Some coincidences are coincidences; others arrive so punctually that one begins to wonder whether the universe has developed a sense of political satire. Benjamin Netanyahu is less than four weeks away from an election on October 27. His corruption trial continues to hang over him, involving three cases alleging bribery, fraud and breach of trust, all of which he denies. Even more awkwardly, former Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit is scheduled to testify between October 11 and 22, barely five days before Israelis go to the polls. One might therefore expect the prime minister to discuss governance, accountability, and the small inconvenience of criminal proceedings. Instead, he is talking about enemies. This is hardly new. Netanyahu’s political career has been built to an extraordinary degree around the proposition that Israel lives in permanent peril and that he is the man uniquely equipped to protect it from that peril. It is a remarkably efficient political formula. The country is surrounded by enemies, the enemies are always preparing something terrible, the threat is existential, and therefore the man behind the lectern must remain behind the lectern. Unfortunately for Netanyahu, October 7 rather severely complicated that proposition.
The subsequent investigations have established that Israel did not simply wake up one morning to an attack nobody could have anticipated. Israel possessed Hamas’ so-called Jericho Wall plan years before the massacre. The IDF’s own investigation found failures in intelligence assessment, threat perception, operational readiness and decision-making. Hamas was repeatedly underestimated, and warning signs were not assembled into the picture they should have produced. That does not prove Netanyahu permitted October 7, but it does establish something far more inconvenient. The question is no longer whether Israel had information. It certainly did. The question is what happened to it. Now comes another extraordinary chapter.
Recent reports allege that Mohammed bin Zayed, President of the United Arab Emirates, warned Netanyahu before October 7 that Hamas was preparing a major operation. Netanyahu denies receiving such a warning. The UAE has not confirmed the specific allegation. Reports have also emerged concerning warnings from Egyptian intelligence. These claims remain disputed and should not be promoted into established fact simply because they fit an attractive theory. But they are serious enough to warrant investigation. Then, on September 27 this year, Netanyahu secretly traveled to Abu Dhabi and met Mohammed bin Zayed. Two days later, Netanyahu publicly warned that Israel’s enemies might attempt an attack before the October 27 election. The warning was conspicuously vague; it identified no specific target and disclosed no intelligence. Then, almost before the warning’s political significance had time to settle, came flydubai flight FZ 1073. A co-pilot allegedly attacked the captain in the cockpit; the aircraft plunged more than 16,000 feet in roughly thirty seconds; the injured captain managed to open the cockpit door; passengers intervened; other pilots helped regain control; and the aircraft eventually landed safely in Saudi Arabia.
It was an extraordinary event. At that point, it was also unexplained. The UAE prosecutor has ordered an investigation into the circumstances, motive, possible terrorist connections and whether the incident involved prior planning or direction. The motive has not been established. Yet the political narrative began forming almost immediately. Netanyahu presented the incident within the wider context of terrorism and Israel’s security predicament. Israeli officials raised the possibility of jihadist involvement. Donald Trump warned Iran of consequences if Tehran were found to be responsible, although no such Iranian connection had been established. And suddenly Netanyahu’s warning of two days earlier looked remarkably prescient! This is where one must resist two equally lazy conclusions. The first is that Netanyahu therefore orchestrated the flydubai incident. There is no evidence establishing that. The second is that the coincidence therefore means nothing. It plainly means something politically. A politician does not have to manufacture a crisis to benefit from one. That distinction is so elementary that it ought to be printed on the walls of every newsroom in the world. If a plane nearly crashes after the prime minister has warned of an impending attack, he can claim that his instincts were correct. If terrorism is eventually established, he can claim vindication. If terrorism is not established, the news cycle will probably have moved on by then. Either way, the country is once again discussing threats, enemies and national security rather than corruption proceedings and political accountability. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is politics.
And Netanyahu’s political incentives are unusually obvious. His government has spent years presenting him as Israel’s indispensable protector. October 7 demolished that mythology. The man who had spent decades selling himself as Mr. Security presided over the greatest security failure in Israel’s history. His answer has been to redirect the narrative towards the failures of the military and intelligence establishment while portraying himself as the leader who subsequently restored Israeli deterrence. The renewed allegations about warnings before October 7 complicate that defense considerably. If Netanyahu was warned, the obvious questions are not conspiratorial ones, but brutally ordinary questions of responsibility. What exactly was he told? When was he told? Did he tell the military? Did he tell the intelligence agencies? If he did not, why not? And why didn’t Hamas’s Jericho Wall plan become the defensive preparations its contents should have demanded? These questions matter far more than the increasingly elaborate mythology surrounding October 7. And they are also more important than the speculation surrounding flydubai.
The two events should not be conflated. October 7 was a documented catastrophic intelligence and security failure. Allegations about advance warnings add a political dimension, but remain disputed. flydubai is a separate incident whose motive is still being investigated. For now, what connects the two is not evidence of a common conspiracy. It is Netanyahu’s security narrative. That narrative has an extraordinary capacity to regenerate itself. Every new threat becomes another argument for his indispensability, every crisis pushes the political conversation away from accountability and towards survival, and every enemy, real or alleged, gives the incumbent another opportunity to stand before the cameras and explain why the country needs him. The arrangement has a grim elegance. The longer the emergency lasts, the less room there is for ordinary politics. Corruption trials become inconvenient background noise. Questions about governmental failure become questions about national unity. Opposition becomes suspect. Accountability becomes a luxury to be postponed until the country is safe.
The difficulty, of course, is that the country is never safe. There is always another enemy, another missile, another warning, another existential threat, and another reason why today is not the appropriate day to ask yesterday’s uncomfortable questions. And that is precisely why Netanyahu’s political incentives deserve scrutiny. Not because one can prove that he creates the crises. Maybe one cannot. But because a politician facing an election and serious criminal proceedings has an obvious political interest in maintaining the security narrative on which his career has been built. The flydubai investigation therefore matters enormously, not because it proves anything about Netanyahu, but because it will tell us whether the facts fit the story that is already being built around it. If the co-pilot acted alone for personal or ideological reasons, then say so. If a terrorist network was involved, establish it. If Iran was involved, produce the evidence. And if there was no wider conspiracy whatsoever, state that clearly, too.
But while investigators establish what happened inside that cockpit, another investigation remains unfinished. What did Netanyahu know before October 7? What warnings reached him? What did he do with them? And why does the political survival of a man facing an election and a courtroom seem to remain so intimately entwined with the proposition that Israel must forever be at war? Those are not questions for conspiracy theorists. They are questions for a democracy. And before October 27, Israel deserves answers rather more substantial than another enemy conveniently appearing over the horizon. Because a democracy cannot allow genuine danger to become the permanent alibi for political accountability. At some point, even the most frightened electorate is entitled to ask a very simple question. Who guards the guardian when the guardian has an election to win and a courtroom to face?