This bombing woke me from my long lethargy.
I have to confess that in the beginning it was not the moral question that troubled me. I saw in all this something different: What was happening to the operational standards of the IDF? “A terrorist was eliminated— great,” I thought and cheered, “Hooray for the Israeli Air Force. But why did you have to get such results in such a miserable way?”
The results of this operation—one terrorist for fifteen children—seemed to me like a pound of gain for a ton of loss. I saw it as a reproach to military competence. To put one bullet in the target you had to tear the whole neighborhood down? This looks like a complete screwup, done by a soldier who doesn’t even know how to fire his weapon. Is that what you learned in the occupied territories, to put fire on the target in erratic bursts? What kind of standard is that, my dear Israeli Air Force (IAF)?
Even having uttered this criticism, I was still not that angry. I was aware that the mission was complex and that there might be many factors that could have affected it. Perhaps, I thought, the pilots and their commanders really did not imagine that there might be so many people in the target house (although simple common sense mocked the idea that in Gaza, packed with a million people, the terrorist Shkhade would be sleeping alone in a large house). So I kept saying that “had the IAF commanders known in advance that the house was full of innocent civilians, they definitely would have halted this bombing, and caught Shkhade in another location, eliminating him in a surgical, precise way, the way it should be done.” This was what I kept saying time and again, to myself and to everybody who asked me.
Today I realize that in the past few years I had been repressing bits and pieces of information. Occurrences of this nature, on a smaller scale, had been taking place in the territories daily. After the Shkhade incident, I realized that this is the way things had been managed there for some time. It was upsetting, but I still argued, “Surely there was some mistake.”
EVERYONE KNOWS THAT WARS are an arena of mistakes where innocents die. In the three years of the War of Attrition, 1968–1970, against Egypt and Syria, for example, we in the IAF hit an Egyptian school full of children, shot down a Libyan airliner, and more—all by mistake. I myself was involved in a very serious operational mistake in 1967 where non-combatants lost their lives (more about this later). Tragic indeed. But a mistake can have some positive value—provided you internalize it and learn from it. This way, new and better ways to fight can be discovered, and new and improved weapons created. “Recognition of mistakes is the way to turn a failure into success.” That is what I was taught and what I taught others. “There is no shame in acknowledging mistakes. On the contrary—credit and dignity derive from it, benefiting all of us.”
In short, I had no doubt that collateral damage—as happened in the elimination of Shkhade—was taken seriously in the IDF as a grave mistake. I took it for granted that the IAF works constantly to develop new methods to hit its targets—and the targets only.
But then, to my complete surprise, the IAF published a press release that showed me I had misunderstood the whole thing. The air force commander, Maj. Gen. Dan Khalutz, made a public appearance. The commander is a charismatic and very likable person. He is especially known for a glib tongue and plain speaking.
“How do you feel, sir,” the interviewer asked him, “when you drop a one-ton bomb on a populated neighborhood?”
“How do I feel?” the commander replied with a smile. “Nothing. Just a light buffet on the wing, that’s all.”
His black eyes flashing with good humor, the commander completed his answer: “I sleep well at night.”
WELL, WE KNOW ABOUT SCHLOCK journalists, the kind who specialize in “How do you feel?” questions. Many times the answers come out foolish, too. I don’t know this officer very well personally and have no clue whether he misunderstood the impact of his words. But the reality was there for everybody to see: immoral and unlawful actions were happening every day in the occupied territories. And when some of the soldiers protested, the IDF and the IAF used their power to punish in order to silence them. This officer’s callous words, on the contrary, were said loud and clear for everybody in Israel and in the whole world to hear. All this shed a new, bright, and ugly light on the IDF’s ways of making war—both operationally and morally.
I began paying attention, and the more I saw and heard, the sadder and more surprised I became regarding the lack of discipline, the defects in personal example, and the short-sightedness of our commanders in this complicated war. I began to see the problem not as just a tactical military mistake but also as a much deeper failure our military commanders were part of. The protruding component in this case was the separation between the principles (and the law of the state) and the deeds done in the area.
This was not the first time, nor the last, when I saw friends and comrades, air force people, pilots of my own level, who were raised on the same values, separating their actions in the field from accepted moral values. In other words, compromising their principles.
Of course, “compromising your principles” is the easy way, isn’t it? Why dig, why rake up the muck? It’s just a wing buffet. Why deal with it at all? Just let it go. Why rock the boat? Hadn’t Ezer Weizmann, the great, the glorious IAF commander of the 1960s, taught us all, “Don’t explain and don’t apologize”? So what do you expect from the IAF? Don’t be dumb. Sit down and shut up.
But I could never follow this principle. Time and again I found myself twisting, investing effort, explaining, and giving excuses. And later, in my forty years of flying, I had had some friends who explored those easy ways and found where they led. The first stage in compromising principles was always easy. But after you began, there was the second stage, and suddenly the path twisted and soon was shrouded in fog. And my mother, too. She used to say, “Now listen well, Iftach Spector” (this is how she would begin when she wanted to make a point), “we are not rich enough to buy cheap things.”
I PERUSED THE LETTER I had signed three weeks ago. This time it was not the rough copy put on my desk by a young pilot with a flushed face. Now the text was in bold type, black and red, spread over the entire first page. The headline shouted, “REFUSENIK PILOTS!”
The journalist glared at me with his beady eyes.
“Well?”
He didn’t say it directly, but I, like the entire crowd watching us at home, understood exactly the reason for the ugly devolution of the word, from “refusal” to “refusenik.” This change is intended to suppress the simple fact that I declare that I shall refuse to take part in war crimes—and to connect me with words whose meaning is repulsive and ugly: “evasion,” “cowardice,” “treachery.”
Or to put it bluntly, treason. Betraying the State of Israel.
“Well?” the interviewer persisted, “What do you say?”
What could I say? It is correct, I do refuse. Here it is written in black and red on yellow. And then I recalled Ladya again. The smell of the mound of vomit of forty-four years ago rose in my nostrils, warm and sour.
So I answered the journalist somehow, and the media did their thing. As expected, the tumult broke even before the interview ended. The IAF reaction was strong: the twenty-eight pilots who signed the protest, including myself, were discharged from the air force. Since there had been no crime and no military offense, they argued that we had violated
So I was struck dumb, and right away some of my friends publicly cut me dead. I noticed that every one of them used the opportunity to show off his medals. I stood empty-handed—I never received nor asked for a medal; I just gave a few to some of them. A friend who had flown with me on perilous missions wrote me a note: “Our ways part,” and for a moment I was scared for him; perhaps he had a terminal illness. Another fighter ace suggested I should be executed; another asked me to commit suicide. Public figures, philosophers, and pundits used my name to further their own causes. Important people declared they would not speak with me nor agree to meet me (though I never asked any of them to do any such thing). Economical brains looked for ways to halt my military pension payments.
Reporters who feed on the IDF led a public campaign focused on personal attacks against us. We were presented as deserters and traitors. One reporter was especially nasty—he invented a nickname for the signatories
