This won’t be the last attempt

We can be certain the cockpit attack aboard flydubai Flight FZ1073 won’t be the last attempt to terrorize Israelis and Americans. I expect more of them.

Picture the terrifying scene: A Boeing 737 MAX cruises at 34,000 feet on a routine run from Dubai to Tel Aviv, then suddenly plunges thousands of feet. Its transponder squawks the general emergency code, then soon after the code for unlawful interference. Israel scrambles fighter jets as the flight, squawking the hijack code, heads toward its airspace. Somewhere over Saudi and Jordanian skies, passengers scream, and in the cockpit, reportedly, one pilot has stabbed the other.

The detail that won’t leave me today is actually the cockpit door.

After 9/11, the reinforced cockpit door became the symbol of aviation security, built to keep hostile people out of the place where the pilots fly the plane. In this case, passengers and crew reportedly had to force their way through it to reach the man at the controls. A generation of security planning assumed the threat was outside the cockpit. This time it appears that the threat was inside the cockpit—sitting beside the captain.

The investigation is ongoing, so some things are known and others aren’t. The plane landed safely at Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, about an hour after the distress call. Both pilots were hospitalized, and the passengers, nearly all of them Israeli, were unharmed. Saudi authorities arrested the suspect, reportedly an Omani national, and are questioning him. Flydubai confirmed an “altercation” in the flight deck, said the motives remain unknown, and urged people not to speculate.

Early reporting was muddled, with some declaring a hijacking and others a dispute. Accounts of the rescue differ too: Defense Minister Israel Katz credited Israeli passengers with breaking into the cockpit, while another Israeli official said two off-duty airline pilots, one from South Africa and one from New Zealand, went in with cabin crew and passengers and restrained the first officer. In any event, those men saved lives.

The assessment from Israeli officials hardened quickly. Katz called it “an attempted jihadist terror attack” and said preliminary information indicated the attacker “had one intention: to crash the plane with all of its passengers.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it “extremely severe,” said one pilot stabbed the other and “apparently tried to crash the plane with everyone on board,” praised those who stopped him for preventing “a major disaster,” and told security agencies to prepare for additional threats. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said it should end any “naive” thinking about Israel’s enemies. Israeli security sources are also looking into a possible Iran link, though it is too early to say.

Officials in wartime have their own incentives, and Israel’s are no exception. But there have been warnings about this kind of attack, and intelligence services know the pattern.

If the allegation holds, this was no random act of violence. It fits a worldview in which every non-Muslim military action in the Middle East is read as an assault on “Muslim lands,” and the obligation to retaliate falls on any Muslim who can reach a target. Under that logic, an Israeli family on a flight or an American on a street is a combatant because of their passport, whatever they personally think of politics or religion.

This is what Islam, in its jihadist form, does best. It takes grievances and understandable anger at war and turns them into theological duty: a license to murder civilians, grounded in an ideological claim that Muslims are superior to, and more valuable than, non-Muslims. It is a poisonous ideology, and it has to be named and opposed.

But why does aviation keep drawing this kind of attempt?

A plane is a sealed room full of civilians, the ultimate soft target, and it delivers the terrorist’s real product, which is fear. Even a failed attempt makes families at airports look at the people around them, count the exits, and wonder.

The terrorist ideologue doesn’t need to succeed to win that part.

Analysts will also ask whether the target was as much about geography as about people. Israelis flying openly from the Gulf to Tel Aviv on a normalized route is exactly the kind of quiet cultural progress that Muslim “conservative” literalists, who hate anything Jewish or Israeli, want to disrupt. Some will see in this attack an attempt to sabotage ties between the UAE and Israel, which have grown significantly in recent years under the Abraham Accords. Whether that was the motive here is for investigators to establish, but the logic is familiar and plausible.

We shouldn’t be naive. Expect similar attempts, some sophisticated and some crude, with Americans in the crosshairs too. Those fanciful dreamers who insist ideology is irrelevant will keep being surprised. There is now no excuse for being surprised. This is the world we now live in, and the free world had better understand what we are up against.