On the same day that Israeli passengers heroically prevented their flydubai plane from being hijacked and crashed, Christa Pike, a convicted murderer in Tennessee, survived two lethal injections intended to execute her.
The events on Wednesday had absolutely nothing to do with one another. Their aftermaths, however, offer a telling comparison.
On Saturday, the head of the Tennessee Department of Correction, Frank Strada, announced he would step down following the botched execution.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, according to The Wall Street Journal, said he appreciated Strada’s “willingness to put the interests of Tennesseans first during this difficult moment.” He also ordered an independent review.
Strada said in a statement that he believed “this review is entirely appropriate and necessary, and I look forward to doing everything I can to help determine exactly what occurred.”
A plane, carrying passengers who were on the FlyDubai aircraft bound for Israel from the United Arab Emirates, which was diverted to Saudi Arabia following an emergency signal, on the tarmac as it arrives at the Ben Gurion International Airport, in Lod, near Tel Aviv, Israel, September 30, 2026. (credit: REUTERS/Ammar Awad TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY)
Strada did not personally prepare the pentobarbital or administer the injections. But the failure occurred in the system he headed, and he resigned. Responsibility came with the position.
The buck stopped there.
Israeli officials push away accountability
Contrast that with what has transpired in Israel following the thwarting of a terrorist attack that could have killed some 180 people, plunged the country into deep mourning, and possibly triggered another war.
First came the relief, the celebration, and the interviews with the passengers who jumped into action and overcame the attacker. Then came something equally familiar: the blame game.
Who was responsible for the breakdown in security that allowed a pilot reportedly dismissed from Oman’s national carrier because of his extremist views to fly an Emirati plane full of Israelis to Tel Aviv?
The public, including the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who travel on foreign airlines, deserves an answer. Whose responsibility was it to identify the threat: the Transportation Ministry’s, the Mossad’s, the Shin Bet’s (Israel Security Agency)?
Who?
Unlike in Tennessee, no one here has stepped forward to accept responsibility. Certainly, no one has resigned.
The buck, in this country, often stops nowhere.
On Saturday night, Transportation Minister Miri Regev said vetting foreign airline crews was not her ministry’s responsibility.
“Those who are supposed to identify the crew are security officials. We are not security officials,” she said in a KAN television interview. “Those who are supposed to say what the threat level is, and whether you can travel to a given destination, are security officials.”
But, according to an Army Radio report on Sunday, Shin Bet gave up responsibility for foreign-flight security in 2021.
In 2024, the state comptroller flagged the resulting security void in a confidential report, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assigned responsibility for the matter to the Transportation Ministry in 2025.
That timeline does not, by itself, settle which body should have identified this particular Omani pilot on flydubai’s FZ1073 flight to Tel Aviv as a threat. It does, however, make Regev’s “not our responsibility” response sound very weak from the ministry entrusted with foreign-flight security.
Over the last three days, various organizations have shifted the onus onto others. Regev pointed fingers at the Mossad, saying intelligence vetting of foreign airline crews is its responsibility.
Her ministry’s Security Division said it is not an intelligence agency, did not receive the pilots’ names in advance, and relies on the foreign airlines themselves to confirm that their crews have been checked.
The Civil Aviation Authority said it handles safety, not security, and also pointed to the airline and the country of departure.
Everyone, it seems, can explain the limits of their responsibility. What remains unclear is who accepts responsibility for the gaps between where their organization’s responsibility ends and another’s begins.
The question is not whether Regev personally should have checked the pilot’s background, any more than Tennessee’s prison commissioner should personally have prepared the lethal drugs. It is whether those entrusted with overseeing a system accept responsibility when the system fails.
The passengers’ success underlines officials’ failure
Much has been written since Wednesday about the passengers’ heroism: their willingness to step up in danger, take their fate into their own hands, and act without waiting for someone else to do so.
This, many have said, is baked into Israel’s national DNA.
It is difficult to argue with that. The willingness of ordinary people – “a Jewish plumber,” in US President Donald Trump’s inimitable words – to put themselves at risk to save others is something this country is blessed with. It may well be a key ingredient of its survival.
But the aftermath has exposed another familiar impulse: the readiness to shrug off responsibility once an immediate danger has passed.
On Wednesday, passengers took responsibility when their lives were on the line. In the days that followed, officials explained why responsibility belonged somewhere else.
Stepping forward in a crisis seems like an Israeli characteristic. So, too, does stepping back when it comes time to take responsibility for a failure. The first reveals the best in this country. The second represents something much less noble.
Worse than not noble, this can also be dangerous. When failures produce explanations like “it was someone else’s job” rather than accountability, the gaps that allowed them to happen can remain. Everyone returns to their own corner, and the public is left hoping that next time, too, someone will act heroically.
That is neither a plan of action nor any way to run a security system.
And the tone starts at the top.
Netanyahu, Eisenkot owe accountability
When Netanyahu does not accept responsibility for policies that led to October 7, points instead to the failure to wake him in time, and refuses to establish a state commission of inquiry, the message travels well beyond the Prime Minister’s Office.
Those farther down the chain can draw their own conclusions about what leadership requires after a failure.
But this is not only about Netanyahu.
“Anyone who fears the word ‘responsibility’ and has, since October 7, evaded an investigation into the truth about the worst disaster we have suffered endangers Israel every day through failures and grave disasters,” Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot wrote on X/Twitter on Saturday.
“We received proof of this just last week, when 180 Israelis were saved only thanks to resourcefulness and extraordinary heroism, in what is increasingly emerging as a terrible failure under the October 7 government.”
He added that Netanyahu’s government has “deliberately instilled” in the public sector a culture of evading responsibility, whitewashing and lying.
Eisenkot’s demand for accountability is justified, but it applies to him as well.
As IDF chief of staff from 2015 to 2019, he was a partner to the ingrained idea that Hamas could be deterred and the Gaza conflict managed. He defended restraint and warned against being drawn into an unnecessary war. He was a senior participant in shaping that approach and bears a share of responsibility for its assumptions.
Since he left the army four years before October 7, he does not bear the same responsibility as those in power and in command that day. Still, demanding that others account for their failures carries an obligation to account fully for his own.
Accountability cannot depend on which political camp someone belongs to. Nor can it mean pointing to another official with even greater responsibility.
Leaders lead by personal example. When those at the top evade responsibility, why should anyone farther down the chain behave differently?
And when the public sees no personal consequences for failures in systems entrusted to senior officials, why should it believe those systems will change?
Israel is blessed with people willing to take responsibility when danger strikes. It needs leaders willing to do the same when the systems they oversee fail.
Correcting those failures begins with acknowledging what went wrong and establishing who was responsible. As long as everyone insists that someone else dropped the ball, the public has little reason to believe the system will be fixed.