Ex-IDF Pilot Tells Why He Said No

Jewish Review
March 15, 2005
By Paul Haist

A pilot with 11 years of service in Israel’s air force who publicly declared he would no longer fly missions over the West Bank and Gaza Strip came to Portland this month to tell why he took the action that cost him his job.

“A year and a half ago I learned how to say no, and that’s why I am here today,” said Yonatan Shapira to a gathering of students and others March 3 at Koinonia House on the Portland State University campus.

“Everything I say here today comes from a deep love for my country, my deep connection to the land (of Israel) and my love for my people,” said the former Black Hawk helicopter pilot.

Shapira was the man behind the so-called Pilots’ Letter, written in October 2003 to Gen. Dan Halutz, the then commander of Israel’s air force, and signed by 27 active-duty pilots. In the letter the pilots asserted that their orders to carry out missions in the occupied territories and the Gaza Strip were illegal and immoral.

In an interview at the Jewish Review a day before his appearance at PSU and later at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, Shapira discussed why he believes those orders were illegal and immoral.

“In the Israeli army and air force I was taught that there is a superior command,” said Shapira. He said, in fact, that the idea of a superior command, a higher authority that transcends the rules of man, applies not only in Israel’s military, but all across Israeli society.

When a military officer, in consultation with that higher authority, “is sure a command is illegal, he is obligated not to follow that command, but to obey the superior command.”

It was first in his job as a rescue pilot that Shapira experienced events that led to an epiphany in which he came to believe that his orders were illegal.

He recounted two missions in which innocents on both sides perished and which underscored for him a fundamental wrong that led him to take the steps he took.

In the first, he transported several wounded children from the scene of an attack in which Palestinian terrorist broke into a Jewish home in a small settlement near Nablus and opened fire with an automatic weapon.

“The whole back of the helicopter was full of blood and children and doctors,” said Shapira.

The flight from near Nablus to Tel Aviv hospital took fewer than 10 minutes. As he was landing his Black Hawk he noticed a wedding going on nearby.

“I saw the chuppah and people were dancing and I was amazed that people so close to me then were not aware of the situation in my helicopter.” Shapira said he thought the contrast was symbolic of “a certain amount of unawareness” throughout Israeli society.

He made two such flights that night from the scene of the attack.

The second mission about two months later was Israel’s targeted killing of a Hamas leader in Gaza. An Israeli F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on the leader’s apartment building.

The Hamas leader was killed, and, Shapira noted, “14 innocent people, including nine children.”

When he told this story at Koinonia House, he added, “I felt this bomb was dropped into my heart.” That event was the last straw for Shapira.

“I couldn’t just sit anymore. It was the same as the children a few months before that I brought to the hospital. You can’t accept it anymore because it is so different than the values you were raised on,” said Shapira.

He said those values were core Jewish values and they outweighed his orders.

He faulted then air force commander Halutz for declaring that Gaza mission perfect and that the pilots should sleep with clear consciences.

“We lost the faith, we do not believe them anymore when they send us to do this kind of mission because we have killed so many innocents,” said Shapira.

“Those missions are the direct result of the ongoing occupation which corrupts Israeli society as a whole and harms in some direct way the security of Israel and her moral strength,” Shapira told the Jewish Review.

Shapira opposed Israel’s recently suspended policy of targeted killings. He doesn’t think they were targeted and cited Israeli air force figures that he said found a high percentage of innocent Palestinian deaths among all the Palestinians killed.

“We have the air force statistics that show that more than 50 percent (of Palestinians killed) are innocents.

“Once you justify killing innocents, you justify the way the terrorists attack you,” said Shapira.

He alleged that the targeted killings policy was implemented as much “to break the spirit of the Palestinian people” as to remove known terrorists.

And he saw in Israel’s recently announced suspension of the policy an implicit official acknowledgement of its alleged wider scope.

“On Feb. 16 the government declared the policy of assassination would be stopped, not including targeting suicide bombers,” said Shapira. He argued that leaving the door open yet to assassinate suicide bombers demonstrated that the policy was never restricted to terrorists.

Shapira said there is wide support in Israel among civilians and the military for the action he and his fellow refusers have taken.

He pointed to most of Israel’s cultural elite, including top writers and artists, and young people on college campuses in Tel Aviv.

Perhaps more significantly, he said there also was quiet but widespread support throughout the air force.

“Many pilots in the air force support us,” he said. “We had about 100 pilots who knew about this, and nothing leaked. So all those pilots supported us. I meet so many pilots who shake our hands and say we are doing it for them.”

The pilots who signed the letter, including a brigadier general, were given 10 days to reconsider and then were discharged as active pilots. Shapira said he remains captain in the army reserve.

Shapira, who was born on an air force base and whose father commanded a fighter squadron during the Yom Kippur War, said he grew up steeped in Zionist and military traditions and dreamed from an early age of following in his father’s footsteps.

“It was my dream to fly these missions, but I can live with it (his dismissal) knowing that maybe we contributed something to the end of the occupation and to the security and to the building of Israel as a moral and strong country,” he said.

His father wasn’t on his side at the outset.

“My father didn’t agree with me at the beginning, and then he saw that many of his friends signed this letter, and I feel that as time goes on he agrees with me more and more,” said Shapira. “He gave me his tie and shirt for this tour, so I think that means something.”

In the end, for Shapira, it comes down to a question of accepting responsibility.

“If I have to find a way to explain what I did, it would be responsibility: We can show people that they can take responsibility and change the future.”

The former rescue pilot sees himself on a new rescue mission now.

“This rescue mission is the most important one I can undertake. I believe it can rescue the future of my country,” said Shapira.

Shapira’s visit to Portland, part of an 11-city U.S. tour, was sponsored by the Washington based Refuser Solidarity Network and the Portland chapter of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom.

Some who attended Shapira’s public appearances expressed disappointment that even organizers did not allow open questions from the floor, but instead collected written questions from the audiences from which they selected those Shapira would address.

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