Start-up Nation

The Israelis quickly pursued stopgap measures. Israeli Air Force founder Al Schwimmer personally recruited a sympathetic Swiss engineer to give him the blueprints to the Mirage engine, so Israel could copy the French fighter. Israel also returned to its pre-state smuggling exploits. In one mission in 1969, five Israeli-manned gunboats battled twenty-foot waves on a three-thousand-mile race from France to Israel; these naval vessels, worth millions of dollars, had been promised to Israel before the new embargo. As Time magazine colorfully described it in 1970: “Not since Bismarck has there been such a sea hunt. . . . At various points, [the Israelis] were tracked by French reconnaissance planes, an R.A.F. Canberra from Malta, Soviet tankers, the radar forests of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, television cameramen and even Italian fishermen.”⁶

These shenanigans, however, could not compensate for the hard truth: the Middle East arms race was accelerating just at the moment that Israel had lost its most indispensable arms and aircraft supplier. The 1967 French embargo put Israel in an extremely vulnerable position.

Prior to the 1967 war, the United States had already begun to sell weapons systems to Israel, starting with the transfer of Hawk surface-to-air missiles by the Kennedy administration in 1962. Jerusalem’s first choice, then, was for the United States to take France’s place as Israel’s main arms supplier. But the French betrayal had built a consensus in Israel that it could no longer rely so heavily on foreign arms suppliers. Israel decided that it must move quickly to produce major weapons systems, such as tanks and fighter aircraft, even though no other small country had successfully done so.

This drive for independence produced the Merkava tank, first released in 1978 and now in its fourth generation. It also led to the Nesher—Israel’s version of the Mirage aircraft—and then to the Kfir, first flown in 1973.⁷

The most ambitious project of all, however, was to produce the Lavi fighter jet, using American-made engines. The program was jointly funded by Israel and the United States. The Lavi was designed not only to replace the Kfir but to become one of the top-line fighters in the world.

The Lavi went into full-scale development in 1982; on the last day of 1986, the first plane took its inaugural test flight. But in August 1987, after billions of dollars had been spent to build five planes, mounting pressure in both Israel and the United States led to the program’s cancellation, first by the U.S. Congress and then by a 12–11 vote in the Israeli cabinet.

Many years later, the project and its cancellation still remain controversial: some people believe that it was an impossibly ambitious boondoggle from the beginning, while others claim that it was a great opportunity missed. In a 1991 article in Flight International magazine, published during Operation Desert Storm, an editor wrote about his experience flying the Lavi back in 1989: “Now when the coalition forces fight in the Gulf they miss the aircraft they really need. It’s a real shame that I had to fly the world’s best fighter knowing it would never get into service.”⁸

Even though the program was canceled, the Lavi’s development had significant military reverberations. First, the Israelis had made an important psychological breakthrough: they had demonstrated to themselves, their allies, and their adversaries that they were not dependent on anyone else to provide one of the most basic elements for national survival—an advanced fighter aircraft program. Second, in 1988 Israel joined a club of only about a dozen nations that had launched satellites into space—an achievement that would have been unlikely without the technological know-how accumulated during the Lavi’s development. And third, although the Lavi was canceled, the billions invested in the program brought Israel to a new level in avionic systems and, in some ways, helped jump-start the high-tech boom to come. When the program shut down, its fifteen hundred engineers were suddenly out of jobs. Some of them left the country, but most did not, resulting in a large infusion of engineering talent from the military industries into the private sector. The tremendous technological talent that had been concentrated on one aircraft was suddenly unleashed into the economy.⁹

Yossi Gross, one of the Lavi’s engineers, was born in Israel. His mother, who’d survived Auschwitz, emigrated from Europe after the Holocaust. As a student in Israel, Gross trained in aeronautical engineering at the Technion and then worked at Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) for seven years.