CLARITY
The Meaning of FZ1073
Michael Oren
October 1, 2026

Occurring just over a week before the anniversary of the October 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 October 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.  READ MORE

JNS Melanie Phillips: Those amazing and heroic Israelis On Monday, Britain’s foreign secretary Ed Miliband delivered a diatribe against Israel, accusing it of ethnic cleansing and war crimes, and vowing to punish it for the crime of allowing Jews to “settle” in their own historic land. On Wednesday, four ordinary Israelis on a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv averted a new 9/11 by overpowering the co-pilot who was attempting to crash the plane, possibly in Israel. There could hardly be a better illustration of the way Britain is now choosing to embrace a culture of death while Israel is choosing life…An averted catastrophe in the air shows how the Jewish state chooses life, while Britain and the West are embracing a culture of death.