Could the Flydubai attack keep Netanyahu in power?

0:02Speaker 1:Big events have always had the power to shape elections. John Howard and the Tampa affair.

0:07Speaker 2:We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.

0:13Speaker 1:The attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

0:16Speaker 3:I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God.

0:24Speaker 1:And it doesn't get much bigger than a foiled attempt to bring down a plane mid-flight. One week on from the fly-Jabai incident, details are continuing to filter out about the pilot accused of stabbing his colleague in an effort to crash the Tel Aviv-bound plane. And as investigations continue, Benjamin Netanyahu has been front and centre, with the Israel election just weeks away.

0:53Speaker 2:I asked him, how did you know how to do that? And he said, well, I watch these air disaster films. I told that to President Trump yesterday. He was amazed, you know, because we all see these films. So to actually be in this thing, this is Hollywood on steroids.

1:09Speaker 4:You can't make this up. You can't believe that it actually happens in real life.

1:13Speaker 1:I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to 7AM. Today, Middle East correspondent for The Economist, Greg Karlstrom, on what we know about what happened on FlyJubai Flight 1073 and whether Netanyahu could use it to help him get re-elected as Israel's president. It's Thursday, October 8th. Greg, let's begin with the co-pilot who is suspected of trying to bring down the fly-by plane on route to Tel Aviv. So he's been named as Amani National, Hammam al-Hammami. He's been interrogated by UAE authorities, and more details are emerging about him and his background every day. What do we know at this point?

2:06Speaker 2:Right.

2:06Speaker 5:So the biographical details that have come out suggest what sounds like a very peripatetic response life. He was born to an Armani father and a Syrian mother, grew up for a few years in the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, eventually moved back to Oman. But there are some reports also that he may have studied in the UK for a stretch. He may have studied in Australia as well for a period of time. Investigators in both of those countries are looking into that. And then ultimately, went on to work for Armand Air, which is the state-owned carrier in that country, worked there for several years, left, moved to Morocco, had a brief stint with the Moroccan airline, and then moved to Dubai not that long ago to take up work at FlyDubai. So bouncing all over the place in terms of his personal life, his biographical details.

3:07Speaker 1:And there are reports coming out now that the plan might have been for an attack earlier this year. There are also reports of different potential targets, including Tel Aviv's main airport.

3:19Speaker 3:Sources tell CNN that the suspect likely wanted to crash the plane with more than 170 passengers into Israel's Ben Gurion Airport, the country's main international hub, with an untold thousands of commuters on the ground.

3:32Speaker 1:Talk me through what we know at this point about what he was actually planning on attempting.

3:37Speaker 4:Right.

3:38Speaker 5:It sounds like essentially a 9-11 style attack, right? Using the plane itself as a weapon, planning to fly it into something. There have been some reports that the target may have been downtown Tel Aviv, that he may have been planning to fly into skyscrapers there. Obviously, that would be very reminiscent of September 11th, but also some reporting, as you say, that Ben Gurion Airport, the main international airport, might have been a target.

4:06Speaker 6:The official says the co-pilot, identified by multiple sources as Hamam al-Hammami, has told investigators he wanted to evade Israel's defenses, then crash into the airport or another building in Tel Aviv.

4:20Speaker 5:And then if he was unable to do that, reportedly, if he was unable to reach Israel as a sort of backup plan, he was aiming to fly into an American base in Jordan, a military base that American troops have been using in Jordan, particularly this year, where it's been a major hub for American warplanes involved in the war with Iran. So Again, some sort of mass casualty attack against a civilian target was the main goal here. And then if he wasn't able to do that, an attack against the military base.

4:55Speaker 1:And you mentioned that he at one point worked for Oman Air. They had reportedly banned him from flying over concerns that he was showing an interest in radical ideology. So do we know how he got hired by FlyJabai?

5:09Speaker 5:There's been a bit of a blame game around that in some of the leaks that have been coming out. And this is something that investigators are no doubt going to look into. I think there's blame to go around. On the one hand, Oman didn't initially fire him. They reassigned him to a different role within the company. They moved him off the pilot track and to a desk job, essentially an administrative role where he wouldn't be able to fly planes. And so because they did that, There may not have been some big red flag in his file saying this person was fired for extremist views. On the other hand, you would imagine that his employment at Armand Air was public.

5:52Speaker 4:It was listed on his LinkedIn page.

5:55Speaker 5:So when he took up employment with FlyDubai or when he was applying to work at FlyDubai, you would expect both authorities there and authorities in the UAE to contact the Armanis to ask if there were any concerns about him. This is a state-owned airline in a country that takes security quite seriously. And so there were obviously some failures somewhere on the Emirati side as well. Other employees from FlyDubai are being questioned by interrogators, people who were involved in the hiring process, I think, to find out exactly what went wrong here and why that information from the Armanis was never either transmitted to FlyDubai or made use of by.

6:38Speaker 4:The officials there.

6:40Speaker 1:Yeah, and as an Omani national, he actually wasn't supposed to be operating a flight to Israel at all. And now we have Israel and the UAE both blaming each other, as you say, for how he ended up on that flight.

6:52Speaker 5:And again, I think there will be blame to go around. You're right that in general, airlines are not supposed to assign pilots to flights to Israel. if they are from countries that don't have diplomatic relations with Israel. And so we've heard Israeli politicians, Israeli security officials faulting the UAE for that. Ultimately, though, Israel has the final say on who is able to fly a plane to the country, right? The manifest for any flight headed to Israel is sent to authorities there. Ahead of time, that manifest includes the names and nationalities of of the flight crew working that flight.

7:33Speaker 5:And so the Israelis could have told FlyDubai that this person should not be allowed to work this route. There have been cases in the past where they have told Turkish Airlines not to send a pilot from a country that did not have diplomatic relations with Israel. But it sounds as if Either the Israelis didn't properly review the manifest. There's a bit of a question about who exactly is supposed to do that. The Shin Bet is the main security agency in Israel, but the transportation ministry has authority over foreign airlines that are flying to Israel. They're the ones that actually vet the manifests. And so this may have just fallen through the cracks, but it seems like a security failure within the Israeli system where this didn't raise any flags that it should have.

8:22Speaker 1:Still to come, the potential impact on Netanyahu's re-election chances. Benjamin Netanyahu has been at the helm of this story from the moment it happened. He took photos, did interviews with people who were on the plane. He appeared on US TV in the hours after it happened.

8:53Speaker 2:Iran and its proxies are trying to conduct attacks against Israel and Israelis right now in this election season. And therefore, I asked Israelis to be on special alert. But we're going to probably draw a lot of conclusions from this investigation and tighten up the security. We always try to do that.

9:13Speaker 4:We do a pretty good job of it.

9:15Speaker 1:Do you think he sees this as a political opportunity?

9:18Speaker 5:He certainly seems to think it's a political opportunity. You're right that he very quickly was cutting these campaign-style videos and splashing them all over social media.

9:30Speaker 2:Captain, I want to invite you and my dear friend, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to light a celebratory flame on our next independent day. You are a true hero of the brave peoples of India and Israel, and you're a hero of the entire world.

9:48Speaker 5:The further we get from this event, the more I'm unsure that it's actually useful to him. I mean, he's trying to present this as further evidence for his main campaign pitch, which is the world is a very dangerous place, Israel's in a very dangerous neighborhood, and only I, Benjamin Netanyahu, can keep you safe. But actually, in this event, I mean, first of all, again, there was a security failure. And it's going to remind Israeli voters that of the much bigger security failure that preceded the October 7th massacre. And then also the Netanyahu government didn't actually do anything here to keep Israelis safe. What prevented a tragedy on that plane was the quick thinking of the pilot who opened the door to the cockpit and allowed a handful of ordinary Israeli passengers to come in and restrain the co-pilot and then get the plane out of a dive and back into level flight. The Israeli government really had nothing to.

10:45Speaker 4:Do with this.

10:46Speaker 5:And so Netanyahu trying to make this a campaign pitch for voters, I'm not sure it's actually going to do what he hopes it's going to do.

10:55Speaker 1:And this comes at a time when Netanyahu has been fending off questions about whether he ignored warnings ahead of October 7th, How politically damaging has that been, just wakes out from the elections?

11:07Speaker 5:They were explosive reports that started coming out back in September in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and then in other media outlets as well, suggesting that the president of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed, called Netanyahu just a couple of weeks before October 7th to tell him that he had received intelligence that Hamas was planning a some sort of major attack, something that would shake Israel, that would change the region, and urge the Israeli government to take that seriously. And the Emirati president was basically dismissed by Netanyahu, who didn't take those reports seriously.

11:46Speaker 4:So a bombshell story.

11:50Speaker 7:For his part, Netanyahu wrote on social media that no such call took place between September and October 7th and called the story a malicious fabrication with a clear political timing.

12:02Speaker 4:How much did it hurt him politically? Less than you might think.

12:05Speaker 5:I mean, if you look at the polls, actually, he seems to have gained perhaps a seat or two in parliament since these reports first came out. I think the problem is Netanyahu has been in power for the better part of the past two decades. Everyone in Israel has a fully formed view at this point of the Israeli prime minister. There's a large chunk of the country that hates him, that wants him gone. there is a smaller chunk of the country that will stand by him sort of no matter what. And I think it's very hard for anything at this point to create a dramatic swing one way or the other. I think politics have become deeply polarized in Israel and deeply personalized. And if you love Netanyahu after everything that has happened over the past few years, I don't think there is anything that is going to make you change your mind at this point.

12:57Speaker 1:Okay, so if Netanyahu doesn't win this upcoming election? How significant would that be? And what would it mean for the Middle East, for Gaza, for Iran?

13:06Speaker 5:It would be very significant for Israel if someone like Gadi Eisenkot, who is his main centrist or center-right challenger, were to win the election. I think you've had years in which the Netanyahu government has been empowering the far-right of Israeli politics, has been pursuing the all sorts of anti-democratic or undemocratic reforms trying to weaken the Supreme Court, trying to undermine the free press in Israel. So a change of leadership would probably reverse many of these trends internally.

13:45Speaker 5:What does it mean for Gaza, the rest of the region? I think there it's much less clear that we would see a dramatic change. I would expect in the West Bank, where settler violence has reached unprecedented levels over the past few years, a new government might take that a bit more seriously, might try to crack down on that, certainly at least would not encourage or look the other way at settler violence against Palestinian civilians the way this government has.

14:14Speaker 5:In Gaza, I think the next government's policy will depend to a large extent on What Hamas does.

14:20Speaker 4:Does it agree to disarm?

14:22Speaker 5:Does it meet its commitments under the ceasefire that it accepted in October of last year and start handing over its weapons and really relinquishing power in Gaza? And we don't know if it's going to do that so far. All signs suggest that it's not. Similarly, in Lebanon, would a different Israeli government withdraw? That depends on whether the Lebanese army is able to effectively deploy in southern Lebanon, whether it's able to begin disarming Hezbollah. And so I think you might find that, yes, in the West Bank, there could be a meaningful change. But for Israel's other wars and conflicts around the region, a new government may be a less dramatic break with Netanyahu than people are expecting.

15:08Speaker 1:Well, Greg, thank you so much for speaking with me.

15:10Speaker 4:Thank you.

15:24Speaker 1:Also in the news, a landmark ruling in the High Court has found authorities must consider the emissions caused by burning fossil fuels overseas when approving projects. A Hunter Valley community group won the fight, with the court ruling that the approval of the coal mine expansion in Musselbrook was invalid. The case is expected to set a national precedent for the way fossil fuel approvals take global emissions and local climate change into account. And Dave Hughes says he's been forced to stop speaking at Liberal Party events after a report to the Victorian Electoral Commission. Hughes, who's been a vocal critic of Labor since Albanese's negative gearing and CGT changes, had been providing his speaking services free of charge in the lead up to the Victorian election. But because of what he usually charges for that service, it could be seen to be in breach of donation limits.

16:14Speaker 4:I'm Ruby Jones.

16:15Speaker 1:This is 7am. Thanks for listening.

16:22Speaker 6:You