Over the past 10 days, Israelis have been subjected to more and more urgent warnings and threats from air-force pilots that if the Netanyahu government goes forward with its plan to pass a law constraining the power of Supreme Court justices to overrule government decisions based on the invented “reasonableness” standard, they will refuse to serve and so destroy the strategic arm of the Israel Defense Forces.
Speaking on the radio on Sunday, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Relik Shafir said, “As pilots, we and other warriors have always stood and will always state on the line against the enemy. This time the enemy is internal. We as pilots who were the first to contend with the danger in the past wherever it was, today we are standing on the front against the internal danger that intends to transform Israel from a democracy to a dictatorship.”
To discuss the pilots’ behavior and the nature of the threat they pose to Israeli security and to the unity of the IDF, Caroline Glick’s guest this week on “The Caroline Glick Show” is IAF Maj. (res.) Shay Kallach.
Kallach served for nine years as an F-16 combat pilot and a flight-school commander. During the first wave of the reserve pilots’ anti-government protests in February, Kallach spearheaded the response of hundreds of pilots, flight crew and ground crew, as well as special-forces operators, against calls to refuse reserve service.
Based on lessons learned from the last iteration of calls to refuse service, this time Kallach and his colleagues organized quickly to blunt the campaign.
