Rebranding terror

The attack on FlyDubai Flight 1073 is a warning about what happens when the world loses the words to call October 7 what it was.

On Wednesday morning, FlyDubai Flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv broadcast code 7500, the signal for unlawful interference. Investigators from several countries have not yet established the attacker’s motive or whether he acted alone, and firm conclusions must wait for their findings. But the question the episode raises is already unavoidable: why would anyone at the controls of an airliner decide that a planeload of Israeli civilians was a legitimate target?

Three years ago, October 7 was understood almost everywhere for what it was: the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Some 1,200 people were murdered and 251 taken hostage; families were burned in their homes and festivalgoers hunted through open fields. Within days, however, another story began to circulate. On campuses, in street marches and across social media, the attack was recast as “resistance,” a “breakout” from an open-air prison, the opening act of a liberation struggle. Calls for intifada echoed through Western capitals. The massacre was not so much denied as contextualized out of existence.

Terrorism has always been a performance for an audience. Its practitioners measure success not only in casualties but in reactions. For decades, attacks on Israeli civilians met near-uniform international condemnation, and that consensus raised the moral price of joining the fight. Today potential attacker scrolling his phone sees something different: crowds in Western cities waving the flags of the movement that carried out October 7, Israel’s diplomatic isolation deepening, institutions cutting ties. He may conclude that he is not a murderer but a volunteer in a cause the world quietly endorses — that history, and the applause, are on his side. Students of radicalization have long observed that a sense of approval from one’s community is among its strongest accelerants. Lone attackers rarely act from nowhere; they act from a story they believe others share.

Condemning terrorism should never depend on one’s view of Israeli policy. If that line is not restored, the passengers of Flight 1073 will not be the last to fight for their lives in the sky — and next time, there may be no one able to break through the cockpit door.