WASHINGTON—Last week brought the harrowing and miraculous news that Israeli passengers aboard flydubai flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv, together with the pilot and crew, foiled a near-deadly terrorist attack intended to be carried out by the plane’s co-pilot. Israeli media, politicians, and the public exulted in the unlikely story’s narrowly happy ending and the heroism of its protagonists.
But within days, the narrative shifted. What emerged was a tale of institutional failure. Government authorities with the responsibility of screening foreign airline crews to detect precisely this threat—from the Ministry of Transportation to intelligence agencies—had reportedly neglected their duties amid bureaucratic disputes and budget shortfalls. Upon reflection, many Israeli citizens felt the travelers had been left unprotected by their government and forced to rely on themselves.
This realization is all the more bitter because it conjures the same feeling of abandonment many Israelis felt almost exactly three years earlier on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists from Gaza claimed some 1,200 lives and dragged 251 hostages into captivity. The government, the army, and the intelligence services, through a combination of conceptual, policy, and operational blindness, left the residents and other civilians in southern Israel to fend for themselves. The fact that the flydubai incident did not cause some 180 additional deaths—or many more if the pilot had managed to crash the aircraft into a building, as preliminary investigations suggest he intended—does not lessen the deficiencies in the work of those responsible for the nation’s security.
These narratives are now converging in the closing phase of a hard-fought Israeli election, with polls projecting thin margins and a difficult path for any candidate to secure the prime ministership. Opposition leaders like Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, and Avigdor Lieberman have made the appointment of a state commission of inquiry into the October 7 attack a central plank of their campaign to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They accuse the prime minister and his government of extreme negligence and of refusing to take any responsibility for the disaster, while shifting blame to military and intelligence professionals—many of whom have already taken responsibility and resigned. Netanyahu, for his part, resists the appointment of such a commission, claiming that it should wait for the termination of the war launched by the attack. Despite Israel’s long history of appointing such independent commissions, usually led by retired judges and professionals, after previous disasters and wars, the prime minister also implies that it would be rigged against him.
The intensity of this debate, nearly matched by that of the dispute over ending the exemption of ultra-Orthodox men from military conscription, underscores the degree to which Israel’s first post–October 7 election is focused inward. A September 2026 Israel Democracy Institute survey found that more than two-thirds of Jewish respondents said October 7 was a central factor in deciding which party to support. Issues of leadership, accountability, burden sharing, rule of law, and the psychological toll and the economic strain of a long war on reservists and their families are dominating public debate. So too are questions about civil society’s outsized role in filling gaps left by the state, including the hostage families’ ground-up campaign to force their loved ones’ release higher on the government’s agenda in years prior. The flydubai incident touched many of these nerves.
Far less prominent are debates about the war itself. Hamas remains in control of approximately 35 percent of Gaza, and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed as Israel prosecuted its campaign against Hamas. Israeli forces appear poised to remain in southern Lebanon as Hezbollah resists disarmament, and a temporary Israeli buffer zone in Syria looks increasingly permanent. The war with Iran launched on February 28 seems unable to wind down while the Iranian regime survives and its nuclear program remains unresolved, and an energy and economic shock continues to rock the region and the globe with little sign of abating. Israel’s standing in the United States and Europe is reaching new lows as the war drags on and West Bank settlement expansion and Jewish extremist violence continue. And yet, despite the magnitude of any one of these issues, they are far less discussed in the context of the election than internal disputes with profound implications for the future of Israel’s identity and the relationship between the Israeli public and the institutions tasked with protecting it.
To foreigners, and certainly to Israel’s critics, the fact that these issues are more absent from the debate may seem strange, or even a dereliction. Conflicts across Israel’s borders, and its policies in the West Bank, grab international headlines. Henry Kissinger famously observed that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics. But this election goes to something deeper: the bottomless trauma that the October 7 attack inflicted on Israeli society and Israelis’ self-image. A country accustomed to seeing itself as strong and capable in its own defense discovered that it was deeply vulnerable, and that its leaders and institutions had let down their guard. There is pain and fear, and there is also humiliation and self-doubt.