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http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1098456,00.html

'We're air force pilots, not mafia. We don't take
revenge'

Israel's F-16 and Black Hawk refuseniks say why they
could not obey illegal orders and kill innocent
Palestinians

Chris McGreal in Tel Aviv
Wednesday December 3, 2003
The Guardian

For two months, a rebel group of Israeli Black Hawk
helicopter and F-16 fighter pilots has been denounced
as traitors for saying they will no longer bomb
Palestinian cities. Until now they have maintained a
resolute silence on their motives, preferring to limit
their criticism of Ariel Sharon's war to a letter
signed by 27 reserve and active duty pilots refusing
to carry out what they described as illegal orders,
and denouncing the occupation as eating at the moral
fabric of Israel.

Now, having been thrown out of the air force, they are
talking publicly about what brought members of the
most revered branch of the Israeli military to make an
unprecedented challenge to the handling of the
conflict with the Palestinians.

"I served more than seven years as a pilot," said
Captain Alon R, who, like all the younger pilots,
hopes to return to combat flying and so declines to
use his full name in order to retain his security
clearance. "In the beginning, we were pilots who
believed our country would do all it could to achieve
peace. We believed in the purity of our arms and that
we did all we could to prevent unnecessary loss of
life.

"Somewhere in the last few years it became harder and
harder to believe that is the case."

The line was crossed for most of the pilots with the
dropping of the one-tonne bomb last year on the home
of a Hamas military leader, Salah Shehade, killing him
and 14 of his family, mostly children.

One captain described the bombing as deliberate
killing, murder even. Another called it state
terrorism, though some colleagues swiftly stomped on
that interpretation. But they all agreed that the
attack sowed the doubts that resulted a year later in
the letter that sent shockwaves through the Israeli
military.

"The Shehade incident was a red light for us, a final
warning," said Capt Alon R. "With Shehade I began to
re-evaluate my beliefs. We killed 14 innocent people,
nine of them children. After my commander gave an
interview in which he said he sleeps well at night and
his men can do the same. Well, I can't. We refused to
see it as an innocent mistake."

Capt Assaf L, who served as a pilot for 15 years until
sacked for signing the letter, had similar doubts.

"You don't have to be a genius to know that the
destruction from a one-tonne bomb is massive, so
someone up there made a decision to drop it knowing it
would destroy buildings," he said. "Someone took the
decision to kill innocent people. This is us being
terrorists. This is vengeance."

Lieutenant-Colonel Avner Raanan is among the most
respected pilots to have signed the letter. He served
for 27 years and was awarded one of Israel's highest
military decorations in 1994. "If you look at the past
three years, you see that, if we had a suicide
bombing, the Israeli air force made a big operation in
which civilians were killed, and that looks to
innocent eyes like revenge," he said.

"You hear it in the streets of Israel; people want
revenge. But we should not behave like that. We are
not a mafia."

More than 30 pilots have now endorsed the letter
refusing to fly bombing raids on Palestinian cities,
although four retracted, one an El Al pilot threatened
with dismissal, and another a reserve pilot who lost
his civilian job.

At its core, the letter questions the legality of the
"targeted assassinations" that have claimed the lives
of more civilian bystanders than their Hamas, Islamic
Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade targets. In October,
14 civilians were killed when the air force fired
missiles at a car in Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp.

"Is it legitimate to take F-15's and helicopters
designed to destroy enemy tanks, and use them against
cars and houses in one of the most heavily populated
places in the world?" Capt Alon R asked.

"Because of the terrorism, we have become blinded by
the blood on our own faces. We cannot see that on the
other side, beside the terrorists, is a whole nation
of innocent people. It's important that we recognise
that, and that, as military people, we say that."

The pilots' stand shook Israeli society. There is no
shortage of critics of the prime minister's militarist
tactics but those of the peace camp are widely viewed
as pacifists and marginal. Doubts raised by the army
chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, and four former heads
of the Shin Bet intelligence service alarmed many
Israelis, but the criticisms were focused solely on
whether Mr Sharon's tactics were fuelling terrorism.

The pilots straddle both issues, raising moral and
legal questions on the conduct of the war and
challenging the government's claim its strategy is
about defending Israel.

"Our government's policy is to maintain fear in the
public," Capt Assaf L said. "We're not weak. It's not
1967 or 1973, with the Syrian army on the border
waiting to attack us. This is maintaining a war to
maintain the occupation.

"We've the strongest nation in the Middle East. The
terrorists are bastards, but we must fight to not
become terrorists ourselves."

Many who poured scorn on the pilots accused them of
wading into politics for going beyond questions about
the legality of their orders and challenging the
occupation. "We cannot separate the two," Capt
Jonathon S said. "We are not pacifists. We don't think
we should sit back and let suicide bombers attack us.
But all this is a direct result of our being in the
[occupied] territories.

"Our fight to keep the settlements and suppress the
Palestinian people is killing us. It is killing our
right to live safely in the country of Israel. A very
small group of radical Israelis is leading the sane
majority to catastrophe."

Col Raanan scoffs at the accusation that the pilots
have denigrated their uniforms by wading into
political issues.

"The air force commander spoke in favour of the
[Jewish] settlements while sitting in uniform next to
Sharon at a Likud party convention," he said. "That is
political. This country has a defence minister who, as
army chief of staff, was the most political ever. It
is hypocritical to say lower ranking officers cannot
express an opinion. What they
mean is, we can be political so long as we agree with
the government. Well that's not democracy."

The pilots say they have received more than 500
letters of support, including one from a Holocaust
survivor, and numerous calls from fellow pilots.
Several leftwing former cabinet ministers praised the
pilots' stand, saying it proved the armed forces were
moral.

Concern in the air force prompted its commander,
Major-General Dan Halutz, to meet groups of pilots to
tell them that "targeted assassinations" were not a
war crime.

"Halutz said we were traitors," Capt Assaf L said. "In
our eyes, what we did is a very Zionist act. We did it
to save Israel." ...








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