The Hebrew language documentary, Air Born, delves beneath the surface to examine a little-known facet of the Israeli Air Force, the backbone of Israel’s armed forces.
Now available on Izzy, an Israeli streaming platform, this intriguing film looks at the IAF through the eyes of men and women who were raised on its bases between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The director, Yoram Ivry, is one such person. His father, David Ivry, was the commander of the IAF from 1977 until 1982, when Israel twice invaded Lebanon and bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Ivry draws some of the material from the diary of his late brother, Gil, an IAF combat pilot who was killed during a training exercise in 1987.
I was attracted to this film because my cousin was an IAF pilot from 1971 onward. I attended his graduation ceremony and connected with him and his new bride after he had been shot down on the Golan Heights in the opening hours of the Yom Kippur War. Luckily for him, he was only slightly injured, enabling him to return to combat duty.
As Ivry points out early on in this 69-minute movie, the wives of IAF pilots, navigators and mechanics joined their husbands on bases in the 1950s on the orders of Ezer Weizman, the IAF’s commander. Their children, who grew up in bases such as Tel Nof, Ramat David and Hatzerim, had the run of them, playing on runways and posing for photographs in the cockpits of Mysteres, Mirages and Phantoms that their fathers flew.
As one woman observes, there was no need for babysitters. Theirs was a tight-knit community of kindred souls bound together by duty and patriotism.
Yet, as Ivry notes, pilots were regularly moved from base to base, creating difficult moments in the lives of their children. Suddenly, they would be uprooted from familiar surroundings and cut off from friends and acquaintances. Nevertheless, they were immensely proud of their fathers, especially when they managed to down enemy aircraft in dogfights.
IAF pilots were widely admired, even revered, in Israeli society, particularly after Israel’s astounding performance in the Six Day War. In victory albums published during that overly euphoric era, pilots were portrayed as heroes who had stuck the first devastating blow in the crushing defeat of the Egyptian and Syrian armies.
Reality burst Israel’s bubble during the War of Attrition, which took place in Egypt and the Israeli-held Sinai Peninsula from 1968 until 1970. Egypt, supplied with advanced Soviet anti-aircraft missile batteries, shot down an alarming number of Israeli planes. Ivry skims over these episodes, leaving gaps in the narrative and viewers in the dark. As well, he neglects to explain the importance of the IAF in Israel’s military strategy.
Cruel as it may sound, a family was compelled to leave a base when an aviator lost his life. He recalls an incident during which the commander of a base was left with the unenviable task of informing the wives of a pilot and a navigator that their husbands had been killed and captured during a mission in Egypt.
There were no shortages of deaths during the Yom Kippur War, which an interviewee describes as “the War of Attrition on steroids.” Some pilots were confident that Israel’s adversaries, Egypt and Syria, could be “finished off” in a couple of days, but reality would prove to be far more complex.
A pilot who had assured family and friends that Israel would triumph was killed two days later. Broken cries from a house could be heard in the wake of his untimely death.
When a squadron commander was taken into captivity, his son breathed a sigh of relief, thinking his father had survived the war and would eventually be released in a prisoner exchange. To his distress, the truth turned out to be far more complicated.
Air Born, an informative film, partially lifts the veil from an invaluable fighting force that has been at the heart of Israel’s wars since the birth of the state.