thousand bombs was an unbelievable number, ten times over the original budget that was allocated to this in the annual program. Each bomb was a hundred times more expensive than a normal iron bomb, and this requirement came at the expense of several other important needs. My commanders raised their eyebrows—clearly there was no need of a thousand such bombs to destroy SAM batteries. But since it was against missiles, they approved the requisition. Still, the number I ordered was only one-tenth of the quantity I really wanted because they were intended for more things than just attacking SAMs. I wanted to get those bombs to action to accelerate the tempo of learning and improving them and their use. I wanted to equip all the squadrons with those bombs and begin employing then routinely in training to accelerate the process of getting to the next generation of weapons. I was ready to use those glide bombs in operations at the first opportunity and I almost succeeded, but had to cancel: Yassir Arafat failed to show up at the meeting.
NO DOUBT I WAS TOO PUSHY and impatient as a staff officer. I didn’t consider political correctness, and my commanders were reaching the limit of their patience. In one discussion Benny got out of his seat and yelled at me to stop grinding him down with these ideas, or—as he put it in English—“I’ll shoot you down in flames!” Benny was scary even in English, but he also had warmth and grace. Very early the next morning I was invited to his office. Over the first coffee of the day and the eternal cigarette, clean-shaven and his eyes still drowsy, he conversed with me at length. In the end he sent me to continue with “my craziness.”
David Ivry replaced Benny as air force commander in October 1977. Ivry was extremely intelligent and understood my worldview pretty well, and I believe he even agreed with most of it in principle. But Ivry was a pragmatic person who knew that a heavy ship such as the air force could not make sharp turns. I lost patience. Even though I saw progress in some of my requirements, my main ideas seemed to me as far from fulfillment as ever. I could continue blabbering about “filling empty squares,” “quality air force,” “first strike,” the need to replace fighter aircraft in some missions by helicopter commandos and drones, and the need to decentralize war planning —still, the main product of my department was plans and orders to eliminate SAM arrays with Phantoms and Skyhawks. And the imagination of the air force and most of its energy were invested in its next fighter aircraft. This was a worthy subject for fighter pilots, and many plans and many interests protected it. It was clear to everybody, even me, that the real attention and the real finance would go there, not to any other idea.
The Americans proposed their fighter aircraft, put political pressure on us, and lent us money so we could buy them, and in Israel, heavyweight sectors—our aerial defense industry most of all—pushed for the development and production of an Israeli-made jet fighter. The air force was the client and its word was important, but very few pilots or commanders cared to discuss the deeper question of what was needed, and for what ends. The air force knew what it really wanted—it was an American modern jet—but at the end, the air force reconciled all the competing parties. It convinced the government to buy American F-16s and at the same time voted for the development of the locally produced Lavi, which was going to be practically identical to the American fighter, and even undertook to order both of them. In this way, by the right hand doing the opposite of what the left was doing, the State of Israel was led into a huge double investment, and part of it went down the drain in the end.
During my studies in the United States I learned the interesting notion of the “military-industrial complex”— this integration of partial interests that affects national decisions. Now I had the opportunity to see this phenomenon firsthand—and in my eyes, this whole process was improper, or at least illogical.
INSIDE THE GENERAL OOZE that my ideas were floundering in, my personal break point arrived. I remember clearly where this happened. It was at a convention of reserve pilots at Tel Nof. The reserve pilots, a big part of the power of the air force, were then a focal point of distrust of the high command. Although ready and willing to contribute, serving a day every week, they harbored deep resentment regarding command failure in the Yom Kippur War. The goal of the convention was to strengthen their trust in our plans for the next war. My departmental officers climbed the podium one after the other and presented them with our new, improved plans. When we got to the crux—attacking SAMs, of course—Tsutsik got up in the audience. The big, swarthy man, my instructor in flight school, was now a captain at El Al Israel Airlines. All those years he continued to fly Skyhawks in the reserves—a feat that not all pilots could match. I looked at him with great affection. His temples and his chest hair, sticking above his shirtfront, were already white.
Tsutsik said, “I don’t understand.”
Nahumi began to explain the new methods of attack on the missiles from the beginning.
“Not that,” said Tsutsik. “Don’t you have anything new to show us?”
The audience of reservists supported him with a growing murmur of catcalls. The room became noisy, and all eyes turned to me. I was the senior staff officer, so I got up to the podium to defend our plans and fighting doctrines.
I knew with whom I was dealing here. The people I faced were not cowards. They were ready to risk their lives and enter the missile killing zones once again, and I presumed they saw our plans as practical, but they needed to be convinced of the reason to do it. So I supplied it. I described to our reserve pilots how the elimination of the missiles would change the situation, shake the enemy strategically, and enable us to break his army tactically. I reminded them how after air superiority was attained on June 5, 1967, the sky opened and the enemy lay open to us. I spoke, but I did not believe what I was saying. The convention ended on an up note, but since then, whenever I approved operational plans, I saw before me Tsutsik’s skeptical eyes.
FOR A WHILE LONGER I kept signing operational orders and sitting in on staff discussions, but more and more I understood that the man entrusted with operations cannot be in opposition. For some additional time I kept coming to work with red eyes, and at last I went to David Ivry’s office and asked to be relieved and leave the service. Ivry, a moderate man, tried to calm me down—perhaps a short leave would do—but my feelings were too strong. I had my strategic thinking, but I failed to convince the air force to follow. I knew how to fly, lead, and command, and also to think and write, but I didn’t know politics nor how to say one thing and mean another, and I didn’t care to learn.
“I don’t fit here, and I can’t stay in the air force,” I told Ivry painfully. The conversation ended. When I exited Ivry’s office I thought, “Here’s where we part, my beloved air force. I am leaving you in the good hands of Ivry, Avihu, and others like them.”
It was August 1978. I took off my uniform and left.
I DIDN’T HAVE MUCH TIME to mourn this second break in my life. We were poor, and we had to pay the mortgage on our home. We both had to find work, and quickly.
Within a week I found myself picking apples in the orchards of Kibbutz Tsuba, near Jerusalem, the same kibbutz my Uncle Shaike hoped to establish before his death. Ali stood like a rock behind my decision and my torment, and worked in the kibbutz kitchen. We came down from the heights of the air force and folded ourselves into the narrow, warm niche of the kibbutz.
Tzuba’s members accepted us very gracefully into their society. We received a small, nice apartment with a bit of lawn in front. The end of summer in the mountains of Jerusalem was sweet and cool. I worked in the fruit orchards, picking, pruning, spraying, and shoveling powdered bird shit on the roots of the trees. Our fourteen-year- old, Etay, learned to drive a tractor, too. Our kids went to live and study in the children’s houses, and while I was in the fields my nine-year-old, Omri, carried six-year-old Noah on his shoulders to the opening of the first day of her first-grade class. Soon we all found new friends, and the children got a dog. Every weekend, friends from the past, from Givat-Brenner or the air force, came to visit us, and we sat on the lawn and peeled cactus fruit, or walked around collecting berries and figs in the deserted Arab gardens on the hilly terraces. I continued flying in the reserves, and every week I drove Ali’s red VW beetle to Hatzor, to fly Phantoms in Aviem Sela’s Falcons as an ordinary section leader. It was nice and calm in Tzuba, the people of the kibbutz were wonderful, and the socialist way of life was still romantic, but we both knew well that this was an intermission. The kibbutz was not the solution to our lives. We recalled Shoshana’s life at Givat-Brenner and my own run-in at the general meeting there, and decided we were not ready to give up our personal freedom. But the days were beautiful, and we lived from one to the next. Shosh came to visit us a few times, to see the grandchildren. I noticed that she was cool to me, and could see in her eyes criticism for my “dereliction of duty,” but I was already in another place and not involved in national security anymore.
In autumn, the fruit harvest season in the mountains, my thoughts flew far with the clouds and the migrating
