A flydubai plane two hours into its trip to Tel Aviv dropped more than 17,000 feet yesterday, because one of its pilots had stabbed the other and was trying to take the aircraft. Passengers and crew stopped him. One passenger, Yaniv Hayun, says he got the man in a chokehold while others pinned him down, and the plane landed safely. The stabbed captain, Smit Machchhar, is stable in hospital, and Netanyahu has called him a “true hero.”

I’m struck by what came next. Within hours the question in the room was whether Iran was involved, and Netanyahu said it’s too early to tell. That’s a fair answer. But a war has a way of making every strange event look like a move on the board, and we have no evidence yet that this one was. A man with a knife in a cockpit could have a thousand reasons, most of them small and personal and unpolitical. Or not. The arrest happened in Saudi Arabia, and he’s expected to be handed to the UAE, so at least the paperwork is straightforward.

The other thing I keep noticing is that the route exists at all. A scheduled flight between Dubai and Tel Aviv, in the middle of a regional war, is a very ordinary-looking thing resting on an extraordinary amount of agreement. It broke for ten minutes in the sky, and an unplanned crowd of strangers repaired it.

Meanwhile Rosenberg is watching for a Putin speech, and the signs, he says, point to more of the same. Some things are very hard to interrupt.

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