RUTHFULLY YOURS

On August 30, 1987 the Israeli government by a vote of 12-11 decided to cancel the Lavi fighter aircraft project. The Lavi was the best fighter aircraft in the world at the time, the result of the work of thousands of engineers, scientists, and technicians at Israel Aircraft Industries and at many other plants around the country, a source of pride for most Israelis. Two proto-types were already in flight test when the decision was taken. Who shot down the Lavi, the crowning achievement of Israeli technology? John Golan’s book “Lavi, the United States and Israel, and a controversial fighter jet” provides the answer in illuminating detail.

The Lavi followed IAI’s successful production of the Mirage aircraft (renamed the Nesher) after France embargoed aircraft shipments to Israel on the eve of the Six-Day War, and the production of the Kfir fighter, an improvement of the Mirage, that was engineered at IAI. It was designed to specifications determined by the Israeli Air Force that were based on the experience that had been gained by its pilots in the Yom Kippur War, and was meant to give Israel a degree of independence in the acquisition of fighter aircraft..

The program really took off after the support of the US government and the US Congress had been obtained. This support included the allocation of $250 million of annual US aid money for engineering development in Israel, plus $300 million for Lavi development in the US. Even more important was the permission that was granted for the use of American technologies in the aircraft and the participation of American companies in the project. The result was that the Lavi was in effect a joint Israeli-US project. With the explicit support of President Reagan and a large majority of the US Congress, the program seemed assured of success. The degree of US-Israel technological cooperation on defense system development reached at the time has not been equaled since.

But, as related by Golan, there was one man, US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who was determined to kill the program. Golan describes how Weinberger mounted a “rogue offensive to kill a program that had been given the president’s stamp of approval”, by charging Dov Zackheim, a middle-level financial analyst at the Pentagon, with the mission of terminating the Lavi. From that point the plot thickens.

Visiting Israel at the wise and weathered age of 95, America’s 1980s secretary of state reaches into history to issue a call for decisive, clearheaded and credible leadership

In 1962, George Shultz, an ex-US Marine and Princeton- and MIT-educated economics high-flyer, was appointed dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where he was a professor of industrial relations. Periodically, he’d hold a reception for the outstanding students who’d made the dean’s list. Every time, one of those outstanding students was a young Israeli named Joseph Levy.

Looking back over more than 50 years, Shultz — who would go on to serve in the Nixon administration as Labor and Treasury secretary, and most memorably as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state — still remembers Joseph Levy. And still mourns him.

Speaking to The Times of Israel on a visit to Israel last week, Shultz, a gracious, wise and weathered 95, recalls that all the kids on those dean’s lists were smart. But “there was something special” about Joseph Levy. “If you’ve been in the education business, you’ve seen this in some students right away,” says Shultz. “I could see this man was going to be a great leader. He’d got all the special attributes.”

But Levy did not go on to that anticipated greatness. As Shultz tells it, “Before I even realized that the Six Day War was on, he was dead. He came back to Israel and was killed in action.”

Levy was one of the members of the Jerusalem Brigade who died battling the Jordanians around Government House in Armon Hanatziv, southern Jerusalem, on June 5, 1967. Says the secretary, “My introduction to Israel was through Joseph Levy.” Now Shultz breaks into staccato sentences, keeping his emotions checked. “High talent. Tremendous patriotism. Tough neighborhood.”

Shultz was making this current visit to Israel as honorary chair of the Israel Democracy Institute’s International Advisory Council for four days of meetings, plus a dinner addressed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and devoted to grappling with the challenges faced by Israel’s democracy. But the IDI also reconnected him with Joseph Levy. The star Israeli graduate student had a wife and a son when he was killed, and the IDI tracked them down.

“We had a nice meeting. And then we went to the battlefield where he was killed. And there is on the hill above the battlefield a beautiful big monument … commemorating what he did.”

Again, the staccato sentences: “The monument has a great view. That’s where the field of battle was. That’s where he was killed. That was a long time ago. It initiated me to Israel.”

We all marvel, understandably, at Shimon Peres’s longevity, his indefatigability, his facility to keep moving with the times, to find the aphorism for every nuanced political shift, at 92 years of age. Shultz, three years Peres’s senior, comes across more as a rock of unshifting fundamentals — looking out on a dangerous world and lamenting, most of all, the absence of clearheaded, decisive leadership.

We talked in his room at the King David Hotel, at the tail end of his visit to a country he plainly much admires and cares for. He sat calmly, almost immobile, for our conversation, spoke in carefully formulated sentences, cherry-picking from more than two centuries of American diplomacy to make his points. But at the heart of the Shultz’s recipe for guiding the world, unsurprisingly, stood Ronald Reagan, whom he served as chief US diplomat for most of the 1980s.

Want to marginalize evil, and empower good? Take a page or three, says Shultz, from the Ronald Reagan playbook.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Israel for a two day visit on Tuesday, March 8. Shortly after Biden’s arrival in the region the day before, American graduate student Taylor Force was murdered by a Palestinian Arab terrorist in Jaffa, just blocks away from where Biden was meeting at the Peres Peace Center in Tel Aviv.

On Wednesday, Biden joined with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference in Jerusalem. Both politicians condemned the terrorist attacks that took place in Israel the day before, with a special emphasis on the brutal murder of Taylor Force, the Texas-born Vanderbilt business school student and U.S. Army vet and West Point graduate.

Biden called on Mahmoud Abbas and the rest of the Palestinian Arab leadership and the entire international community to denounce terrorist attacks against Israelis, including the one in which Force was murdered, his wife was badly injured, and 11 others were wounded, according to the Jerusalem Post.

“Let me say in no uncertain terms: The U.S. condemns these acts and condemns the failure to condemn these acts,” Biden said.

But when Biden met with Mahmoud Abbas, the acting head of the Palestinian Authority, later in the day, Abbas pointedly did not do what Biden had insisted he should have done: he did not condemn the murders that Biden had condemned only hours before.

Instead, Abas offered condolence over the death of the American — as if the man died of some cause having nothing to do with Abbas — and then slid into assigning blame for the outrage. Not surprisingly, the Arab leader’s blame finger pointed only at Israel.