The FlyDubai flight to Tel Aviv is a modern story of Jewish heroism

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(RNS) — Some summer night years from now, a counselor at a Jewish summer camp will gather the kids around the fire and tell them a story.

He will hold up a pair of cheap airline headphones and start from there with a story about a man with a knife and an airplane falling out of the sky.

Its heroes are ordinary Jews who unbuckled their seatbelts and went forward.

On Wednesday morning (Sept. 30), 180 passengers were aboard a FlyDubai flight on its way from Dubai to Tel Aviv, most of them Israelis heading home for Sukkot.

Two hours and 15 minutes into the trip, the Boeing 737 MAX pitched into a dive, dropping roughly 17,000 feet in under two minutes.

According to passengers, the Omani first officer turned on the captain, an Indian pilot named Smit Machchhar, and stabbed him. Machchhar, bleeding from his copilot’s knife, acted heroically and used his last bit of energy to unlock the cockpit door and let help in. 

Tzvika Manes, an Israeli bank executive traveling with his family, pulled his young daughter from the lavatory and went forward to the cockpit to fight. Two other Israelis joined him. It took them some 20 minutes to overpower the copilot, and when they succeeded, they tied him up with the corded headphones that the airline hands out for in-flight movies.

Yaniv Hayun, another Israeli who helped stop the attacker, then found the cockpit empty and the airplane tilting toward the desert floor. He grabbed the controls and hauled it back.

How did he know what to do? As he later explained to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he watches “Mayday,” a documentary television show about airplane crashes. 

Then, two off-duty pilots on board flew the crippled jet to Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and landed it safely.

As the plane hurtled toward the ground, some passengers recited the Shema. And when the wheels touched the runway, solemn prayer became unfettered joy, as passengers broke into applause and song.

Saudi Arabia reportedly refused to let Israeli Air Force planes fetch the passengers, so a FlyDubai rescue flight brought them home. They cheered and sang again as the plane touched down at Ben Gurion International Airport.

What was the motive? As of this writing, we do not know. Israeli officials suspect terror but have not ruled out a psychiatric episode.

The real story belongs to the people in the seats. Manes put it plainly: “It was a very difficult scenario … but because we’re Israelis, we responded quickly.” 

The story offers a mini-lesson in how many Jews experience the world. We never shrug things off — they always have echoes. 

What were the echoes of this day?

First, next Wednesday marks three years since the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. On the Hebrew calendar, the anniversary arrives this weekend, on Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.

For those past three years, the story we have told ourselves has largely been one of helplessness. Yes, there were many moments of heroism. But, Oct. 7 is mainly a story about an army that took hours to arrive, about hostages who vanished into the tunnels, about horrific sexual violence and now, about a government that knew, and failed to act.

But there is another anniversary we just marked, and it supplies a necessary counter-point to this story.

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, we marked a quarter-century since 9/11. The stories that we remember are the stories of heroism — of police, firefighters and rescue workers who gave their lives. And, the passengers on United Flight 93.

The passengers onboard learned that hijackers had already flown airplanes into buildings that morning. They took a vote, and Todd Beamer famously said, “Let’s roll.” They stormed the cockpit, stopped the hijacker and the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field near Shanksville, far short of its target in Washington. Everyone on board was killed.

Fast forward to the news from this week. This was not a hijacker, but a pilot. As David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel, noted, never before had passengers thwarted a pilot’s attempt to crash a commercial airliner. 

The postscript of Flight 93 was Flight 1073 to Tel Aviv — and this time, the passengers all walked off the plane.

But, reach back even farther, 50 years ago, to Entebbe. 

On June 27, 1976, Palestinian and German terrorists seized Air France Flight 139, flying from Tel Aviv to Athens. They forced it to fly to Uganda, then ruled by the despotic Idi Amin. There, the hijackers separated the Israeli and Jewish passengers from the rest and held them hostage.

On the night of July 3, Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles and freed more than 100 hostages. Their commander, Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, fell in the raid.

The stars of Entebbe were Israeli soldiers who had planned and rehearsed that rescue.

But, now, another postscript: The stars of Flight 93 were not highly-trained commandos. They were ordinary people, acting in an extraordinary way. 

What do we learn, or re-learn, from all this?

Our teacher is a man who was a Zionist before there were Zionists. In 1882, Leon Pinsker argued that if Jews wait for others to rescue them, they will wait forever. They must act on their own behalf.

That simple statement became one of the cornerstones of Zionism, and it remains so. When trouble started at the front of the plane, Israelis get out of their seats and moved toward it.

We are approaching the end of Sukkot, and every morning of the festival we have taken up the lulav. The midrash teaches that each of the four species, the plants mentioned in the Torah, resembles a part of the body, and that the lulav, tall and straight, resembles the spine. Wave it in every direction and it holds its shape.

On Wednesday, a few Israelis showed the world what the Jewish spine looks like at 34,000 feet: A man hears a scream at the front of the plane, and he stands up.

Perhaps in the future, that counselor will re-tell the midrash, how the Israelites walked into the middle of the Red Sea and one man, Nachshon ben Aminadav, jumped in. The waters parted, and the Israelites walked to safety.

That counselor will say: “Nachshon did it; those passengers did it, and that is the story of the Jewish people.

“It is your story, and welcome to it.”

No one can ever take that story away from us.