When Citizens Become the Last Line of Defense

On September 30, passengers aboard Flydubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv found themselves in a situation no airline passenger should ever confront. After the co-pilot attacked the captain and attempted to seize control of the aircraft, crew members and passengers intervened. The captain, though wounded, helped regain control, and a potential mass-casualty disaster was averted.

Their courage deserves recognition. But in Israel, where extraordinary civilian heroism has acquired an uncomfortable familiarity, celebration should be accompanied by a more difficult question: Why did ordinary people once again find themselves serving as the final line of defense?

That question became more urgent after Army Radio reported that senior Israeli bodies had been warning for years about deficiencies in the system responsible for overseeing security on foreign airlines flying to Israel. According to internal National Security Council documents cited in the report, concerns about responsibility, resources and capabilities predated the attack by several years.

The bureaucratic history is complicated, but its essential contours are not. In 2021, the security cabinet changed the framework governing oversight of foreign aviation security, assigning responsibilities to the Transportation Ministry’s Civil Aviation Authority. A classified State Comptroller report in 2024 subsequently found, according to the documents reported by Army Radio, that the ministry was not adequately fulfilling its obligations. That May, the security cabinet ordered the National Security Council to convene representatives from the Transportation Ministry, Civil Aviation Authority, Shin Bet, Mossad and Finance Ministry to reconsider the security framework for international commercial flights into Israel.

The discussions exposed a fundamental problem. The Shin Bet reportedly maintained that it lacked the personnel and budget to assume responsibility for foreign-flight security checks. The National Security Council believed the responsibility belonged with the Transportation Ministry but acknowledged that the ministry would require additional manpower and resources. Security professionals within the ministry itself reportedly warned that the task exceeded its capabilities. Nevertheless, responsibility ultimately remained with the Transportation Ministry, and in March 2025 the National Security Council reportedly warned that the ministry was still not adequately fulfilling its role.

The Transportation Ministry disputes important elements of this account. It maintains that its responsibility for foreign-flight security is longstanding rather than newly transferred, that its procedures were approved by the relevant security bodies, and that it has supported the creation of a unified national aviation-security authority. These disagreements matter and deserve investigation. But they do not erase the larger and more troubling picture: for years, agencies of the Israeli state were debating who was responsible for a recognized security vulnerability and whether the institution carrying that responsibility possessed the means to discharge it.

Then an Israeli-bound aircraft nearly became a catastrophe.

For Israelis, the sequence has an unavoidable resonance.

October 7 was an event of an entirely different magnitude, and careless comparisons diminish rather than illuminate it. But the investigations conducted since that day have established something more disturbing than the simple proposition that Israeli intelligence “missed” an attack. The IDF’s own investigations identified failures in the conception governing Israel’s understanding of Hamas, in intelligence assessment, in the treatment of Hamas’s “Jericho Wall” invasion plan, in operational preparedness and in the decisions made during the hours immediately preceding the assault.

Information existed. Warning signs existed. The failure lay partly in converting what was known into an adequate understanding of the threat—and converting that understanding into action.

When that system collapsed on October 7, ordinary Israelis filled the vacuum. At communities along the Gaza border, civilian security teams, police officers, off-duty soldiers and residents fought while the national defense apparatus struggled to understand the scale of the invasion. At Kibbutz Be’eri, the IDF’s own investigation found that during the first hours of the attack, the principal resistance came from the kibbutz’s civilian rapid-response team and residents, whose actions prevented Hamas terrorists from penetrating still further into the community.

Their heroism remains one of the defining stories of October 7. But heroism can become dangerous when it obscures the failure that made it necessary.

That is where the comparison with Flight FZ1073 becomes important. There is presently no evidence that Israeli authorities possessed specific intelligence that this particular co-pilot intended to attack this particular aircraft, nor has it been established that a different Israeli screening regime would necessarily have identified him. The issue is therefore not foreknowledge of the attacker. It is whether Israel had identified a vulnerability in the security architecture surrounding foreign aviation and failed to resolve it adequately before that vulnerability was tested in the real world.

This is the institutional lesson of October 7 that matters now. Security failures rarely begin at the moment of attack. They develop earlier, in the distance between intelligence and policy, between responsibility and capability, and between warnings issued and warnings acted upon. When several institutions possess fragments of responsibility, the existence of an elaborate bureaucracy can paradoxically obscure the most elementary question of all: Who, ultimately, is responsible for making sure the threat is addressed?

Israelis deserve a precise answer to that question. They deserve to know what the classified 2024 State Comptroller report found, what the National Security Council warned about in 2025, which officials received those warnings, what measures followed, and whether the institution charged with protecting foreign aviation possessed the personnel, authority and intelligence capabilities necessary to do so.

Accountability does not require pretending that government can prevent every terrorist attack. No state can. It requires something more reasonable: that identifiable vulnerabilities be taken seriously, that responsibility be clearly assigned, that responsible institutions be given the means to perform their duties, and that warnings produce action before catastrophe supplies the incentive.

Israel learned on October 7 what can happen when those connections break down. It also learned something extraordinary about its people. When institutions failed, ordinary Israelis displayed a capacity for courage that saved lives.

Three years later, passengers and crew aboard FZ1073 demonstrated that courage again.

We should honor them for it. But a functioning state cannot make civilian heroism part of its security architecture. The ultimate lesson of October 7 was never simply that Israelis are remarkably capable of saving one another when everything goes wrong.

It was that they should not have to.