No Margin for Error: The Making of the Israeli Air Force (review)

148 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 . a Palestinian Arab, while roughly a quarter of the total population under Israeli rule live in the occupied territories. In fact, both citizen and noncitizen Arabs play important roles in (or for) the "Jewish" economy of Israel. Yet the well documented dependence and subordination of Israel's Palestinian citizens in its political economy is indirectly dismissed by assertions that in Israel's "liberal, pluralistic democracy" they "of course" enjoy equal rights to Jews, even though they may feel subjectively harddone -by (pp. 325 and 109-111). Aharoni's only reference to the occupation is political: he worries out loud about "how to maintain the Jewish majority without becoming a garrison-state or an apartheid-like regime," and blandly suggests that "exchange of populations" might solve the problem (p. 319). Such opinionated statements, which many readers will find objectionable, are out of place in what purports to be a scholarly work. Michael Shalev Department of Sociology The Hebrew University ofjerusalem No Margin for Error: The Making of the Israeli Air Force, by Ehud Yonay. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. 426 pp. $27.50. The Israeli Air Force (lAF) began just before the War ofIndependence . as a clandestine collection of nine volunteer pilots and six obsolete light aircraft. Additional planes were procured from the scrapheaps of World War II; more volunteer pilots, Jews and non-Jews, arrived; and when the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) was officially formed in 1948, it included an air service. But, in the eyes of the IDF commanders, ground soldiers to a man, this did not mean an independent air force, and there now ensued an uphill battle to build an independent combat-ready force, capable of achieving air superiority and support for the ground troops. Ultimately the airmen reached their objective and vindicated their doctrine on that spectacular day in June 1967 when the IAF neutralized the Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Jordanian air forces and paved the way for the IDP's rapid victory in the Six-Day War. From then on, the IDF and the lAP have attracted a great number of writers, and the outlines of its history and operations have become well known. While No Margin for Error adds some interesting anecdotal details regarding the struggle for an independent air force, the virtues and foibles of some major IAF commanders and Book Reviews 149 elite fighter pilots, it does not provide much that will be valuable to the specialist reader. The basic reason of this shortcoming, and it is a shortcoming only for professional historians, is that this fascinating book was not written as serious history but rather as an entertainment. The author, the son of a well respected old settler family in northern Israel, is an investigative reporter in California whose 1983 story about u.s. Navy fighter pilots was turned into the movie Top Gun. And this book has much the same flair. Yonay managed to obtain a considerable number of personal interviews, especially for the pre-1973 period. Thereafter, presumably for security reasons, his sources become much more reticent, the account becomes much briefer, and there is little operational or technical detail. Although Mr. Yonay did his IDF service in the ground forces, his heart is clearly with the airmen. Even so, his narrative is both sympathetic and objective, while the writing throughout is informal and dramatic. Chatty, loaded with colorful anecdotes and personal details, Yonay's style is very much in the manner of a veteran pilot recalling the antics of his younger years. The result is that he succeeds in humanizing his story and bringing commanders such as Aharon Remez, Menahem Bar, Don Tolkowsky, Moti Hod, and above all the charismatic but mercurial Ezer Weizman, Yonay's main hero and in his view the real founder of the modern IAF, to life. Yonay's account of the fight for an independent air force, the struggle by the "Blues" to wrest operational control from a landforces-oriented IDF high command, the "Greens," is well told, and, though heavily prejudiced in favor of the airmen, provides new detail especially on the internal politics of the IDF and the government. Unfortunately, this personal approach...