gaza and the West Bank or within Israel proper, as well as in Israel’s ongoing attacks on Lebanon and Syria.
What this narrative conveniently ignores, of course, is that the company transporting the Israeli passengers was Emirati, while Saudi Arabia received the aircraft and treated the injured.
[Al-Quds Al-Arabi]
Compiled and translated by Faizul Haque