The hijacker tried to kill them. The memes accidentally humanized them

Something changed this past fall weekend. The temperature dropped. The air turned crisp. And, for a fleeting moment, something shifted in the way people talked about Israel.Flydubai Flight 1073 was traveling from Dubai to Tel Aviv when its co-pilot attacked Captain Smit Machchhar with an onboard crash axe and attempted to seize control of the aircraft. The plane plunged thousands of feet towards certain doom in what increasingly appears to have been a murderous act. Machchhar, grievously wounded, managed to open the cockpit door. Passengers and crew rushed forward, subdued the attacker, and helped regain control of the aircraft. Somehow, miraculously, roughly 180 people made it safely to the ground.The story invites a thousand questions. How did a man reportedly known to have expressed extremist views end up in that cockpit? What failures of screening, intelligence, and communication made the attack possible? What more needs to be done to protect planes flying to Israel? Those questions must be answered. But something else happened in the aftermath: The memes started.Airline seating charts appeared online, inviting travelers to choose a seat not by window or aisle, but by proximity to an Israeli! TikTok influencers joked the first step in an airline emergency should be: to locate the nearest Israeli. After years in which Israelis have so often appeared in the world’s imagination as genocidal soldiers, colonial occupiers, or political villains, suddenly they were the guys you wanted sitting next to you in Row 12.It was funny. And cathartic. But also clarifying. For once, people weren’t talking about Israel. They were talking about Israelis.They were talking about Yaniv Hayun, the plumber who raced toward the cockpit, helped wrestle the attacker down, and pulled the plane out of its fatal dive. About the passengers who moved toward danger rather than away from it. About human beings whose politics, religious practice, and voting records suddenly didn’t matter. Were they right-wing or left-wing? Religious or secular? Supporters or opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Did they favor settlements or oppose them? What did they think about Gaza, judicial reform, or the coming Israeli election? Nobody asked. They were Israelis.That should not feel revolutionary, yet after the past three years, it does.One of the most toxic habits in the discourse surrounding Israel is the steady disappearance of Israelis themselves. Israel becomes its government. Its government becomes its prime minister. Its prime minister becomes every Israeli — and every Jew.The actions of extremist settlers come to define the moral character of an entire society. Government, country, people and ideology collapse into one undifferentiated accusation.This is not merely sloppy thinking. It is how prejudice works.To collapse a people into a monolith, to take the feature of one and assign it to all, is the essential building block of hatred and prejudice. We know that no president, mayor, rabbi, or political party fully represents us. But when looking at a group we dislike, differences disappear — we imagine those on the other side as uniform and interchangeable. The act of a hardliner becomes the character of a nation.First the individual disappears. Then the category becomes the accusation.Criticism of Israeli policy is not only legitimate, but necessary. But something dangerous happens when criticism of a government metastasizes into an indictment of a people, or when Israelis and Jews thousands of miles away are treated as legitimate targets for the policies and politicians they may oppose. It is easier to hate abstractions than human beings.Which may explain a conspicuous silence in my own city.New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has hardly been reluctant to speak about Israel and the Middle East. He has called Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide, threatened to arrest Netanyahu, and freely used his City Hall platform to opine about matters way beyond the five boroughs.Yet as of this writing, I’ve seen no statement from the mayor praising the courage of the people who thwarted what Emirati authorities now call a terrorist attack on a Tel Aviv-bound plane. Not a word celebrating the Indian captain who fought through grievous wounds to save his passengers. Or about the Israelis who stormed a cockpit assault as an airplane hurtled downward.The silence is telling because Flight 1073 does not fit comfortably into the prevailing narrative. To acknowledge what happened requires acknowledging that Israelis can be victims of terrorism, not merely agents of someone else’s suffering. It requires speaking of Israeli courage without immediately inserting a political qualification. Most inconveniently, it requires recognizing Israelis as people.Religious and secular. Jewish and Arab. Right and Left. Native-born and immigrant. Soldiers and protesters. People who agree about almost nothing except that they share one impossibly complicated national story. I harbor few illusions about people determined to hate Israel. The news cycle will move on. The memes will fade, and the haters will return to their familiar slogans. Israelis will once again become “Israel,” Israel will become “Netanyahu,” and millions of individuals will be flattened into whatever political category is most convenient.So let’s enjoy the moment, including the improbable image of a plumber racing into a cockpit and helping save a plane and all those on board.IT COULD HAVE BEEN ISRAEL’S 9/11. THE MEDIA CALLED IT A ‘MIDAIR ALTERCATION’And let’s also remember the lesson. Before there is Israel, there are Israelis.People with names, families, opinions, and contradictions. People capable of courage and fear, wisdom and foolishness, decency and wrongdoing, like everyone else. It should not be a difficult truth. But for one extraordinary fall weekend, it is a truth the world was forced to see.Elliot Cosgrove is rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue and author of For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today (Harper Collins).