by Yiftah Leket
As we enter the fourth week of the war in Ukraine, an imbalanced battle has caused thousands of casualties and refugees. With our media, and especially social media, bursting with news, briefings and personal narratives, I found myself struggling with some of the notions that I have encountered. When thinking about why I am struggling, I finally realized that it stems from my experiences as a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force.
It was during an operation in Gaza where I was assigned to fly and attack a military target. In this type of assignment, we had only 30 minutes from when the siren went off to when the bomb would hit the target. We were in a rush…it was tense, we were focused…Everything that we did was done for one purpose: hitting the target with maximum accuracy. There was no room for mistakes. One typo of a coordinate, which was 14 digits long, and it’s all over.
Warfare today is much more digital. You receive the coordinates, and the rest is almost like a video game. You don’t even have to see the target to hit it. It can be in the pitch black of night. In order to function well in the digital battlefield, there has to be a strong sense of trust in the system that is going with you into battle.
As we approached the target, I opened the map-kit we had and looked at the target and its surroundings. The maps showed that not far away from our target was a Mosque. I immediately reported this information over the radio and the call was made to head back to the base and to not take the risk of having collateral damage that might affect civilian lives. I remember this moment as something I am proud of. I had, and I still have, trust in the Israeli Defense forces and their commanders. Despite this situation, if I honestly share what it looks like to be a pilot on the modern battlefield – it can easily go into two paths:
The first is the banality of serving. Being in the Airforce, especially when you are on duty at the headquarters, it can feel like you are just going to work. Of course, it’s more intense than an ordinary job, and you understand the gravity of your work, but with the advancement of technology of warfare came the digitization of these tools. The modern battlefield is built from numbers. You get a list of targets from the Intelligence Corps or from another special unit and the targets are all numbers. You get the coordinates, send them to the airplanes where they are entered into the fire control systems, and from there you attack. The pilot reports that the target was hit, and the controller fills out an excel sheet, and they move onto the next target.
The other path, which is the total opposite of the banality of the job, is the feeling of a real hatred for the enemy. It’s natural to feel that you hate someone who wants to kill you…. but if we think about it, there is a fine line between the will to go into battle and beat your opponent and hating him as a person. From my perspective, there is no reason to hate an entire population of any organized group (such as a state or any other governing body)just because their leaders have decided to go to war. This is an especially important point when thinking about how soldiers express themselves within the civil discourse. I recently attended a briefing by an Israeli official, who told us that there are Russian and Ukrainian teens that live together in a boarding program in Israel. He shared the complexity they now have between them. For me, this is very saddening. Why on earth would two teens, living in Israel, become enemies just because their states are at war? Don’t get me wrong, I am not so naive. It’s natural to feel connected to your country’s narrative, but extrapolating conflicts just creates more conflict.
When we dehumanize people from the other side, just because they are from the other side, we dehumanize ourselves. You don’t need to look hard to find ordinary people writing memes on social media, cursing and demonizing Russians (civilians or soldiers).
I was fortunate to serve in the Israeli Air Force, which relies on the Israeli Defense Forces Code of Ethics. This code gives an unproportionable weight towards the decision making of soldiers in the battlefield, regarding the morality of their actions and the importance of innocent lives.I truly hope this war will end today. It’s horrible, it’s sad, it’s devastating. Unfortunately, it seems like it will continue longer than we wish. While it is happening, our morality comes into effect as we try to stop the invasion and the killing of innocent civilians, while staying humane ourselves in the way we think, speak, write, and educate ourselves and others, about the situation.