When a co-pilot allegedly stabbed his captain and tried to send a Flydubai jet carrying 174 passengers plummeting into the Arabian desert on 30 September, the images that followed were the stuff of genuine heroism: an Indian pilot, badly wounded, forcing open a locked cockpit door with his last reserves of strength; passengers wrestling an attacker to the floor; a plane limping to safety in Tabuk. Nobody disputes that something terrifying happened 14,000 feet above Saudi airspace. What is now being disputed, with growing unease across Israel’s political spectrum, is how swiftly and conveniently that terror was folded into Benjamin Netanyahu’s election narrative.
The timing alone would raise eyebrows in any functioning democracy. A day before the incident, at a campaign stop staged at the Tel Nof airbase, fighter jets arranged behind him like props, the prime minister told Israelis that he had "indications that, ahead of the elections, our enemies will try to attack us." Vague, unspecific, impossible to verify. Then, less than twenty-four hours later, an attack duly materialised. Netanyahu’s supporters have been quick to call this prescience. His critics call it something else entirely: a forecast so convenient it barely needed fulfilling.
Yair Lapid, who was given a security briefing by Netanyahu’s own office the night before the warning was issued, has been unambiguous. Nothing resembling a plane attack, he says, appeared anywhere in that briefing. If the prime minister genuinely possessed intelligence pointing to this specific threat, why would his own opposition leader, briefed directly by his office, have heard nothing of it? That is not a question easily waved away as sour grapes from a rival trailing in the polls, particularly when those same polls suggest Netanyahu could lose the 27 October election outright.
Then come the discrepancies in the official account itself, which have mutated almost by the hour. Within the first day, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir and senior officers reportedly assessed that hijacking had been ruled out, attributing the emergency squawk codes to a violent personal altercation between the two pilots rather than an act of coordinated terror. Saudi and Emirati state media, notably, continued to avoid describing it as a terror attack at all. Yet almost simultaneously, Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Israel Katz were publicly branding it a "jihadist terrorist attack attempt" and invoking the spectre of Iranian involvement, despite Netanyahu himself, in the same breath, conceding to Fox News that "it’s too early to say." One cannot have it both ways: either the intelligence picture is too uncertain to draw conclusions, or it is solid enough to assign blame to Tehran on primetime American television. Reports have since suggested that multiple Israeli security bodies, including Mossad and Shin Bet, leaned towards a "lone wolf" assessment rather than state-sponsored terrorism, a far less politically useful conclusion, and one that received considerably less airtime from the prime minister’s office.
None of this is to suggest, carelessly, that the incident was staged or stage-managed from the cockpit outward; that would be an extraordinary claim demanding extraordinary evidence nobody has produced. The attacker was real, the stabbing was real, the terror felt by 174 passengers plunging through the sky was entirely real. But the gap between what actually happened in that cockpit and the story Netanyahu’s government chose to tell about it, jihadist radicalisation, Iranian collusion, vindication of a vague warning issued hours earlier, is wide enough to merit genuine scrutiny, not reflexive dismissal.
It is worth noting, in fairness, that not every seasoned observer believes this will even work in Netanyahu’s favour. The historian Ahron Bregman has argued there may be "no political gain for him" here at all, suggesting the incident simply deepens an already-pervasive sense of national trauma rather than reviving a flagging campaign. That is a credible reading too. Israelis exhausted by two years of war, by the unresolved wounds of 7 October, and by a prime minister whose critics accuse him of ignoring explicit warnings before that catastrophe, may simply not have the appetite to be reassured by his newfound vigilance now.
What seems undeniable, though, is that the tide of international sentiment towards Netanyahu personally, as opposed to Israel as a state, has been shifting for some time, and incidents like this one accelerate rather than arrest that drift. Commentators abroad increasingly view his security pronouncements through a lens of electoral self-interest first and national safety second. Whether or not that reading is entirely fair to a man who has governed through genuine, repeated crises, it is the reading that is taking hold. And once a prime minister’s warnings are met by instinctive scepticism rather than instinctive trust, something important about the relationship between leader and electorate has already been lost, regardless of what the investigators in Riyadh, Dubai and Tel Aviv ultimately conclude about what really happened in that cockpit.
Written by:
*Chloe Maluleke
Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group
Russia & Middle East Specialist
**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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