Flydubai Attack Feeds into Netanyahu’s ‘Protector’ Narrative with Crucial Elections Approaching

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Ran Porat, Affiliate Researcher, The Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University

The apparent attempted hijacking of a Flydubai flight carrying 170 mostly Israeli passengers was another reminder to Israelis of the constant threat of terror and war. Only the bravery of the chief pilot and passengers prevented a major disaster.

A few hours earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video warning of attempts to harm Israelis in the lead-up to the country’s general election on October 27. Initially, his opponents criticised this as a stunt to divert public discourse towards security concerns, and away from his part in the devastating failures that enabled the October 7 Hamas attacks.

But after the suspected terror incident on the Flydubai plane, Netanyahu can claim he was right. With the elections approaching, the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history is hoping he can still restore his image as “the protector of Israel”.

See also: The Great Aviation Disaster Cover-Up? One Year After the Air India Plane Crash, Victims' Families Are Still Searching for Answers

Netanyahu was quick to incorporate the plane attack into his campaign by posting on his social media accounts a video and images of him embracing and praising one of the passengers (a Netanyahu supporter) who stormed the cockpit, his shirt still stained with blood.

Growing criticism over October 7 failures

Despite public outcry, Netanyahu refuses to accept blame for the October 7 attack. He has blocked the creation of a judicial commission of inquiry to investigate what led to the attack, while failing in his attempts to set up a different investigative committee more favourable to him.

Netanyahu has repeatedly argued that security officials failed to warn him of the impending assault, saying “if they had woken him up” earlier on October 7, “things would have been very different”.

Recent reports, however, paint a different picture. Numerous media outlets have reported that Israel’s security agencies, as well as Netanyahu himself, received explicit warnings days before the 2023 attack. These came from high-ranking Arab officials (Egypt’s intelligence minister) and leaders (the United Arab Emirates’ Mohammad bin Zaid). A new book also claims Netanyahu received a direct warning from Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the attack.

The prime minister and his top security officials, however, understood these warnings of an “earthquake” (to use Sinwar’s own term) erupting in Gaza as a demand for economic concessions for Palestinians.

Israeli decision-makers were captive to what is called a conceptzia in Israel – a detailed and entrenched set of assumptions about the enemy’s capabilities and intentions. (The term was coined to describe Israel’s intelligence failures before the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.)

In 2023, Netanyahu’s conceptzia, supported by many security officials who misread or were fooled by Sinwar, was that Qatari money going to Hamas would “buy quiet”, in the words of his critics.

Netanyahu approved the transfer of millions of dollars from Qatar to Gaza from 2018 onward. Yet, instead of assisting needy Gazans, Israeli intelligence believe much of these funds ended up feeding the growth of Hamas’ military abilities and underground terror infrastructure.

Can the opposition capitalise?

In the election, Netanyahu is facing strong opposition from the “ABBA” (Anyone But Bibi Again, in reference to Netanyahu’s nickname) bloc. His main rival is the Yashar! Party (which translates as “direct” or “straightforward”), headed by a former head of the Israel Defense Forces, Gadi Eisenkot, whose son was killed in the Gaza war.

Polls consistently suggest Yashar! will be the biggest party after the elections. Yet, forming a coalition may prove difficult because Eisenkot’s bloc is made up of a mishmash of right, left and centre-aligned parties, with little common ground except their goal of ousting Netanyahu. A similar coalition, under Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, fell apart quickly in 2022.

Furthermore, many Zionist parties demand the next government be “Zionist-only”, refusing to participate in a coalition that includes the Arab Islamic party Ra’am.

Ra’am was the missing piece that enabled the creation of the Bennett-Lapid government after four consecutive elections ended in 2022 without anyone having a path to a governing majority. Without Ra’am, the ABBA bloc may not be able to form a coalition.

The fate of a few small parties that must pass the vote threshold to sit in the Knesset is a wild card that is almost impossible to predict. If votes from the pro- or anti-Bibi blocs are wasted on small parties that fail to meet the threshold, this could dramatically affect the result.

Until recently, the polls were consistently pointing to a change of government being likely. But in recent weeks, the polls have tightened between the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs because they do not count the Arab parties and centre-right Hendel/Zelekha party. (It remains to be seen if this party will even pass the threshold.)

October 7 looms large over the vote

A few days before the election, Israelis will sombrely commemorate the third anniversary of the October 7 terror attack. Almost 1,200 Israelis of all ages were massacred on that Black Saturday, with some 250 people kidnapped, countless women raped and whole neighbourhoods pillaged and destroyed.

In the war in Gaza that followed, more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, with vast stretches of the enclave left in ruins and 1.2 million people left without homes.

October 7 is everywhere in the heated election campaign. Many candidates are family members of victims or soldiers injured in the war. A poll of the unprecedented large number of young, first-time voters revealed that October 7 has dramatically shifted their views to the right.

What will worry many Israelis most is the election will again end with a deadlock. The Jewish state urgently needs a leader that can safely steer it in the face of increasing criticism over the Gaza war, a wave of ugly antisemitism globally and now incidents like the attempted Flydubai hijacking.

Netanyahu will certainly be seeking to project himself as the person who can meet these challenges – but so, too, will his opponents.

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