How Fiction Will Remember October 7 - with Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff

Dan Senor (0:00)

Quick note before we start, big things are coming to ARC Media. Somewhere in the small gaps of time between putting out three episodes each week, we've been secretly working on something we think all our listeners are going to be really excited about. We're announcing everything live on October 5th. If you want to be the first to hear about it, RSVP to our virtual announcement event. You can find the sign up link in the show notes. See you there.

SPEAKER_2 (0:28)

You are listening to an Art Media Podcast.

Dan Senor (0:34)

Today we will hear a conversation with Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff about the new season of Fauda and the audiences it has reached, which, especially after the past three years, would have seemed impenetrable. But I couldn't help but think that we may have just witnessed what could be the basis for the next season of Fauda. Before a conversation, which I recorded a few days ago, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the dramatic events of the past 24 hours.

Imagine you're on a routine three-hour flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. There are numerous flights like this every single day back and forth. It's a Wednesday morning, the fifth day of Sukkot. Your kids are in the seats next to you, and then the plane starts falling out of the sky.

That's what happened to the passengers of Fly Dubai Flight 1073

Had the attack been successful, it would have been the worst attack against Jews since October 7th, 2023

Arc Media contributor Amit Segal wrote in the Free Press Today that this is the first time in more than 20 years that someone has tried to hijack a plane bound for Israel. He describes the whole region holding its breath as the flight sent out an emergency signal. Flash the hijack code and seemed to veer off course over Saudi airspace. The co-pilot had stabbed the captain repeatedly, taken the controls and pointed the plane at the ground. It dropped over 17,000 feet in just over one minute. One passenger said she was certain everyone would die and she sent goodbye messages to her parents. And then something miraculous happened. Someone from the cabin managed to get into the cockpit and threw the co-pilot out, as three others jumped on him and tied him up with the cables of the airline headphones. The plane had an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. And then on the way home, Israelis on board were heard singing Rabbi Nachman's Kol HaOlam Kulo. The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid.

Younger listeners may need some context to make sense of the past 24 hours. Between 1968 and 1976, Palestinian terror groups carried out or attempted 16 hijackings and a similar number of other aviation attacks, including strikes on LL targets in Athens, Brussels, Istanbul, and Rome. Their goals were always to isolate Israel, reach a global audience, and terrify Israelis. And, as Amit Segal writes, they succeeded. In Tebbi, in 1976, actually ended that era by showing the West an alternative to capitulation. And once a rescue became credible, hijacking was a far worse bet. So what are the lessons we've learned so far from today? Well, there are probably many, but three that jumped out at me are, one, it wasn't the long arm of the Israeli military apparatus or intelligence services that played a major role here. In fact, not really any role. It was civilians, many of whom had military training, but they organized themselves as civilians and took action. Two, the attacker may have been aiming at the UAE-Israeli alliance itself. And three, the Saudi dimension, the Saudi medics treating the Israeli passengers, the plane landing in Saudi Arabia shows how far we've come on a path to normalization and yet how far there is still to go. Each of these topics will be addressed in episodes on Call Me Back in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, please be sure to check out the latest episode of ARK News Daily. Now on to the episode we recorded with Lior and Avi a few days ago.

SPEAKER_2 (4:28)

It's not like season one, two, three, four, it's something else. Now there's a real story, a real event that when you follow the real events, you got to be very careful about what you do. And I felt like that there's a mission here to tell a way bigger story than just another season of Fauda.

We knew that we had to tell our truth because you hear so many stories, people trying to say that the October 7th wasn't real, that it was some army things, a war. No, we want to show to the world this is what happened.