Israel probably produces more heroes per capita than any other nation
Nobody boards a budget flight from Dubai expecting to end up at the controls, covered in blood, with the life of hundreds of passengers in your hands. Yet that is precisely where Yaniv Hayun found himself on Wednesday morning, with the aircraft dropping thousands of feet over the Arabian desert.
When terror came to the flydubai flight, he didn’t wait for somebody else to do something. He forced his way into the cockpit, helped tackle the alleged attacker and then, with the aircraft in a nosedive, steadied her until the crew could take over.
It was an extraordinary act of courage. But it was also, in a fundamental way, an ordinarily Israeli one. From the country’s earliest days, heroism has been woven into its national story: the conviction that you don’t freeze, look the other way or wait to be rescued. You act.
Israelis certainly have no monopoly on courage. The Indian captain, Smit Machchhar, also deserves to be mentioned here. Badly wounded, he fought back and managed to open the cockpit door, allowing the passengers to intervene. Benjamin Netanyahu called him a “true hero”, and quite right too.
But Israel, through the peculiar trauma of its history, has produced an extraordinary concentration of heroism, and set an example to the world.
Courage has been part of the Jewish character since the earliest times. In the Bible, a shepherd boy armed with a sling walks out to face Goliath; Esther risks her life by entering the Persian king’s presence uninvited to save her people (“if I perish, I perish”); and Gideon routs the vast Midianite army with just 300 men.
Yet not all Israeli heroes are Jewish, suggesting that although courage may be born from the Jewish journey, this has long been a national characteristic. There’s a lesson in there for the West, and it’s one that we must instil in our children.
So, although there are far too many to choose from, here is my short history of Israeli heroism, condensed into ten inspirational figures. It begins with a young woman who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe, knowing perfectly well that she would very likely never come home.
Of course, there are far too many candidates for any definitive top ten, and I don’t mean to play down the heroism of the countless Israelis I’ve left out. These are simply mine: soldiers and civilians, men and women, famous names and people you may never have heard of. A couple may surprise you.
1. Hannah Szenes
Born in Budapest, Szenes emigrated to Mandatory Palestine before volunteering for one of the most dangerous missions imaginable: parachuting back into occupied Europe in 1944 to help rescue Jews from the Holocaust. Captured in Hungary, tortured and executed at 23, she refused to betray her comrades. Even when Israel did not yet exist, its spirit clearly did.
2. Amos Yarkoni
He was born Abd el-Majid Khader, a Muslim Arab from the Galilee, and he threw in his lot with the Jews before the state was established. In the 1950s, he founded and commanded the Shaked reconnaissance unit, hunting down infiltrators across the Negev with legendary tracking skills, and became the first Bedouin to command an elite IDF unit.
3. Uri Ilan
In December 1954, Ilan, a 19-year-old soldier, was captured by the Syrians during a covert operation on the Golan Heights. Imprisoned and tortured in Damascus, he took his own life rather than give up sensitive information that would cost Israeli lives. When his body was returned to his homeland, a tiny note was found hidden in his clothing. It read: “I did not betray”. He represents a great many Israelis who have done the same.
4. Eli Cohen
Born in Alexandria, Cohen, Israel’s most famous Mossad agent, reinvented himself as Kamel Amin Thaabet, a wealthy Syrian businessman, and talked his way into the highest circles of power in Damascus. The intelligence he sent home would prove invaluable when Israel took the Golan Heights in 1967. By then he was dead: unmasked in 1965 and hanged in a square in Damascus. His body has never been returned. (I interviewed his widow here.)
5. Avigdor Kahalani
During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, vastly outnumbered Israeli tank forces faced the Syrian assault on the Golan Heights. Kahalani rallied the battered defenders in the Valley of Tears and helped turn what looked like certain defeat into one of Israel’s greatest battlefield victories.
6. Yoni Netanyahu
The elder brother of the current Prime Minister commanded the assault force at Entebbe in 1976, leading the astonishing operation to rescue more than 100 hostages held in Uganda by Palestinian and German terrorists. Almost all the hostages came home. Yoni was the only Israeli commando killed.
7. Ferede Aklum
In the late 1970s, a young Ethiopian Jew who had fled persecution into Sudan wrote a letter to Israel asking for help. The Mossad answered, and Ferede Aklum became the linchpin of an extraordinary secret operation, smuggling thousands of Ethiopians out of the Sudanese refugee camps and paving the way for the airlift known as Operation Moses. An entire community owes its homecoming to his nerve.
8. Roi Klein
In Lebanon in 2006, Major Roi Klein saw a grenade land among his men. He threw himself onto it, absorbing the explosion with his body and reportedly crying “Shema Yisrael”. He was 31. Major Klein is included to represent the countless brave Israelis who have given their lives in this way, including of course on October 7.
9. Zidan Saif
In November 2014, two terrorists armed with meat cleavers and a gun burst into a synagogue in Har Nof, Jerusalem, during morning prayers. Among the first officers on the scene was Zidan Saif, a 30-year-old Druze policeman from the Galilee, who ran in and exchanged fire with the attackers. He was shot in the head and died of his wounds, an Arab man and recent father fighting to save Jewish worshippers at prayer. Thousands of Israelis, many of them strictly Orthodox Jews, attended his funeral.
10. Noam Tibon, and the heroes of October 7
On October 7, a retired general of 61 learned that his son Amir and his young family were trapped in their safe room at Nahal Oz. Tibon grabbed a pistol and drove south into the war zone. Yet again and again, he interrupted his own mission: stopping to pick up wounded survivors fleeing the Nova festival and ferry them to safety, and joining soldiers in firefights to help kill the terrorists he found along the way. Only after many hours did he finally reach his own family.
He stands here for the countless heroes of that day: the policemen, reservists, kibbutz security teams and ordinary civilians who drove towards the gunfire, often without orders and sometimes without proper weapons. Among them were Arab Muslims, like Youssef Ziadna, a Bedouin bus driver who packed some 30 terrified young festival-goers into his minibus and drove them out under fire, and Awad Darawshe, a paramedic who refused to leave the wounded at the Nova festival and was murdered there. Israel’s institutions failed that morning. Israelis themselves did not.
And now, on a flight from Dubai, another name joins them. Yaniv Hayun didn’t know that history had marked him out on Wednesday morning. He simply acted.
That, perhaps, is the thread running through all these stories, from Hannah Szenes to Yaniv Hayun. Courage is neither machismo nor glamorous. It is a split-second response to danger, anguish and confusion that reveals one’s true character. It is the decision, made in a fraction of a second, that somebody has to take responsibility for others. And more than in any other country, Israelis almost always do.
This column was first published on https://jakewallissimons.substack.com/
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.