WASHINGTON, 19 October 2003 — Curious fact: an Israeli pilot — a living legend — refuses to participate in targeted assassinations of Palestinians, and is fired from the Israeli Air Force. And the US press neglects to comment on it.
Curious indeed.
Brig. Gen. Yiftah Spector is someone who would make good movie material. He’s the most senior signatory of the 27 Israeli pilots who refuse to bomb the occupied territories, and call for ending the occupation.
The Jerusalem Post calls Spector “the epitome of ‘the new Jew’.” He’s “the son of a hero, a triple ace, a mythological fighter pilot who turned painter and sculpture. He led squadrons into some of the most fateful battles of the Jewish state. If pilots are the elite of Israel, (Yiftah Spector) symbolizes the elite of the elite.
“He is the son of one of the ‘23 men in the boat’, a group that was sent in WWII to demolish oil installations in Lebanon and were never head of again.”
Spector participated in the attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, and his flight log records nearly 7,000 flight hours, with 8,500 sorties including 334 combat flights.
Called “a triple ace”, Spector shot down 15 enemy aircraft; only one other pilot shot down more planes in Israel’s history.
With this impressive history behind him, he is now questioning the Israeli government’s attacks on Palestinian civilians. He has gone from hero to pariah.
“People are asking me why am I using the fact that I am a pilot to express political opinions,” Spector, 63, recently told journalists. “I don’t think that the only one who can express opinions on bad commands are bereaved parents.”
Spector also questions the aims of the Israeli Defense Forces, and has no qualms in noting that Israeli fighters killed civilians at Deir Yassin, Kibya, and Kafr Kasim.
“The prime minister was involved in some of these (attacks),” he said. “We are fighting against a civilian population because our government doesn’t have any solution other than using brute force.”
Spector said when Air Force Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz summoned him to his office and asked him to resign, he said: “I put my wings on the table and told him to take them. I want freedom to speak.”
Spector’s actions have caused many Israelis to look inward and question their government’s tactics: “The pilots are reminding the Israelis that even if the aim of the military action is to hit a murderer who is to die, when a state orders its pilots to drop a one-ton bomb into a residential neighborhood in the most densely populated place in the world, and with the clear knowledge that hundreds on innocents are likely to get hurt, its action, to a significant extend, employs the methods of a terror organization,” writes David Grossman in the Israeli daily Haaretz.
“One of the reasons for this is the destructive influence that such a mode of action has on the society itself,” writes Grossman.
“Another reason is that a state is not entitled to carry out assassinations and murders and executions without a trial, because then it loses the legitimacy of its claims against the terror organizations.”
