One Flight Revealed the New Middle East - and the Old One | 10@9 | 2026.10.06

Good morning. Today is Tuesday, October 6, 2026. May Eis Hashem Heisazos, this was certainly from God. He nefloos beinaynu, it was a pela, a wonder in our eyes. Those were the words from Hallel, the prayer of praise we say every day during Sukkos, that I first thought of, and many others did, when I heard about the near catastrophe of fly Dubai last Wednesday. News reports now indicate the plan was much more horrifying, much worse than just, and I'll put in quotation marks just, the approximately 180 people on board. But news reports indicate the co-pilot who carried out this terrorist attack intended to crash the plane into Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, and his plan was that he would overtake the captain. He would receive all the necessary landing clearances and then crash into something, the airport, a building, another plane. And by doing that and waiting till the last moment, his idea was he would have prevented anyone else from realizing what was happening and prevent anyone from stopping him to doing this, putting countless more than just those on the plane in peril in Israel. And the only thing that stopped it was the brave, courageous captain unlatching the cockpit door, which allowed Israeli passengers to subdue the terrorist, care for the captain's serious wounds, write the plane, and bring it down safely. This is a uniquely Israeli story. Yaakov Katz wrote, Israelis are a nation of heroes. Of all the extraordinary stories to emerge from Wednesday's fly Dubai flight, the one that stands out as the courage of the passengers who realized something had gone terribly wrong, forced their way into the cockpit, helped subdue the copilot, and they acted. They didn't wait for someone to rescue them or see if everything would resolve itself on its own. They took the initiative and they saved lives, not only of the passengers on board, but as we now know, whatever else the plane, God forbid, might have taken down with it. It is part of this country's culture, not to stand by and watch events unfold, but to run headfirst into the fire, battle, or the storm and do whatever can be done to save lives. That's Israeli culture. They literally took charge. And when we think about it, now Katz is writing just a couple of days ago, it's a characteristic we know all too well. Tomorrow, October 7th, we will mark three years since October 7th, 2023. And that terrible day will be seared into our collective memory as one of the greatest failures and tragedies in Israeli history, but like with the airplane, it too was filled with stories of some of the greatest courage this country has ever seen. The people who woke up that morning heard that something incomprehensible was happening in the South, understood that people were in desperate need of help and got into their cars. They took whatever weapons they had, if they had any, and drove straight into the battle. They did not know what they would find. They did not know how many terrorists had crossed the border, where the army was, or whether they themselves would make it home. They just went. And that to a large extent is the story of Israel. A small country whose people are repeatedly confronted with danger and who, when the moment comes, stand up, fight, and leave the charge. But there is a wider story of the events of last Wednesday that I want to share. It's a nuanced story. It contains contradictions, but it illuminates a great truth about our time. And the story is told by Rabbi Stephen Abraham. Now, of course, even today, many details of what happened are under investigation. But we already know enough to make the story almost unbelievable. Fly Dubai Boeing 737 was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv, carrying between 170, 180 people, most of them Israelis. Pause there for a moment. Dubai to Tel Aviv. An Arab airline carrying a plane full of Israelis from the UAE to the Jewish state. For almost the entirety of Israel's existence, that sentence would itself have been extraordinary. Next to impossible. On Wednesday, it was simply a regularly scheduled commercial flight until it wasn't until a violent confrontation erupted inside the cockpit and the copilot attempted to crash the airport, the aircraft in a terrorist attack. There was blood. There was confusion. There was no guarantee that anyone aboard understood precisely what was happening. The Israeli passengers acted anyway. They stabilized the airplane and then came the next problem. Where do you land a crippled aircraft carrying more than 170 Israelis after an apparent attempt to bring it down? The answer was Tabuk Saudi Arabia, of all places, Saudi Arabia. Saudi emergency personnel met the plane, took the wounded for medical treatment. The attacker was detained by Saudi authorities. Israeli passengers found themselves safe on Saudi soil and eventually another fly Dubai aircraft carried them home to Israel. But remember, Saudi Arabia does not have diplomatic relations with Israel. The kingdom has not joined the Abraham Accords. Israeli citizens do not simply book vacations in Saudi Arabia the way they now travel to Dubai or Abu Dhabi. And yet, when this aircraft needed a one way, Saudi Arabia gave it one. There are moments when history is almost too subtle to notice. This is not one of them. This one deserves to be read carefully because somehow contained within a single Boeing 737 were almost all the contradictions of the modern Middle East. And this is the time that we are living in Israel and for Jews around the world a time of contradictions. The plane belonged to an Emirati airline. It departed from Dubai. It was headed for Tel Aviv. Most of the passengers were Israeli. The wounded, courageous captain was Indian. The terrorist was Omani. The passengers who helped overpower the terrorist were Israelis. Additional fly Dubai pilots aboard the aircraft helped bring it safely to the ground and the ground beneath them was Saudi Arabian territory. This flight existed at all because the Middle East has changed. In September 2020, Israel and the United Arab Emirates signed the Abraham Accords. Now, there have been peace treaties before, which are still in effect. Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, Jordan in 1994, but those relationships are often described as cold peace. They stopped wars, established diplomatic relations, they created strategic cooperation, but they rarely have produced so far the kind of everyday encountered when we envisioned the word normalization. The UAE relationship was different because when that was signed in 2020, suddenly there were flights, there were business deals, Israeli tourists wandering through Dubai malls, kosher restaurants, Jewish prayer services, Hebrews spoken openly in the Gulf, Emirati visitors in Israel, commercial relationships, technology relationships, something that had once been almost unthinkable became ordinary. Peace stopped being merely something signed by foreign ministers. It became something printed on a boarding pass, Dubai to Tel Aviv. And perhaps that's part of what makes Wednesday's story so painful because the New Middle East did not eliminate the old one. They coexist, sometimes literally in the same cockpit. The Abraham Accords did not abolish anti-Semitism. They did not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They did not destroy Islamist extremism. They did not end the Iranian threat. They certainly did not turn every Arab state into an ally of Israel. And they most certainly did not erase October 7th and everything that has followed from it. History does not surrender so easily, but something did change. Israel is no longer situated in precisely the same regional reality in which it existed for most of its first seven decades. The map is different, not entirely different, not safely different, not permanently different, but different. The old Middle East was there. Violence aboard an aircraft carrying Jews to Israel. Terrorism. Israeli fighter jets being scrambled. The ancient Jewish reflex of wondering whether this is the moment when catastrophe begins. The old Middle East was there, but the New Middle East was there also. The plane was Emirati. The route existed because of normalization. Arab and Israeli lives had become intertwined in the most mundane possible way. Commercial aviation. Israeli passengers and an international crew suddenly depended upon one another for survival. And Saudi Arabia, a kingdom with which Israel still lacks diplomatic relations, became the place of refuge. Saudi Arabia has not made peace with Israel. Normalization has not occurred. Political disagreements are enormous. And the Saudi government's response to this reflected that according to news reports, the Saudi authorities did not allow Israeli planes to come to pick up the Israeli passengers to bring them home. And those Israeli passengers ultimately returned home on another fly Dubai flight. Now that distinction is important. Saudi Arabia provided emergency landing, treated the injured, took custody of alleged attacker, but Saudi Arabia did not suddenly become Israel's newest diplomatic partner. The old barriers remain. And that is precisely why the story is important, because we have a habit of imagining history and absolutes. War or peace. Enemy or friend. Recognition or non-recognition. But sometimes countries that do not recognize one another cooperate quietly. That is the nuanced contradictory Middle East we now inhabit. And perhaps the most accurate word for it is not peace. It is possibility. Now possibility is smaller than peace. It is more fragile. It is less satisfying, but it is also real. The Abraham Accords were never valuable because they proved that the Middle East had become a utopia. They were valuable because they enlarged the realm of the possible. Before 2020, an Emirati plane flying hundreds of Israelis back and forth between Dubai and Tel Aviv would have been impossible, implausible. And then it became routine. The remarkable became mundane. With commercial agreements, with tourists, with business people, with families, with airline crews, with human beings discovering slowly and imperfectly and inconsistently that the person on the other side of the border side of the border may not need to remain a stranger forever. But again, slowly and imperfectly and inconsistently that is our world today. I certainly agree with what Rabbi Abraham writes next. I make no prediction of what comes next. But Wednesday gave us a small glimpse of what could come because last Wednesday when human lives were in a immediate danger, the map temporarily mattered less than the emergency. A Saudi runway was available. The aircraft needed it and the Israelis landed. Asaf Rajoon was one of the heroes among the passengers of the fly Dubai flight. A couple of days ago, he wrote, I usually don't write much on social media, but today I felt something burning inside me that I had to share. Of course, after we arrived safely on the soil of Israel, I felt the need to thank many people, the passengers who cooperated, the captain, the passengers who took the initiative to overcome the terrorist, to right the plane, the other crew members who helped to land the plane, of course. But yesterday during an interview with a group of passengers, we realized something profound when we looked at the smallest details. Every passenger on the flight had a specific role. Some took care of communication with Israel's security system. One passenger provided a mobile hotspot and shared it with others. One passenger recited to Hila. One passenger made sure there were headphone cables available to tie up the terrorist. Passengers updated our location using the GPS map. An Australian passenger was the only one who managed to make calls to Israel from hostile airspace. There were many more examples. In addition to the ones we know about, Yanniv, Tsvika, Tali, Shota, the others that we know about, they are incredible heroism and Asaf writes, After this great miracle, I went to the synagogue to say Bi'r-hasegomel, the blessing of thanksgiving after surviving danger. This was on this pas shabbos. Just so happens, the Torah reading in the synagogue, when I came, was from Deuteronomy chapter 33 verse 26. In Israel that was read on Shabbos, we read this on Sunday. Ain ke'el ye'shurun. There is none like God ye'shurun. Rolchev shamaim be'ezrecha. God who rides through the heavens to your aid, ube gava soshchokim. And in his majesty rides through the skies to protect you. And Asaf writes today during Bi'r-hasegomel, I felt one central thing, gratitude. Gratitude for life, gratitude for the miracle, and gratitude for the privilege of standing here and telling this story. Am Yisrael. My friends, I wish you a great day and I look forward to seeing you soon in person.