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There is an Israeli song that explains Israel better than a thousand books about the country. It is called “גיבורי על” — “Superheroes” — by Hatikva 6, an Israeli band that is famous locally for its beautifully Zionist songs.
The song was inspired by a viral Facebook post written by Israeli author Asaf Peri in November 2023, shortly after October 7th. Hatikva 6 lead singer Omri Glickman was struck by the way Peri captured the surreal duality of Israeli life: ordinary people with ordinary jobs who, almost overnight, become soldiers, officers, medics, and commanders — while specifically nodding to popular Israeli musician and actor Idan Amedi, who left his career, served as an elite combat engineer, and was seriously wounded in Gaza.
The song does not describe generals, commandos, or decorated war heroes. It describes a Bible teacher in Givati (an IDF brigade). It describes a Bible teacher in Givati (an IDF brigade), a contractor who has disappeared from the apartment upstairs because he has been in the reserves for a month, a lawyer who has become a military intelligence officer, a high-tech executive who is suddenly a sniper, a bank manager who becomes a general, a toy-store owner who becomes a tank company commander, a bus driver who becomes an artillery commander, and a university student who becomes an army captain.
Then comes the line that explains everything about Israeli society: “Everyone here looks ordinary, but we are a people of superheroes.” And then another: “There is always a soldier hiding in each of us, ready to save the world.” It is easy to hear this as patriotic exaggeration. It is not.
On Wednesday, September 30, 2026, somewhere high above the Middle East, a plane full of ordinary Israelis suddenly became the most literal possible demonstration of what that song means. A passenger identified as Daniel later described hearing a struggle near the cockpit aboard flydubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv. The cockpit door was partly open. He could see a physical confrontation. Three Israelis sitting near him got up to see what was happening. Then the airplane dropped.
According to flight-tracking data, the aircraft plunged nearly 20,000 feet in less than one minute. The flight was carrying more than 170 Israelis. Israeli officials say the copilot had stabbed the captain and was trying to crash the aircraft. The plane entered a violent dive while passengers and a crew member forced their way into the cockpit and subdued him.
A second team of pilots aboard the aircraft ultimately took control and landed in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Daniel remembered thinking: “It felt like, that’s it. It’s over. September 11th is happening again.”
But something else was happening too: Israelis were getting out of their seats. They were not waiting for instructions, not asking who was officially responsible, and not assuming somebody else was better qualified.
When the cockpit erupted in violence and the plane began plunging toward the ground, four Israeli passengers moved toward the danger. Yaniv Hayon forced his way into the cockpit, grabbed the attacker, choked him, dragged him away from the controls and then, drawing on nothing more than what he had seen on aviation TV shows, pulled back on the controls to help level the aircraft.
Zvika Manes and Assaf Rajwan joined him in overpowering and restraining the attacker, improvising with whatever they could find, including the cord from airline headphones. Rajwan later described the instinct simply: There was no time to think. They decided to fight because their families, the crew, and everyone aboard depended on it.
At the same time, Israeli dentist Shota Musayev first helped subdue the attacker and then turned to the critically wounded captain, stopping his bleeding and keeping him stable until landing. The captain himself, Indian pilot Smith Machtsar, had also displayed extraordinary courage: Despite being repeatedly stabbed, he apparently managed to leave the cockpit accessible before collapsing, giving the passengers the chance to intervene.
None of these men boarded the flight expecting to become heroes. They were a banker, an insurance executive, a dentist, and ordinary travelers. But when the aircraft was falling and lives depended on immediate action, they did not wait to be told what to do. They acted.
Think about the madness of that moment. You are not in the army. You are not carrying a weapon. You did not wake up that morning expecting to save anyone. You are a passenger on a commercial flight. Maybe you spent the trip watching a movie. Maybe you were sleeping. Maybe you were complaining about the food. Maybe you were thinking about work tomorrow, your children waiting at home, the messages piling up on WhatsApp.
And then the nose of the airplane points toward the earth. Someone screams. There is blood coming from the cockpit. And within seconds, the question becomes brutally simple: Who are you when nobody has appointed you to be the hero?
Israeli society has been answering that question for generations. That is what Hatikva 6 understood when it wrote “Superheroes.” The genius of the song is that the superheroes are not superheroes at all. They are teachers and electricians and musicians and lawyers and students and business executives. There is no transformation booth. There is no cape. There is just a moment when ordinary life is interrupted and another part of the Israeli identity takes over. The civilian becomes responsible.
That idea has become increasingly foreign to much of modern life across the rest of the world. Modern societies are built around specialization. Something is on fire? Call the fire department. Someone is injured? Call an ambulance. Someone is violent? Call the police. The country is threatened? That is what the professional military is for.
Modern civilization is increasingly organized around the assumption that somewhere there is a trained person whose job it is to handle the problem. Usually that is a wonderful thing. Civilization requires professionals. But it can also quietly train people into passivity. Responsibility becomes another service we outsource.
Israel has never had that luxury. It is one of the few modern countries where the line separating citizen from defender remains extraordinarily thin. The person designing software on Monday may be wearing body armor on Tuesday. The surgeon operating in a hospital may also be an army doctor. The father coaching his child’s soccer team may have a reserve unit waiting for him. The person sitting beside you in a restaurant may have spent months commanding soldiers and then returned home to argue about the bill.
The security apparatus is not some distant caste of professionals hidden behind the walls of a base. It is your brother, your daughter, your accountant, your dentist, your employee, the guy selling toys, the woman sitting beside you on an airplane.
And therefore something very unusual happens to the psychology of the society. Israelis grow up with the idea that in a crisis, you may be the cavalry. There may be nobody else coming. That instinct does not disappear when the uniform comes off. It follows Israelis into restaurants and highways and hospitals and airports. It follows them on vacation. It follows them onto airplanes. The uniform Hatikva 6 sings about may be sitting at home inside a closet, but the instinct that comes with it is harder to put away.
And that is why what happened aboard Flight FZ1073 feels almost like a verse that Hatikva 6 somehow forgot to write. There is a businessman in row 14. There is a reservist in row 18. There is someone’s husband staring at the cockpit. There is blood on the floor. There is an airplane falling out of the sky. And suddenly the passengers are no longer passengers. They are Israelis. They are real-life superheroes.
That does not mean Israelis do not panic. Of course they do. Courage has never meant the absence of terror. Anyone who imagines otherwise has probably never been truly terrified. The extraordinary thing is what happens while they are terrified.
According to passenger accounts, people prayed Shema Yisrael because they believed they might die. At essentially the same time, other passengers were moving forward to stop the attacker. That combination is one of the most Jewish things imaginable. Pray as though everything depends upon God; move as though everything depends upon us.
None of this was supposed to be the Israeli passengers’ job. They were customers, but they acted like guardians, because heroism is not really about military skill; it is about the assumption of responsibility when responsibility suddenly becomes yours. This is among the deepest cultural inheritances of Israeli society.
After October 7th, the world saw it on an almost incomprehensible scale. Israelis did not wait for the state to become perfectly organized before acting. People opened their homes. Restaurants became kitchens. Hotels became shelters. Volunteers moved supplies across the country. Reservists left businesses, universities, honeymoons, and families to return to their units. People filled gaps because gaps existed.
There is a phrase Israelis use constantly: אין ברירה — ein breira (There is no choice). Foreigners sometimes hear fatalism in those words. I hear something else: responsibility. There is no choice because somebody has to do it. There is no choice because these are our people. There is no choice because if I do not stand up, perhaps nobody will.
This is very different from performative heroism. There were no cameras waiting inside that flydubai cabin when those men stood up. There was no medal waiting, no social-media audience, no certainty that they would survive.
In fact, rushing toward a cockpit while an aircraft is plummeting may be one of the purest tests imaginable because almost every incentive points in the opposite direction: Stay seated, protect yourself, comfort your loved ones, hold onto something, pray, hope.
Instead, they moved toward the problem. That is heroism.
Marvel superheroes know they are superheroes. They have costumes and origin stories and special powers. Israeli superheroes complain about parking, argue about politics, answer emails, take their children to school, and forget to pay their electricity bills.
Then something happens — a siren, a gunshot, a car ramming, a war, a wounded stranger, an airplane falling toward the desert. And some buried switch flips.
This quality comes with costs. A society that must remain permanently ready for an emergency pays an enormous psychological price. Israelis would undoubtedly prefer a world in which the uniforms really could stay forever inside those closets. But history has rarely offered Jews that world, so Israel developed something else instead: a civilization of civilian readiness, and a culture in which adulthood carries with it an unusually powerful idea that your life belongs to you, but responsibility for the person beside you belongs partly to you too.
That is what other modern societies should study about Israel — that reflex, the willingness to say: This is happening near me, therefore it is partly my responsibility.
Civilizations ultimately depend upon people who are willing to do things that are not technically their jobs. They are the stranger who runs into the water, the neighbor who enters the burning house, the civilian who applies the tourniquet, and the passenger who gets out of his seat. Strip away the uniforms, institutions, titles, and slogans, and that may be the oldest definition of a hero there is: someone who could have said, “Someone else will do it” — and did not.
That is why “גיבורי על” is much more than a catchy Israeli song. It is anthropology. Israel’s superheroes are not extraordinary people walking around waiting for history to notice them. They are ordinary people living ordinary lives who have been raised inside a society that still understands one ancient truth: When the moment comes, you do not get to choose whether the world needs a hero. You only get to choose whether you will stand up.
On Wednesday, somewhere between 34,000 feet and the Middle East desert, several Israelis stood up, and more than 170 Israelis eventually came home. This is neither a parallel universe nor Marvel. It is the story of the people of Israel.
I am so proud to be Israeli and Jewish 💙🇮🇱🙏🏻
So grateful for this, even though I don’t know a single soul who was on that plane. Israelis are FUCKING AMAZING!!! 💪🏽 🇮🇱💙