[WCUSP] Fw: "The whole country 'slid' into war crimes"

[Libby or Mort Frank]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jewish Peace News " <jpn at jewishpeacenews.net>
To: <LMFrank1 at verizon.net>
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 8:04 AM
Subject: "The whole country 'slid' into war crimes"


>
> The three pieces below report on some of the still continuing 
> ramifications of Israel's policy of what is known in human rights law as 
> 'summary executions', the execution of suspects without trial or due 
> process. Though Israel has been secretly performing summary executions for 
> decades, the term 'targeted assassinations' was introduced in the early 
> 2000s to (barely) whitewash the practice, when it was openly declared a 
> systematic state policy.
>
> One instance of summary execution by Israel which received extensive 
> attention and coverage was the killing, in Gaza, of Salah Shehadeh of 
> Hamas. As Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy reiterates in his opinion piece, 
> Shehadeh's assassination - carried out when a fighter jet dropped a one 
> ton bomb on an apartment building - was an assassination of fifteen people 
> including several children.
>
> Human rights, peace and justice organizations, led in the Shehadeh case by 
> the longtime refusers' group, "Yesh Gvul" (see their website at: 
> http://www.yeshgvul.org/index_e.asp) have persistently pursued legal 
> action, both in Israel and abroad, against the highly visible individuals 
> directly responsible for the execution. Top air force, army and security 
> service officers are repeatedly being fingered as war criminals and 
> threatened with charges. Other public campaigns accusing Israelis of 
> perpetrating war crimes include a recent protest against the appointment 
> of Dan Halutz, air force commander during the Shehadeh assassination, as 
> managing director of the company importing B.M.W.'s to Israel (see the 
> petition at: 
> http://www.al-arabeya.net/halots/?act=1&theclass=&serial=&cat=&page=1).
>
> This cumulative, unrelenting action is making a mark on Israeli 
> consciousness. It has repeatedly forced high ranking Israeli officers and 
> officials to confront the fact that their actions are or may be classified 
> by some authorities as war crimes and that they are accordingly suspected 
> war criminals. Several such figures have had to deal with serious threats 
> of litigation against them, as demonstrated for instance in the item below 
> by Haaretz reporter Barak Ravid.
>
> Another, complementary, change of consciousness, driven by the policy of 
> assassinations, is outlined by ex-pilot Yiftah Spector in his interview 
> with Neri Livneh, in Haaretz weekend magazine. Spector, one of the air 
> force pilots who declared his refusal to follow such orders, describes his 
> background and part of the process he experienced up to and following his 
> declaration. Spector's interview was published along with a new book he 
> has written on these topics.
>
> No anti-militarist, Spector still balks at the term 'refuser', but says 
> that "the whole country, myself included, 'slid' into war crimes by going 
> along with illegal acts that have been going on for years."
>
> Both these developments represent a process of significant change in 
> perceptions of, and attitudes towards, the military in Israel. The erosion 
> of its former impunity is visible and ongoing. While public resistance to 
> summary executions is still voiced by a minority, awareness of their 
> criminality is considerably broader and looks like it is here to stay.
>
> Rela Mazali
>
> ------------------
>
> http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/932411.html
>
>
> w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
>
> -----------------------------
>
> Last update - 09:57 09/12/2007
>
> London's burning for Dichter
> By Gideon Levy
>
>
> Avi Dichter will not be going to London. The Israeli dream of taking in 
> year-end sales, the new production of Othello or the sights of Oxford 
> Street vanished before the public security minister's very eyes. The 
> Foreign Ministry advised Dichter not to participate in a conference there, 
> because he could be arrested for involvement in the assassination of Hamas 
> leader Salah Shehadeh, when he was Shin Bet security service head. The 
> one-ton bomb used to target Shehadeh in 2002 left 15 people dead.
>
> The day after the horrible assassination, in late July 2002, I visited the 
> homes that were destroyed in the Al-Darj neighborhood in the Gaza Strip. 
> The Israel Defense Forces tried at the time to claim they were "huts," to 
> explain why it was unaware that people lived there. But they were 
> apartment buildings housing dozens of families. The person who dropped a 
> one-ton bomb on them in the dark of night knew it would kill many innocent 
> people.
>
> Among the ruins, I met Mohammed Matar, a Palestinian laborer who had 
> worked in Israel for 30 years, lying in the rubble of his home, his arm 
> and eye bandaged. In the "targeted killing" planned by Dichter's Shin Bet, 
> Matar lost his daughter, his daughter-in-law and four toddler 
> grandchildren. The pictures of the horror from the Gazan neighborhood have 
> haunted me ever since. Someone, I thought, must pay for this. Could it be 
> that no one is to blame or responsible for such an act?
>
> Shehadeh's assassination became a seminal event for Israel's critics the 
> world over. It was not different from many other liquidation operations 
> the Shin Bet had planned for the IDF. In July 2006, for example, Israel 
> assassinated nearly all of the Abu Salmiyeh family - Dr. Nabil Abu 
> Salmiyeh, a lecturer in mathematics, his wife and seven of their 
> children - because wanted man Mohammed Def was visiting their home at the 
> time. In the past seven years, 368 Palestinians were killed in liquidation 
> operations of which Dichter was the founding father.
>
> However, the dimensions of the bomb dropped on Shehadeh and the scope of 
> killing it sowed turned it into an icon of the struggle against Israel's 
> brutal methods of warfare. A damages lawsuit was submitted in a New York 
> district court against Dichter on behalf of the families of those who were 
> killed. Major General (Res.) Doron Almog was forced to remain on a plane 
> when he arrived in Britain in September 2005 and Brigadier General Aviv 
> Kokhavi, a former commander of the Gaza Division, canceled his plan to 
> study in England.
>
> These people and others were marked as war crimes suspects. Unfortunately, 
> this occurred only overseas. Here, they remain ministers and aristocrats, 
> their career and public status untainted, their foreheads unbranded by the 
> mark of Cain. For years, the High Court of Justice deferred discussing 
> petitions against the liquidations, until it finally gave its stamp of 
> approval in December 2006. Another year passed before the state 
> prosecution informed the High Court that it did not oppose forming an 
> investigative committee to study the Shehadeh assassination, five years 
> after the fact - a scandalous delay. In this state of affairs, those who 
> were horrified by these operations could only hope legal authorities 
> abroad would take action to fix what our authorities have chosen to 
> ignore.
>
> Yes, some in Israel believe that dropping a one-ton bomb on a residential 
> neighborhood merits a criminal investigation. They are Israeli patriots no 
> less than those who believe everything is permissible for us in the war 
> against terror. They are not the ones who besmirch Israel's name - 
> Israel's actions are responsible for this; these people seek to put an end 
> to Israel's actions. They would prefer judicial proceedings be held in 
> Israel, but our legal system is blocked before them. Therefore, their eyes 
> are directed abroad.
>
> The Foreign Ministry already has begun to act against the complaints 
> overseas in various channels. It is a shame that this is Israel's only 
> response. It would have been better to clarify here, among ourselves, the 
> responsibility of these people for such grave actions as the bombing of 
> Shehadeh's neighborhood. Meanwhile those who believe that the liquidations 
> have brought us to the verge of a moral abyss must look toward London. 
> Thanks to legal authorities there, people like Dichter are finally feeling 
> "a slight bump on the wing."
>
> ------------------------------- 
>
> http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/931680.html
>
> w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
>
> -------------------------------
>
> Last update - 02:17 06/12/2007
>
> Dichter nixes U.K. trip; fears arrest for 'war crimes'
> By Barak Ravid
>
>
> Public Security Minister Avi Dichter canceled a trip to Britain over 
> concerns he would be arrested due to his involvement in the decision to 
> assassinate the head of Hamas' military wing in July 2002.
>
> Fifteen people were killed in the bombing of Salah Shehade's house in 
> Gaza, among them his wife and three children, when Dichter was head of the 
> Shin Bet security service. He is the first minister to have to deal with a 
> possible arrest.
>
> Dichter was invited to take part in a conference by a British research 
> institute on "the day after" Annapolis. He was supposed to give an address 
> on the diplomatic process.
>
> Dichter contacted the Foreign Ministry and sought an opinion on the 
> matter, among other reasons because of previous cases in which complaints 
> were filed in Britain and arrest warrants were issued on suspicion of war 
> crimes by senior officers who served during the second intifada.
>
> The Foreign Ministry wrote Dichter that it did not recommend he visit 
> Britain because of a high probability that an extreme leftist organization 
> there would file a complaint, which might lead to an arrest warrant. The 
> ministry also wrote that because Dichter was not an official guest of the 
> British government, he did not have immunity from arrest.
>
> Dichter's bureau said in response that the minister does not intend to go 
> to Britain on any type of official or unofficial visit until the matter of 
> the arrest warrant is resolved.
>
> Dichter was already charged in a civil suit in the United States in 2005 
> for his part in the decision to assassinate Shehade. But in this U.S., 
> this is not a cause for arrest.
>
> British law, however, states that a private individual can file a 
> complaint against another person for offenses such as war crimes. 
> According to the law, such a complaint might lead to the court issuing an 
> arrest warrant, or a summons to criminal investigation or clarification of 
> the complaint by the police, or even the opening of criminal proceedings.
>
> Dichter is the first minister to face this problem, which has mainly 
> affected senior officers in the Israel Defense Forces. Transport Minister 
> Shaul Mofaz, formerly chief of staff, encountered a similar problem when 
> he traveled to Britain in 2002 before becoming defense minister. Other 
> officers in a similar predicament included former chief of staff Moshe 
> Ya'alon and former GOC Southern Command Doron Almog.
>
> In September 2005, Almog flew to London and found that a British police 
> officer was waiting in the terminal with an arrest warrant. Almog remained 
> on the plane and returned to Israel to avoid an embarrassing incident.
>
> Israel has brought up the subject over the past few weeks with the British 
> government. Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni 
> demanded in separate meetings with British Foreign Secretary David 
> Miliband that the British government work seriously to change the law that 
> harms former IDF officers. Miliband said his government was working on the 
> matter but did not promise anything.
>
> After the incident in which Almog was almost arrested, a joint foreign 
> ministry-justice ministry team worked to hire a major law firm in London 
> to represent Israeli officers if they were arrested.
>
> Senior officials met with a number of the most prominent London firms, 
> some of which offered to provide the service pro bono. But none of the 
> firms were hired, and the idea was set aside.
>
> ----------------- 
>
> http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/932058.html
>
> w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
> -------------------
>
> Last update - 10:24 08/12/2007
>
> Spreading his wings
>
> By Neri Livneh / Photo by Yanai Yehiel
>
>
> The first time Yiftah Spector saw an Israeli fighter pilot who had been 
> killed was when he was 19. "He peeked at me from between the weeds," he 
> recalls. "I picked him up very carefully." A terrible feeling of nausea 
> gripped him.
>
> Forty-four years later, in September 2003, Spector was a brigadier general 
> in the reserves and one of the Israel Air Force's most renowned pilots, 
> having downed 15 enemy planes and participated in the IAF's most 
> spectacular operations - from the destruction of the airfields in Egypt 
> and Syria in the first three hours of the 1967 Six-Day War, to the bombing 
> of the nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. During his military career he was 
> the commander of two squadrons and two bases, including the huge Tel Nof 
> facility, and served as IAF chief operations officer.
>
> Two-thirds of his peers in the pilots' course of 1958 fell in battle, and 
> dozens more of his subordinates and friends were killed. All of them are 
> eternally enshrined in Spector's memory. But he did not experience the 
> feeling of nausea again until that day in 2003 when a Channel 1 reporter 
> asked: "Brigadier General Spector, are you a 'refusenik'?"
>
> Though he did not initially grasp its full significance, the question 
> itself was enough to make him queasy. He asked the reporter to repeat it. 
> "At the time I was not proficient enough ... I was not effective enough at 
> responding, I hadn't yet completely organized things in my head. I admit 
> that what bothered me most then was not the moral aspect of the IAF, but 
> its combat level. I asked myself why it was necessary to kill 15 children 
> in order to liquidate one terrorist."
>
> And what about the moral angle?
>
> Spector: "With regard to the moral aspect, I thought at first that there 
> had been a mistake - that maybe the pilots and their commanders didn't 
> know there were civilians there, even though it's not so logical to expect 
> that in a densely populated area like Gaza, Shehadeh, of all people, would 
> be in civilian-free surroundings," Spector notes, referring to the July 
> 2002 operation in which the IAF bombed the apartment building in which 
> Salah Shehadeh, the head of the Hamas military wing in Gaza, resided with 
> his family.
>
> "I told everyone who asked me that a mistake had been made which called 
> for an apology, that mistakes happen in war and innocent people are 
> killed, and that I knew from the IAF that one learns from mistakes and 
> that they have to be rectified. But then I opened the paper and read the 
> interview with Dan Halutz [then the commander of the IAF] and realized 
> that the mistake was mine. When he replied to the question of what he 
> feels when he drops a one-ton bomb on a densely populated neighborhood in 
> Gaza by saying that he felt only a light tremor on the wing, and it 
> passes, and that he sleeps well at night afterward - I understood that 
> this was not a mistake, but moral deterioration. That illegal and immoral 
> operations were being carried out deliberately."
>
> Spector was the most senior officer who signed the "letter of the pilots," 
> which was made public on September 24, 2003, and stated: "We, for whom the 
> IDF and the air force are an integral part of our being; who were brought 
> up to love Israel and to contribute to the Zionist ideal, cannot take part 
> in the operations in the center of populated civilian areas; and [we] 
> refuse to endanger innocent Palestinian civilians ... The continued 
> occupation is critically harming the country's security."
>
> Twenty-nine pilots signed the letter, and even before the end of the 
> interview with Spector on Channel 1 about it, a furor erupted, resulting 
> in the pilots being ousted from the IAF. The signatories were branded 
> enemies of the force, and all of Spector's mailboxes - physical, 
> electronic, voice - and even his fax were jammed with abusive messages, 
> echoed by newspaper articles in the same vein.
>
> Spector was accused of undermining the IAF's esprit de corps. One of his 
> comrades suggested that he commit suicide, another that he be executed, 
> and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) examined the possibility of 
> terminating his pension arrangement. He was depicted as an evader and a 
> traitor. But nothing, he now says, broke his heart like the question put 
> to him by his daughter, Noa, then 31: "So, are you a refusenik, Dad? Is 
> that what you taught us?" To this day he denies that he acted the way a 
> conscientious objector might. "It is not a case of objecting," he 
> explains, "but of refusing." That is, not a sweeping objection to, or a 
> call for evasion of, army service, for example, but a refusal to carry out 
> specific operations, which can be seen as immoral.
>
> Were you surprised by the reaction of your friends after you signed the 
> letter?
>
> "Yes. I never imagined how hurt they would be by what I did. The main 
> argument against me was that I was accusing the air force of committing 
> war crimes and declaring that they are war criminals. But I was not."
>
> Were you yourself a war criminal?
>
> "No. I was not, and I think most of us were not. I think the air force and 
> the IDF and the whole country, myself included, 'slid' into war crimes by 
> going along with illegal acts that have been going on for years; and the 
> fact that I did not say so from the first day of the occupation is because 
> I am not as wise as [the late Prof.] Yeshayahu Leibowitz. What can I do?"
>
> Late maturation
>
> Now, four years later, Spector is publishing a full and detailed reply to 
> the question of how someone like him could have signed the pilots' letter, 
> and also why his signature is the only possible outcome of his education 
> concerning the value of conscience and of "purity of arms" (use of weapons 
> only for a mission, and not against noncombatants): old-style Zionism and 
> concern for Israel's security. The reply comes in the form of a book 
> entitled "Ram vebarur" ("Loud and Clear," Yedioth Ahronoth Books; in 
> Hebrew), in which Spector tells his story and the story of the IAF.
>
> This is Spector's second book. The first, published in 1985, described 
> seven days and nights in the life of a fighter squadron at the southern 
> front in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That book, for which he received the 
> Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for excellence in military literature, was already 
> somewhat critical of the behavior of the high command in the war, but such 
> comments were slashed ruthlessly by the military censors.
>
> He first wrote "Loud and Clear" in English. "A friend of mine, Sam Gorwin, 
> an American poet whom I became friends with when he was a volunteer on 
> [Kibbutz] Givat Brenner, told me that it was high time I sat down and 
> wrote, because I had a story to tell. This was after I felt the need to go 
> public in the wake of the 'refusal' episode. I wrote the book in English, 
> and it was very preliminary in character. Afterward I sat down and for 
> more than a year rewrote it in Hebrew, and it came out completely 
> different."
>
> What did you feel as you were writing?
>
> "It took me back 20 years. I left the air force for good in 1984, and 
> suddenly I found myself going back to my period of service and before. It 
> was sometimes emotionally difficult. In fact, I wasn't able to do this 
> kind of personally revealing writing, as in the previous book, until I 
> underwent a process of maturing. The older I get, the more sentimental I 
> get, because I think I matured late. I experienced very few emotional 
> events in my life. I almost never cried. No one ever hit me. I never lost 
> a child, thank God. I was not taken prisoner. I have had a very fortunate 
> life, so my emotional maturation came very late."
>
> Fortunate? You lost your father at the age of one and were passed from one 
> foster family to another.
>
> "You can turn everything into good or bad. I never considered myself 
> unfortunate. 'An orphan is not disabled,' as my mother used to say. Our 
> relations were very extreme. I was an only child, with all the burden that 
> imposes on the mother and the child, along with her inability to forgive 
> and her strictness. The result was that I separated myself from her early 
> on. From the moment I developed a mind of my own, I no longer saw her as 
> my mother. The fact that I was a foster child in many families also 
> contributed to the feeling of being an outsider."
>
> Could it be that it took you years to achieve emotional maturity because 
> you spent most of your life in a macho environment?
>
> "The IAF is definitely a macho environment. But a senior official in some 
> international concern also functions in a macho environment, and the only 
> difference from the IAF is that the concern does not entail risk of life. 
> So in that sense, macho has nothing to do with gender."
>
> "Loud and clear" is a term used in radio communication in the army, but 
> that is not the only reason it is the book's title. Explaining the title 
> requires a digression about Ran Pecker, a pilot universally admired in the 
> IAF and Spector's superior officer in a senior command course "during one 
> of the most beautiful periods of my life."
>
> Spector met Pecker in May 1967, before Pecker's extraordinary 
> accomplishment as commander of the 119th Squadron (Mirages) in the Six-Day 
> War. Already then, he writes, "Pecker was a legend in the air force and 
> the IDF, as a fighter pilot and particularly as a team leader ... His 
> commanding officers showed their high regard for him openly; his 
> subordinates revered him ... He was bursting with captivating physical 
> warmth. In every place and in every situation, all eyes were drawn to him 
> ... this rare human phenomenon of unconditional leadership ..."
>
> Against this background, Spector was profoundly confused when he heard a 
> rumor to the effect that a few days after the war Pecker, on his own, 
> killed a Jordanian POW who had confessed to being involved in the murder 
> of an Israeli pilot who was shot down. "I was stunned. Ran was a role 
> model for me," Spector writes.
>
> That same day, during the debriefing of the war that took place at Hatzor 
> airbase - "which was not really a debriefing, but a joyful string of 
> heroic success stories" - Spector, in everyone's presence, asked about the 
> rumors that were circulating concerning "someone who did something, I 
> don't know, exactly," and also suggested that the matter be investigated.
>
> The hall fell silent, and suddenly Spector realized that everyone knew. 
> The commander of the air force at the time, Motti Hod, suggested to 
> Spector that he not be taken in by unsubstantiated tales. Later that 
> evening, Pecker asked him to step outside. He stared at Spector with 
> "piercing, hawk-like eyes" and snapped: "So you heard something. So you 
> start smearing people. What are you whining about to everyone ... Is that 
> how buddies behave?" Pecker ended by saying: "With me you are done for and 
> this is your end in the air force and maybe the country, too - I will see 
> to it."
>
> Spector, who says he still does not know the truth about the incident of 
> the Jordanian POW, thanks Pecker in the book's acknowledgments. "I sent 
> Ran the book to read and told him that I was not asking for his approval, 
> but that if he had comments he was invited to write them. Ran read the 
> manuscript and replied: Write exactly what you think and what you feel. A 
> real man."
>
> In contrast to the Pecker story, and to shed light on the book's title, 
> Spector tells about battalion commander (now in the reserves) Pinhas 
> Weinstein, also from Givat Brenner. In the 1956 Sinai War, Weinstein 
> received an order to kill POWs. "Sir, you can kiss my ass," Weinstein 
> replied over the communications network. After the war, when he was 
> summoned for a clarification concerning whether he would be charged with 
> refusing an order and insolence toward a commander in the presence of 
> soldiers, he said: "There are things that have to be responded to loud and 
> clear, so every soldier will hear."
>
> But obstacles arose on Spector's own way to making things heard: A 
> "ministerial committee" took months to authorize his book's publication. 
> The committee, to which the military censors referred the book, ostensibly 
> consists of the prime minister and the ministers of defense, justice and 
> foreign affairs.
>
> "After four months in the committee, the book was returned to me with a 
> series of totally foolish deletions. For example, the book mentioned a 
> certain bomb, 500,000 of which were dropped in the Second Lebanon War, and 
> 50,000 of which did not explode at the time, but have been exploding ever 
> since, amputating legs and arms, mainly of children. The committee deleted 
> the name of the bomb. I was also prohibited from citing numbers of units 
> that appear all over the world, including on the official air force Web 
> site. I had to give the units fictitious names."
>
> Treason or courage
>
> Spector, now 67, has penetrating blue eyes. He arrived for the interview 
> in a battered Isuzu van, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. He looks like 
> a farmer. Seemingly, nothing in his background prepared him for the role 
> of refusing, perceived by part of the public as an act of treason and by 
> others as a display of moral courage.
>
> Spector's father, Zvi Toledano Spector, was the commander of the ill-fated 
> 1941 naval operation in which 23 members of the Haganah (forerunner of the 
> IDF) set out, in coordination with the British army, to sabotage the oil 
> refineries in Tripoli, Lebanon, which were supplying fuel to the German 
> Luftwaffe and to Vichy France. Contact with the commandos was lost almost 
> immediately - their motorboat was probably sunk by the French - and 
> Spector lost his father before he was a year old.
>
> Spector's mother, Shosh, decided not to tell him what had happened - only 
> that Dad "went on a long trip." His foster parents (on a number of 
> kibbutzim) supported this version, and he believed it until about the age 
> of five, when his father's older brother, Yisrael, who thought the boy 
> knew the truth, told him his father drowned at sea.
>
> Little Yiftah was quick to tell his mother this news, so she would realize 
> her mistake. But she reacted furiously. "The '23' disappeared," she 
> screamed. "Who says they are dead? They are still looking for them." Thus, 
> he writes, he became a half-orphan, "one of those who look for their 
> father their whole life."
>
> In his quest to understand who his father was, he met with Yitzhak Sadeh, 
> the commander of the Haganah's Palmah commando unit, and with Ruth Dayan, 
> the first wife of Moshe Dayan and a classmate of Spector's father (he 
> still maintains warm relations with her). His father had been named Zvi 
> Spector at birth, but after a quarrel with his father, took his mother's 
> maiden name, Toledano, and reverted to Spector only after he was married, 
> at his wife's request.
>
> Zvi Spector was an admired commander and a derring-do figure. Sadeh wrote 
> of him that he "had a streak of cruelty, an un-Jewish streak. He squeezed 
> the trigger without hesitation. But justice was always his guiding light."
>
> "For me, Zvi Toledano Spector took on the dimensions of someone holy," 
> writes his son, who could never stop imagining him lying dead in the 
> depths of the sea. Seven years after his death, his young brother, Shaike, 
> was killed in battle in the Negev.
>
> In practice, the pilots' letter was not the first time Spector riled 
> others by speaking his mind. The Ran Pecker episode is one example. 
> Another occurred in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. Spector was then 
> the commander (and creator) of the 107th Squadron of Phantoms, which 
> carried out 760 combat missions in the war without loss of life. He 
> himself flew 42 sorties in 19 days. But despite the unit's excellent 
> record, Spector views it, as he does the entire war, as a "crushing defeat 
> and a total failure."
>
> The management of air force headquarters, he says, was utterly chaotic. 
> "True, Benny Peled was a new IAF commander, but that does not absolve him 
> of responsibility, because previously he had been deputy commander. The 
> chaos that erupted in the war was reflected in the way Benny Peled and all 
> the levels below him lost their heads, and I heard the result over the 
> phone. We were given contradictory and illogical orders. I felt that my 
> commanders were not focused and I lost confidence in them. They sounded 
> hysterical and kept repeating the same mistakes. I had the feeling that I 
> and the squadron were on our own."
>
> He set down the lessons of the war in an inquiry report that his squadron 
> published for internal consumption. But Peled ordered all copies of the 
> report collected and destroyed. When Spector asked for an explanation, 
> Peled told him it was a pity to waste time learning the lessons of the 
> war, and better to prepare for the next one. Unconvinced, Spector stated 
> in the report: "In this war, air force headquarters was the true enemy."
>
> Did you think the Yom Kippur War was a debacle in real time, too?
>
> "No, not really. When you are in the middle of things, it's difficult to 
> look at them from a bird's eye perspective. When you spend all your time 
> thinking about the next war, you don't invest time contemplating things. I 
> think I may have grasped it intuitively, but 'formatting' it took time. In 
> any event, my conclusion was that we failed in every war since 1967. It is 
> only the continuing existence of a myth that is blinding us to 
> understanding that we have an army and an air force that are finding it 
> difficult to adapt to the niche for which they were created. The world has 
> changed since the air force was established. There was a period, in the 
> 1960s, when we achieved a perfect balance between the very small and 
> efficient army and the air force, to suit our needs. Since then the world 
> has changed, but the IAF and the army have not changed accordingly. New 
> methods of war have been invented, such as terrorism, but our military 
> systems, which since 1967 have become very expensive!
> !
> and
> very fat and very technological, are not adapting themselves to the 
> changes."
>
> When did you realize that Israel and the IDF were in a mode of 
> deterioration?
>
> "It was gradual. The act of refusal led me to sit down and think and write 
> in order to pull my thoughts together, so maybe from this point of view, 
> the letter was a quantum leap of understanding for me."
>
> What did you understand?
>
> "That without a change in IDF policy, I could see no reason why it would 
> not go on deteriorating. Of course, the IDF's recent chiefs, including 
> Halutz, helped that deterioration a great deal, but in the end the problem 
> starts with a policy that it uses as a tool, which makes the army a body 
> of people who shoot in all directions ...
>
> "I think that Herzl-style Zionism is over. The tasks of establishing the 
> Jewish state, with all the symbols, independence, power and an anthem, 
> have been achieved and are by now self-evident. Now the turn has come for 
> Ahad Ha'am [pen name of Asher Ginsberg, 1856-1927], who wanted the state 
> to be good and to be a light unto the nations. We have to think how we go 
> about making a good country, but instead we are continuing to concern 
> ourselves with the Herzlian elements, such as 'a dunam here and a dunam 
> there,' the place of the Arabs of Israel - the unimportant things."
>
> What should we do?
>
> "First, we have to end this conflict, which is already ripe for a 
> solution, and demarcate the only possible borders, namely those of 1967. 
> And at the same time, we have to be full partners in the transformation of 
> the Palestinian state into the most successful Arab state in the world, so 
> we will have a good neighbor. And I agree very much with my beloved, in 
> quotation marks, Ehud Olmert, whom I see as the head of the thieves' 
> government - but even thieves sometimes get it right - when he says that 
> if we do not make peace now, we can say good-bye to Israel."
>
> 'A thinking person'
>
> While Spector says that when he left the army, he told his wife that he 
> "had never encountered a right-winger" during his service, that's not 
> quite true. He met at least one, in the person of the former chief of 
> staff Rafael Eitan, who in fact persuaded him to return to the IAF after 
> he had already left. The first time Spector wanted to leave was after 
> completing his mandatory stint in the career army, after the pilots' 
> course. His dream was to become a physician, but this irked the commander 
> of the IAF at the time, Ezer Weizman, who persuaded him to stay on.
>
> Two years after the Yom Kippur War, he was posted to air force 
> headquarters in order to engage in instruction and apply the lessons of 
> the war. He was then sent to study at the University of California at Los 
> Angeles, and at RAND, the California think tank. "I discovered that war 
> has other dimensions, beyond downing planes or diving into the depths," he 
> says. What he discovered was the economic dimension. He was flabbergasted 
> when he became aware of the proportion of the budget Israel allocates to 
> security. "I started to think and reached the conclusion that Israel was 
> in a frenzy of increasing the defense budget and that the IAF was obsessed 
> with quantity and technology. I thought that instead of increasing the 
> number of planes, we should consider an alternative: RPVs [pilotless 
> aircraft] and helicopters."
>
> When he returned to Israel he was appointed commander of the IAF 
> operations division. He decided to try to change the force, based on his 
> new ideas of using RPVs instead of fighter aircraft, but was ahead of his 
> time. "I was also very impatient, I admit. I didn't understand that it was 
> impossible to change everything in a day. It was urgent for me to do 
> everything immediately, but I felt no movement in the direction of my 
> ideas. I felt that I was bearing good tidings but, like Jesus - if you'll 
> pardon the hyperbole because, after all, no one crucified me, but in the 
> end I crucified myself - no one wanted to hear them. It was a process of 
> more than a year, in which I was constantly disappointed in myself for not 
> being able to achieve what I wanted. Until then I had been successful in 
> everything I wanted, and suddenly, after I became operations officer, 
> nothing I wanted was happening. After a year and a half in that post I 
> tendered my resignation and left the IDF."
>
> Spector and his wife, Ali (Aliza), were then the parents of three children 
> (now four: Itai, 43, a farmer in the Arava desert; Omri, 38, a computer 
> engineer; Noa, 35, a fashion designer; and Ela, 27, a student at the 
> Bezalel art and design school). They took the children and went to work on 
> Kibbutz Tzuba, near Jerusalem - he picking oranges, she in the kitchen. 
> They were happy, and IAF friends came on weekends to sit on the lawn and 
> reminisce.
>
> A year later, Rafael Eitan ("Raful") showed up in the orchard. "If there 
> is one person who I am sorry will not be able to read the book, it is 
> Raful, who, despite looking like a block of wood, was a reader and a 
> writer," Spector says. The two first met in the mid-1960s, when Spector, 
> then a young lieutenant, was sent to direct air support for an exercise of 
> the Paratroops. With his thick, toughened farmer's hand, Raful, the 
> brigade commander, shook his hand at the end. In 1979, when Eitan came to 
> the kibbutz orchard, he was chief of staff. "You are coming back to the 
> IAF," he informed Spector.
>
> The IAF commander, David Ivry, offered Spector the task of integrating 
> F-16 aircraft in the force and also commanding the Ramat David airbase, 
> "by virtue of the 107th Squadron" (Spector's successful team of Phantoms). 
> Spector was persuaded. "The price was shutting up, leaving the circle of 
> those who influence the agenda of the IAF." But the temptation - 
> establishing the squadron of the prestigious new plane - was overwhelming. 
> "But in another two or three years, I am leaving," he told Ivry, noting 
> that he had no chance of becoming IAF commander. Five years later, after 
> also serving as commander of Tel Nof, he left the IDF, without ever being 
> mentioned as a candidate for head of the air force.
>
> Why did you not have any chance of becoming IAF commander?
>
> "In principle, the way it should work is that you become commander of the 
> IAF because you have the ability to be a leader of aerial forces. Ran 
> Pecker, for example, was such a person, with an exceptional ability to 
> lead people into battle. You also have to be a strategist in your mode of 
> thinking. You have to know how to build up the IAF. Benny Peled, for 
> example, knew how to do that, but he was not a strategist. And, of course, 
> you have to be a politician."
>
> Who were the best IAF commanders?
>
> "I can tell you who influenced the air force, and how. For example, 
> [Eitan] Ben-Eliahu was a tremendous pilot, in my opinion better than me, 
> and he was also an excellent commander, but nevertheless he had no 
> influence on the development of the IAF ... Ezer Weizman, who was an 
> expert at fudging things, had a major influence on the spirit and morale 
> of the IAF. Motti Hod and David Ivry excelled in effective tactical 
> management, Benny (Peled) influenced organization and technology, and Dan 
> Halutz contributed to the loss of the military and moral way. True, he was 
> not solely responsible, but he made a great contribution."
>
> Despite his harsh view of Peled's performance in the Yom Kippur War, 
> Spector later maintained warm relations with him. "Even though he was a 
> person of angles and complexities, he was also very warm and very smart, 
> and wisdom always wins me over. He could shout at you like a wild man, and 
> then go and be nice. To see and analyze things through his prism was 
> wonderful, and I say this without connection to the fact that in the Yom 
> Kippur War he was at a loss and almost inflicted disaster on us."
>
> You note a few times in the book that you are not a politician. What do 
> you mean by that?
>
> "The answer consists of several elements, each of which is sufficient to 
> turn me into a bad politician. First, I am a thinking person and not a 
> reactive one, by which I mean that the world is created from within me and 
> not as an internal projection of external shadows. I am also more 
> connected to the people under me and to my tasks than to the people above 
> me. I prefer clarity to niceness, and that hurts people, because to blur 
> things or not go all the way makes human contact a lot easier, but the end 
> result of the blurring is not good."
>
> How much of a matter of principle is the political thing?
>
> "There are extreme examples. Take Dan Halutz, who is an extreme example of 
> a person who got where he did solely through politics. He is the 
> embodiment of lack of professionalism: Shoot first and then draw the 
> bull's eye around the bullet. He is not the only one who used bombs 
> generously and without a defined goal - that is characteristic of the IDF 
> leadership in recent years - but he is the embodiment of that approach. We 
> saw the result in the Second Lebanon War: a chief of staff with no 
> tactics, no strategy no leadership. Halutz is the extreme example of a 
> person who once had basic skills, but specialized exclusively in the 
> political and PR, to the neglect of all the other elements."
>
> Does that have anything to do with the arrogance of pilots?
>
> "I don't think he is especially arrogant. I met him once in my life, not 
> in a personal setting. He is charming, multitalented, definitely 
> intelligent and smart. The outstanding element in his personality is not 
> so much the arrogance as the ass-licking. In the past decade of his 
> service in the army, the man specialized in using his tongue, both 
> mechanically and also verbally ... and as a result he got where he got 
> when he was no longer a soldier, and his lack of abilities in terms of 
> soldiering came at our expense."
>
> ................................................................
> --------
> Jewish Peace News editors:
> Joel Beinin
> Racheli Gai
> Rela Mazali
> Sarah Anne Minkin
> Judith Norman
> Lincoln Shlensky
> Alistair Welchman
> -------
>
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