Loud and Clear
Iftach Spector
A recently retired Israeli Air Force general and its second-highest-scoring fighter ace, Iftach Spector is one of Israel’s living legends. He was the leader of the flight that attacked the USS Liberty in 1967. After the 1967 and 1973 wars, in which he commanded a squadron of fighter-bombers, he rose to head the IAF’s Training and War Lessons Section and later became its the Chief of Operations. He was one of the eight Israeli pilots who attacked Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirik in 1981.
In 2003, his career took an even more dramatic turn: he was the senior signatory of the famous “Pilots’ Letter,” in which Spector and 27 other Israeli pilots stated their refusal to bomb targets in Palestine where collateral damage would likely be severe. His maverick conscience is well on display in this artfully written memoir, which is currently a 10-week-and-counting bestseller in Israel and has been licensed in Brazil as well.
The son of a family that immigrated to Palestine at the turn of the 20th century, whose father and mother served in the Palmach, Israel’s early clandestine commando force, Spector has written a rich and reflective meditation on loyalty, on what is right and wrong in war, and on his dedication to the idea and reality of the state of Israel.
The Pilots’ Letter ended Spector’s military career, but also made him one of the most compelling and celebrated defenders of the conscience of the Jewish state. In that battle, as in his previous battles against Nasser’s MiGs, his mother’s constant lesson to him sustained him: “All from within.”
General Spector’s first book, A DREAM IN BLACK AND AZURE (1992; never translated into English), won the Sade Literary Award, given to him personally by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He has a B.A. in history and Middle East Studies from Tel Aviv University and a masters in political science from UCLA, both with honors.
Brigadier General
Iftach Spector
LOUD AND CLEAR
The Memoir of an Israeli Fighter Pilot
Chapter
1
The Letter
We, veteran and active-duty pilots alike, who served and still serve Israel every day, are opposed to carrying out attack orders that are illegal and immoral of the type the State of Israel has been conducting in the Occupied Territories…
We, for whom the IDF and the Air Force are an inalienable part of ourselves, refuse to continue to harm innocent civilians…
These actions are illegal and immoral, and are a direct result of the ongoing occupation which is corrupting all of Israeli society…
We hereby declare that we shall continue to serve in the IDF and the Air Force on every mission, for the defense of Israel.
—The Pilots’ Letter to the Israeli Air Force,
December 24, 2003
THE FIRST ISRAELI FIGHTER PILOT I ever met was Ladya. He peered at me through the grass and looked a little like cat food, reddish and granular. I collected him carefully in a cardboard box. Around us were low barbed-wire fences, and above stretched the open blue sky from which he had descended a few minutes before—passing over us with a roar, his jet rolling like a big black cross and at last slamming into the ground. Now, all around the ground was sticky and the air was saturated with the sweet smell of jet fuel.
One of my friends raised his head above the weeds and I saw his pale stare. Then I saw his back bend and heard gagging sounds. When I crawled toward him, my hand sank into a small, steaming pile. I looked at my palm—the dripping porridge of tomato pieces and white slime was not much different from the fiber and broken bone scattered around.
I vomited.
My gorge rose again forty-four years later, when the journalist in front of me combed his hair, checked his makeup in the monitor screen of the TV camera, and turned to interview me for this evening’s sound bite for Channel One. A pimple on his cheek drew my attention. Then I saw his expectant look.
“Sorry, what did you ask?”
“Brigadier General Iftach Spector, one of Israel’s greatest fighter pilots—are you a refusenik?”
“What?”
WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? My country is under attack. Terrorists with knives attack our citizens on the streets. At night, cars are hosed down with automatic weapons fire. Suicide bombers enter hotels, restaurants, and buses to subject women, children, old people, and babies to fire, shock, and a hail of shrapnel nails. Hundreds are killed, thousands injured. The country is covered with a grid of fences around public buildings, schools, and kindergartens. Armed security stands in the entrance of every mall, cinema, restaurant, and bus station. Security people and soldiers carrying weapons patrol everywhere, stand in doors and road crossings, checking hand luggage. But in spite of all this, the terror continues. And, of course, passive defense is not enough. The enemy must be attacked in his base, and so the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the security services are activated.
The IDF moves its center of gravity to the occupied territories. Our soldiers focus on “dealing with the civilian population,” breaking into houses, making arrests. Our soldiers smash walls and tear up floors, searching for weapons. Sometimes they catch terrorists and their handlers. When a home has been used in this manner, the family is evacuated and the house demolished. The IDF surprises the enemy time and again in the cities and in the villages, day and night. Sometime the operation ends quietly, and sometimes clashes occur in streets and on rooftops, with dead and wounded on both sides. Many terrorists and suspects are caught. The prisons are packed with thousands of Palestinians, and new prisons are being opened.
The Palestinians react with escalating savagery. Terrorists are caught—but new ones are born all the time, some of them mere children. The mullahs seduce them, promising heavenly virgins, and terrorists continue coming like zombies with their bomb belts. They launch homemade rockets that they manufacture in secret factories at night. In the mosques, on Fridays, they get their religion with an anti-Semitic flavor, justifying their abominable terror as “holy war.” It develops into a zero-sum game—either us or them.
I AM OVER SIXTY and am not an active participant in this war. For the past fifteen years I have done my reserve duty as a volunteer, teaching pilots. From the sidelines, I watched my country forced to defend itself against terror.
This is not a simple battle; the terrorists who face us wear civilian clothes. They emerge, strike, and go to ground among the civilian population. Our forces must hit the terrorists without harming the innocent population in which they immerse themselves, and this is a very complicated surgical mission. Still, it is clear that this distinction is very important—indiscriminate attacks on populations, besides being immoral, are forbidden by Israeli law, and turn the whole world against us. Attacks that cause collateral damage endanger our chances to resolve the conflict we are engaged in, and they tarnish our self-image and our way of life.
It is a tough war. I cross my fingers for the IDF every day.
THE AIR FORCE IS THE MAIN TOOL to do that important “surgery,” and for good reason. An airplane, soaring high over the conquered areas, sees without being seen. From on high it detects figures who can be identified as “bad guys” by somebody else, locks onto them, and fires on or bombs buildings reported by somebody as containing enemies.
And terrorists do get taken out, but the process is not perfect. Many noncombatants are hit as well. The ratio of combatants to noncombatants is 1:1—meaning for every terrorist we kill an innocent, and other noncombatants are wounded. This ratio is very bad. The terrorists are the ones who profit from the collateral damage. They, who target our children intentionally—exploit our misses to win the hearts and minds of the Palestinian population and world support. Sometimes, after a botched operation like thi
s, it seems that the loss from the operation is greater than the gain. But this is the nature of war. And throughout this book you will hear about war.
ON THE NIGHT OF JULY 22, 2002, the “surgeon’s scalpel,” while excising a cancerous tumor, slipped deep into living flesh. A fighter jet was sent at midnight to take out a notorious terrorist named Salekh Shkhade. The fighter dropped a one-ton bomb on a house in a heavily populated suburb of Gaza. The bomb hit, and the house collapsed on all its inhabitants. When the dust cleared, it was found that fifteen women and children were blown to pieces together with the terrorist.
When that outcome was known, the world cried out. In Israel hard questions began to be asked. People wondered whether this was intentional, and began inquiring about the limits set upon the military. Officials began making excuses, explaining that they hadn’t imagined that so many people were living in that house. Knowing Gaza better than that, journalists dismissed this explanation. On the other side, the shrill voices of self-proclaimed patriots thundered in the streets and markets, “What the hell is all the soul-searching for? Woe to the villain and woe to his neighbor!” And if one listened hard, one could hear the thrill of satisfaction and the joy of revenge.
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.
“W
ell?” 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 esprit de corps. It was a clever tactic; could I say that in our senior winged ranks, some were not worthy to be called fighter pilots in my corps? I couldn’t make my mouth utter those clear, hard words. I hadn’t had the fortitude to accuse my air force of incompetence, and the IDF high command of war crimes. Even today, three years later, I find it very difficult to write these words.
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 of the pilots’ letter—“the Air Force 28,” and used the loss of my father, Zvi Spector, at sea with twenty-three commandos who sailed to fight the Nazis, to humiliate me. The public followed through, and all kinds of people I never knew called me and sent faxes. My mailbox at home as well as my e-mail boxes began filling with trash. After some time I gave up and began separating out my utility bills and throwing everything else away.
Loud and Clear Page 1