evening was Col. Yig'al Shohat, a war hero shot down over Egypt in the Yom Kippur war. His damaged leg had to be amputated by an Egyptian surgeon. Upon his return, he studied medicine and became a doctor himself.

In a voice trembling with emotion, he read out a personal appeal to his comrades, the air force pilots, calling on them to refuse orders over which "the black flag of illegality is waving" (a phrase coined by the military judge at the Kafr Kassem massacre trial in 1957). For example, orders to drop bombs on Palestinian residential neighborhoods for "targeted liquidations."⁷⁵

The speech aroused a strong echo, but the army command

succeeded in "damage control." The air force commander, General Dan Halutz, perhaps the most extremist IDF officer except Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon, was asked what he feels when he releases a bomb over a Palestinian neighborhood and answered: "I feel a slight bump." He added that after such an attack he "sleeps very well."

It seemed as if Shohat's call had evaporated into thin air-but not any more. The seed has matured slowly. This process accelerated after a pilot released a one-ton bomb over a residential neighborhood in Gaza in order to kill a Hamas leader, abruptly ending the lives of 17 bystanders, men, women and children. Many pilots were deeply troubled by this. Now the conscience of 27 of them has spoken out.

In Israeli mythology, combat pilots are the elite of the elite. Many of them are kibbutz-boys, who were once considered the aristocracy of Israel. Ezer Weitzman, a former air force commander, once coined the phrase "The best boys for flying" (and immediately added, in the typical macho style of the Force, "and the best girls for the flyers.")

The pilots are bought up from an early age to believe that we are always right, and that our opponents are vile murderers. That the army commanders never make a mistake. That an order is an order, and theirs is not to reason why. That professionalism is the highest virtue. That problems have to be solved inside the force. That one does not question the authority of the political leadership. There exists a whole mythology about the part played by the force in the Israeli victories in all our wars: from the tiny Piper planes in 1948, to the destruction of the Egyptian air force in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, and so forth.

The air force does not, of course, take in non-conformists. Candidates for flight training are scrutinized carefully. The force chooses solid, disciplined youngsters who can be relied on, both as to their character and their views, Zionists and the sons of Zionists.

Moreover, the air force is a clan, a sect whose members are

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