Author’s note: I usually write about more serious matters but given the serious absurdities in the coverage of the Flydubai “altercation”, I just couldn’t resist. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. For those whose compass around all things Jewish is permanently skewed and require a trigger warning and disclaimer to keep their head from exploding – it’s satirical. But, disturbingly and hilariously, not very.

The European Union issued a strongly worded statement last Thursday expressing “grave concern” over the conduct of Israeli passengers aboard a Flydubai flight to Tel Aviv, accusing them of the “unlawful occupation of a cockpit that does not belong to them” after they forcibly ended what one official called “a deeply personal moment between a co-pilot and the ground.”

“We are troubled by reports that Israeli civilians crossed into the flight deck, a space internationally recognized as belonging to the flight crew, and imposed their will on its rightful inhabitants,” said an EU spokesperson, reading from a statement that appeared to have been drafted in 1987 and updated only by changing the nouns. “While we acknowledge that the aircraft was in a steep dive at the time, we must ask whether a chokehold was truly a proportionate response to a pocketknife. The co-pilot had one small blade. The Israelis had several hundred pounds of furious father. This is exactly the kind of asymmetry the international community has warned about for decades.” The EU went on to call for an immediate Israeli withdrawal from the cockpit to the pre-dive lines and urged both sides to return to negotiations over who gets to hold the controls, proposing a two-seat solution in which the captain keeps the left seat and the co-pilot retains sovereignty over the yoke.

Major Western news outlets moved quickly to provide context for the incident, with early headlines describing a “brawl,” a “cockpit altercation,” and in one case a “workplace disagreement between colleagues that escalated after Israeli intervention.” One prominent wire service reported that the plane had experienced “an unscheduled descent of unclear origin,” while another ran the headline “Israeli Man Seen Near Cockpit Moments Before Plane Stopped Crashing.” Senior media analysts praised the restraint of the coverage, noting that journalists had been careful not to jump to conclusions about the man with the knife while still finding room to mention that one of the passengers who restrained him had served in the IDF, which experts say is a red flag.

The United Nations Human Rights Council convened an emergency session to address what it called “the escalating cycle of violence at 35,000 feet.” In a resolution passed 41 to 1, with the United States voting against and several Gulf states abstaining because one of their airlines was involved, the council called on all parties to exercise maximum restraint and condemned “the Israeli practice of surviving.” A UN special rapporteur added that the dive could not be understood in a vacuum, explaining that it was “the predictable result of decades of Israelis boarding planes, sitting in assigned seats, and expecting to land.”

Saudi Arabia, where the aircraft made an emergency landing, reportedly declined an Israeli request to send its own plane to bring the passengers home. A Saudi official explained that the kingdom theoretically remains fully committed to future possible conditional normalization, but that normalization specifically and narrowly means Israelis are welcome to be stranded in Tabuk on any aircraft that does not visibly belong to them.

Meanwhile, activists gathered outside the Israeli embassy in London holding signs reading “Free The Flight Deck” and “From The Aisle To The Sky.” Organizers demanded that Israel return control of the plane to the co-pilot as a goodwill gesture, arguing that peace in the skies can never be achieved as long as one side refuses to let the other side crash.

In a related segment marking the 50th anniversary of Operation Entebbe, CNN aired a retrospective under the chyron “Half A Century Later, Israel Still Refuses To Negotiate.” The anchor lamented that the commandos had flown 2,500 miles to rescue the hostages “without ever once sitting down to hear the hijackers’ perspective,” and a panel of experts agreed that the operation set a dangerous precedent of Jews expecting to come home alive. “Imagine how differently the region might look today,” one panelist said wistfully, “if Israel had simply let the process play out.”

At press time, the Israeli father who stormed the cockpit had been asked by the flight crew to return to his seat, fasten his seatbelt, and refrain from any further acts of provocation and/or occupation, while the EU announced sanctions against seat 23C, which it said had been illegally expanded into the aisle.

This is a developing story and we expect to have more outrage and sobbing as the full extent of Jewish chutzpah is continuously revealed by our crack team of multinational chutzpah detectives.

The international community responds (satire)enlargeThe international community responds (satire)AI generated by Daniel Winston

Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage and family therapist, lecturer, and author who studied with Dr. David Schnarch, creator of the differentiation-based Crucible Approach, from 1998 until Schnarch’s death in 2020. He runs twelve-hour intensive therapy sessions for couples and has trained more than 150 senior therapists worldwide in the Crucible Approach. He serves in the IDF reserves and volunteers as a Magen David Adom medic, with ZAKA, and on the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His website is DanielWinston.com.