Am Israel Chai. FlyDubai is further proof

I never thought I would live to see another hour like it: a cabin pulled back from the fire, as Entebbe was pulled back in 1976. Not a sea splitting on command, not a new Sinai—only this: a people who should have been a headline walking off an aircraft and singing.

On the morning of 30 September 2026 a FlyDubai plane left Dubai for Tel Aviv with some 174 souls aboard, most of them Israelis, among them children. Over the desert it fell more than 14,000 feet in half a minute. It told the world, in the only language aircraft have, that something was terribly wrong. Israeli jets rose. The plane found a runway at Tabuk. By evening a second flight had brought the living home to Ben Gurion.

The account still settling is brutal in its simplicity. A man in the cockpit tried to turn the aircraft into a grave. A wounded captain opened a door. Crew and passengers moved toward a knife. Someone still knew how to land. They came home. They sang.

We do not yet know every motive. We do not need every motive to recognize the older pattern. Jewish history is not a chain of immaculate victories. It is a chain of near-endings that did not end.

Other nations have been conquered and have vanished into the conqueror’s language. We have been expelled, burned, selected, scattered, and told, more than once, that the story was over. The surprise is not that we have suffered. The surprise is that there is still a we.

That is the fact behind every rescue we are tempted to call a miracle. Entebbe was not only a raid. It was a refusal, written at the edge of the map, to let Jews remain objects in someone else’s theatre. A civil aircraft bound for Tel Aviv is a quieter image of the same refusal: a people going home in ordinary seats, carrying children, as if the world had at last agreed that such a journey was allowed. Someone in the cockpit disagreed. The cabin did not.

This is how survival has usually looked. Not as a permanent exemption from gravity, but as a second when someone still acted as if the story were not finished. A door opened under a blade. Hands that should have been frozen moved. A foreign field took the wounded. Another aircraft lifted. The song at Ben Gurion was not décor. It was memory finding its throat before analysis could close it.

In July 1976 an Air France plane was taken to Uganda. Jews were separated from the rest. A dictator played host. The distance was absurd. The odds were worse. Israeli soldiers flew through the night, killed the hijackers, and brought the hostages out. Three hostages died. Yonatan Netanyahu was killed. The Jewish world argued afterward whether to call it a miracle. Some said the ordinary course of events could not have produced such a success. Some said God may save through those who are not pious, and that the sin is not the imperfect instrument but the thankless heart. Some could rejoice that Jews lived and still refuse to bless the state that sent the planes. The argument was never only about Uganda. It was about whether a people that acts in history is still allowed to speak of heaven.

Entebbe and this flight are not twins. One was a nation projecting force two and a half thousand miles. The other was a crime inside a tube of aluminium, stopped from within. One extracted a price we still name. The other, as of this evening, extracted wounds, terror, and a night on Saudi concrete—not a new row of graves. To inflate one story by forgetting the dead of the other is not faith. It is advertising.

What they share is the structure of Jewish remaining. Nature did not pause. Hercules aircraft still needed fuel. A 737 still needed a living pilot and a strip of earth. The saved were not spectators only. At Entebbe they were, for the decisive minutes, the object of a raid. On this flight they were, for the decisive minutes, part of the raid. That difference matters. Survival, for us, has never been only what is done for Jews. It has been what Jews still know how to do when the map shrinks to a cabin and the time to half a minute.

The agents, in both hours, were mixed. Entebbe’s force was not a seminary. The door over the desert was opened, if the names now circulating hold, by a captain who was not a son of Israel; the attacker was subdued by crew and by Israelis no rabbinic court had examined. That, too, is an old pattern. We have been carried, more than once, by the courage of strangers and by the decency of a foreign field. Kenya’s quiet help is part of the Entebbe memory. A Saudi runway is part of this one. Gratitude to a tower that was not ours does not dissolve a people. It is how a people lives among nations without disappearing into them.

Survival is not a talisman. A people that treats every landing as proof that it cannot fall will not know how to bury its dead when a landing fails. Jewish memory is too honest for that insurance policy. We have the graves. We have the children who did not come home. We have the century in which Europe’s Jews learned that civilis\zation is not a covenant.

It is not kochi ve-otzem yadi—my strength and the might of my hand. Deuteronomy already knew the kick that follows fullness: Jeshurun grows fat and forgets. First fruits exist so that eating will not erase Egypt. A song on the tarmac is the beginning of thanks. A theory that daring makes God unnecessary, or that God makes daring unnecessary, is the old kick in a new fuselage.

It is not a campaign launched before the wounded have been counted. Entebbe was recruited within weeks. This flight will be recruited by tonight. A people may have an army and a charter. It may not turn rumor into a verdict. The Torah’s courts are forbidden to kill on conjecture. A public that has just been spared should not be quicker than its courts.

It is not the children on the manifest turned into relics. They are why we teach, why we write, why we still say the Shema on an ordinary morning. If there was a miracle in the singing, it was not acoustics. It was that a generation still has a song that is not only a scream.

Call the long fact by its right name. The amazing thing is not that a particular aircraft did not become a pyre on a particular Wednesday. The amazing thing is that there were Jews to put on that aircraft: a language revived, a city that receives flights from Dubai, a calendar that still runs from Sinai through destruction through return, a people that can hear “Entebbe” and know, without a footnote, what the word asks of them.

Empires have had better odds. They have left monuments and silence. We have left commentaries, arguments, graves, and children. The argument is part of the survival. So is the grave. So is the child. So, today, is a cabin that refused to become a statistic.

A hidden miracle—nes nistar—is the name our tradition gives to an hour when the world does not openly tear, and yet a life is given back. An open miracle is rarer, and we should be slow to claim it. What we may say without extravagance is this: the natures of air and metal held; the particular that could have ended the story did not finish its work; courage was present in a captain, a crew, and passengers; a field not our own took the wounded; a people came home and remembered to sing.

I had not expected to see, again, a deliverance so nearly lost and so clearly not lost—Entebbe written not across a continent, but across a cockpit. The plane landed. The people walked. That is the Jewish miracle in its most exact modern form: not that we cannot die, but that, after so many reasons to be finished, we are still here to disembark.