U.S. Sends More Patriot Missile Batteries to Protect Saudi, Qatari Energy Sites - Barak Ravid (Axios)
    Last month, the U.S. military sent one additional Patriot battery to Saudi Arabia to protect a key oil facility. Another Patriot battery was sent to Qatar to protect a natural gas facility, U.S. officials said.
    The U.S. military is sending more ships, fighter jets and troops to the Middle East ahead of a possible resumption of the war.
    The USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier and its strike group left San Diego on Sunday and is expected to arrive in the Middle East in mid-November. It will join the USS George H.W. Bush and the USS George Washington.
    Three amphibious ships carrying thousands of Marines left for the region on Monday.

Israelis Take Pride in Bravery of Passengers Who Saved Flydubai Flight - Isabel Kershner (New York Times)
    Israelis were buoyed on Thursday by the brave actions of several Israeli passengers who, along with crew members, averted a midair disaster aboard a Flydubai flight to Tel Aviv on Wednesday.
    The dramatic events evoked for some Israelis the days in the 1960s and 1970s when Israel was widely considered to be a small, plucky country that had survived against the odds and took on hijackers.
    The Israeli commando raid in 1976 that rescued more than 100 hostages from Entebbe, Uganda, became legendary and spawned several movies.
    After the Flydubai episode, Israeli social media was flooded with memes offering advice to air travelers: In case of emergency, locate the nearest Israeli.

The Morning After the Miracle - Amit Segal and Ari Tatarka (It's Noon in Israel)
    On Thursday, Israeli social media was awash in a torrent of celebration, praise and gallows humor following Wednesday's miraculous foiling of a terrorist hijacking on Flydubai flight FZ1073.
    By every reasonable expectation, the country should have woken this morning to grief: to names and faces, and to the long, familiar litany of condolence. Instead, it woke to memes.
    It is a sad reality that for Israelis this is the best of all possible worlds: not safety, but that those who try to kill us fail.
    That is the grim truth engraved anew on every Israeli heart. Vigilance is Israel's only real defense in a hostile region.

The Flydubai Flight and the Indomitability of the Jews - Amb. Michael Oren (Times of Israel)
    The saving of Flydubai Flight 1073 from fiery destruction and 174 passengers, most of them Israelis, from certain death, stands as a metaphor for the past three years of war.
    After Oct. 7, hundreds of thousands of Israelis rallied to their nation's defense, put on uniforms, picked up guns, and risked their lives, often in hundreds of days of relentless urban combat.
    Others volunteered to support the soldiers, the wounded, bereaved, and the displaced, or worked the fields of abandoned farms.
    They performed all this while the country was under massive international pressure to cease defending itself. They persevered in the face of near-global condemnations and false accusations.
    Some 924 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the war and thousands physically and emotionally wounded. Yet, we keep fighting.
    We defend ourselves in the court of international law; we stand up for truth in the media. We will battle Hamas and Hizbullah again as the need arises.
    The world will continue condemning us for doing what so much of it no longer has the will to do - defending our homes and families.
    We will do all of this not because we have nowhere else to go, but because of who we are. We, the Jewish people, are indomitable.
    When their airliner plunged nearly 20,000 feet in under two minutes, ordinary Israelis rushed to the front of the plane.
    There, regular citizens with their bare hands disarmed and subdued the co-pilot who tried to kill everyone on board precisely because most of them were Israelis. And once the danger passed, the Jews broke into song.
    The Flydubai flight stands as an example of what a proud, strong, and self-respecting people can still accomplish. It reminds us of who we are, what we stand for, and what we are willing to do to remain Israelis.
    The sheer heroism displayed by the Israeli passengers shows why nothing can ever defeat us.
    The writer was Israel's ambassador to the U.S., 2009-13.

UK Foreign Secretary's Silence on the Crimes of Palestinians Speaks Volumes - Amit Segal (Telegraph-UK)
    "We will never be silent about injustice," Ed Miliband declared when he outlined new measures against Israel at the Labour Party conference last week. But Britain's Foreign Secretary is rather partial about the injustices he chooses to be noisy about.
    When the victims are citizens of the Jewish state, Miliband suddenly becomes cautious.
    Faced with an attempted mass killing of passengers on a Flydubai flight to Tel Aviv, he offered this bland statement: "Deeply concerned about the incident that occurred on the Flydubai flight to Israel."
    After all, it was only an attempt to murder 174 people - not construction of new homes near the Dead Sea.
    In his speech at the conference, he clarified that Israel is committing ethnic cleansing and war crimes. He equated Hamas, the barbaric terrorist organization, with the State of Israel that was defending itself against it.
    There is an attempt at ethnic cleansing between the Jordan River and the sea, and it is by the Palestinians against the Jews.
    While Labour is doing its best to establish a terror state five minutes away from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, no government formed in Israel after October's elections will allow the establishment of such a state.
    If someone got their news on world events exclusively from the Foreign Secretary's X account, they might think that the greatest evil empire in the world is Israel.

How Terror's Victims Became the Targets of Blame - Ben-Dror Yemini (Ynet News)
    The forces of darkness are aided by far too many of those considered enlightened. Osama bin Laden, Yahya Sinwar, Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei would have reason to be pleased.
    Their work is being carried out not only by the terrorists who continue in their footsteps. It is also being done by a growing band of those who openly declare that their goal is to defeat the Free World.
    This is not Israel's struggle alone. It should have been the struggle of the Free World and of the Muslim world in particular. That is because Muslims are the primary victims of jihad.
    The Muslim Brotherhood, from which most jihadist movements emerged, is persecuted in most Arab countries, which understand the danger, while its influence in the West continues to grow.
    Over the past quarter-century, 320,405 people have been murdered in Islamic terrorist attacks. Jihadist branches are spreading death in wars that have raged for years in Sudan, Somalia, and Libya. Shiite jihad is wreaking havoc in Iran, Yemen, Lebanon and among the Palestinians.
    Most of these centers of violence have nothing to do with the U.S. or Israel.
    According to Brown University's Costs of War research, 4.5 million people have been killed since 2001, most of them in Muslim countries.
    Even if we accept Hamas's figures, the 75,000 killed in Gaza amounts to 1.6% of the total, and most of those killed are men of fighting age.