After the Flydubai Attack: Israel Heads Toward an Election: as America Faces Its Own Reckoning

Marc Schulman returns to Tel Aviv after two weeks in the United States to a country already focused on the October 27 election—and still absorbing the extraordinary attempted destruction of a Flydubai flight bound for Israel.

Marc examines the questions raised by the attack, including how a potentially dangerous pilot was able to fly a route into Israel, and what the episode says about Israel’s security establishment. With the anniversary of October 7 approaching, he turns to an election campaign increasingly centered on responsibility for the failures that preceded the attack and the continuing absence of a national commission of inquiry.

He also looks at what Israelis mean when they say the country has “moved to the right” since October 7, the changing attitudes of younger Israelis, and the political arithmetic that could determine who is able to form the next government.

Then the focus shifts to the United States: the approaching midterm elections, what changes in Congress could mean for Israel, continuing uncertainty over another confrontation with Iran, and Marc’s growing concern about the extraordinary speed of artificial intelligence—and whether governments are running out of time to regulate it.

A wide-ranging Tel Aviv Diary about Israel three weeks before an election, America approaching its own political test, and a world in which politics, war, and technology are changing with remarkable speed.