Flydubai Flight FZ1073 and the Indomitability of the Jews

Occurring just over a week before the anniversary of the Oct. 7  horrors, the saving of flydubai Flight 1073 from fiery destruction and 174 passengers, most of them Israelis, from certain death, stands as a metaphor for the past three years of war.

Starting at 6:29 on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists breached the Gaza fence at dozens of locations and invaded Israeli border communities. More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign workers were slaughtered and 251 taken hostage. The next day, Hezbollah joined the fight, attacking northern Israeli towns with rockets and drones. Further strikes were aimed at Israel from Iranian-backed terrorists in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, as well as from the Islamic Republic itself.

Another country — Britain, for example, or the Netherlands — having suffered similar losses, would have taken weeks or months to mount even a minor military response, if any. Hundreds of thousands of their citizens would not have rallied to their nation’s defense, put on uniforms and picked up guns and risked their lives, often in hundreds of days of relentless urban combat. The overwhelming majority of their populations would not have volunteered to support the soldiers, the wounded, bereaved and the displaced, or work the fields of abandoned farms.

No other Western country, perhaps even the United States, could have performed all this while under massive international pressure to cease defending itself. No other people could have persevered in the face of near-global condemnations and false accusations of committing the most heinous crimes known to humanity. No other nation, isolated, boycotted and surrounded by enemies devoted to death, would reaffirm its determination to live by bringing yet more children into this world, expanding its economy and reasserting its technological prowess.

Israel’s response to Oct. 7, however unique in the contemporary world, has not been cost-free. Our people remain agonizingly divided over which of our leaders bore responsibility for that morning’s failure and for decisions made in the subsequent war. A no less bitter schism separates those who are willing to fight from those who, avowedly for religious reasons, are not. Some 924 Israeli soldiers have been killed since Oct. 8, and thousands physically and emotionally wounded.

And yet, we keep fighting. We will defend ourselves in the court of international law; we will stand up for truth in the media. We will battle Hamas and Hezbollah again as the need arises, and mount crippling operations against Iran should America resume the war. Missiles may once again smash into our neighborhoods and schools, businesses may close, and the world will continue condemning us for doing what so much of it no longer has the will to do — for defending our homes and families. We will celebrate births, bar mitzvahs and weddings, and pioneer technologies that benefit humankind. We will do all of this not because, it is often stated, we have nowhere else to go, but because of who we are. We, the Jewish people, are indomitable.

We are the people who, for nearly 2,000 years, never forfeited our hope of returning to our ancestral homeland. The people who, a mere three years after the Holocaust, declared our independence in that land and thwarted successive enemy efforts to destroy us. We are the people who, despite grave disagreements between religious and secular, right-wing and left, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, geographical periphery and center, still coheres. We are a people who, less than a month from now, will go to the polls, demonstrating once again our uniqueness as one of the very few nations never to have known a moment of nondemocratic governance.

That, then, is the meaning of flydubai Flight FZ1073. While their airliner plunged nearly 20,000 feet in under two minutes and their courageous wounded pilot struggled to open the cockpit door, ordinary Israelis overcame paralyzing uncertainty and rushed to the front of the plane. There, regular citizens — not commandos, not armed air marshals — with their bare hands and headphone wires, disarmed, subdued, and bound the co-pilot suspected of trying to kill everyone on board precisely because most of them were Israelis. Were Jews. And once the danger passed, the Jews of FZ1073 didn’t wallow, didn’t shrink, but instead broke into song. They sang words of the late 18th and early 19th-century Hasidic genius, Rabbi Nahman: “All the world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to fear” and “Am Yisrael Chai,” the people of Israel live.

FZ1073 has a message for the world. For the terrorists striving to take innumerable Israeli lives and make the survivors’ lives unbearable, the message is that your love of death will never diminish our love of life nor make us any less determined to defend it. For the European leaders who prefer to boycott Israeli Jews rather than confront the extremists who are conquering their countries from within. FZ1073 stands as an example of what a proud, strong, and self-respecting people can still accomplish. And for Israelis soon to celebrate the completion of the yearly Torah readings — Simchat Torah — and commemorate the anniversary of Oct. 7, FZ1073 reminds us of who we are, what we stand for and what we are willing to do to remain Israelis. The sheer heroism displayed by the Israeli passengers of FZ1073 shows why nothing can ever defeat us. 

Michael Oren, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the US, Knesset Member, and Deputy Minister for Diplomacy, is the founder of the Israel Advocacy Group and author of the Substack, Clarity, where this article originally appeared.