Te gast: Sayed Kashua, Haaretz.

What fun to be a pilot. Wow. If there’s one thing that, in my opinion, the Israel Defense Forces was not fair to me about, it was in preventing me from becoming a pilot. Flat feet, you know. Okay, what can you do, not every dream comes true, even though this is one dream I haven’t given up on.

Last night, after the briefing by the Air Force commander, I fell asleep with a smile on my face. All night I dreamed that Channel 2 had created a new program, “A Pilot Is Born,” hosted by the IDF spokeswoman, Miri Regev. The judges were fantastically fair. Roni Daniel was absolutely super, had warm words for the people who live in the periphery and immediately sent me on to the next level. Effi Eitam was fine, too, he was worried about the flat feet, but in the end agreed that I represent a new generation and have the potential to be a pilot of a special hue. Only Yaakov Turner had a problem with me.
If I had to serve in the army, I always said, then only as a pilot. To this day it happens that when I look in the mirror, I momentarily forget about the flabby lump of meat, the swollen eyes and the unfocused gaze, and see instead a gorgeous overall made of alligator skin, a helmet, modish sunglasses and a smile in the corner of the mouth that says, Hey babe, how’d you like to go for a spin in my F-16?

I always loved planes, everyone knew that, I always got a plane for my birthday and at Id al-Fitr. When I was about six we got an Atari, and even then what I liked most was planes, war, shelling. Then came Commodore, the IBM compatible and now the Sony PlayStation. Always planes. But nothing will replace the true feeling – there’s no comparison. Ya’allah, if I get so excited by cars on the road, tears are now coming to my eyes as I think of a fighter plane doing low somersaults and then soaring in a straight line into seventh heaven.

How I envy our pilots in Lebanon. True, it’s a bit of a downer, because what’s most fun about being a pilot is dogfights. Nothing tops those aerial shootouts, but what can we do – not everything is perfect and our primitive enemies don’t have an air force or antiaircraft guns. It’s like playing not even at Level 1; it’s more like the pregame stage of getting to know the plane. Never mind. Static but complicated targets are also fun. You aim with the joystick and all that. In the end, just flying over villages, sonic booms and one bomb a day is enough to get the adrenaline going.

What’s also good is that, in contrast to the ground corps – tanks, artillery and ordinary infantry – you don’t sweat, you don’t have to suffer from earsplitting noise, and best of all, you never get dirty. You sit up there with an air conditioner, put a CD into the system – these days they probably also have DVD players in the luxury models – you don’t have to see Arabs up close and certainly don’t have to take fire from them, don’t see blood being spilled – if it’s yours, it’s a disaster and if it’s theirs, it’s still unpleasant. Because it sometimes happens that it’s civilians, women, children. As a soldier who was raised with the strictest moral values, that will pain you for a few minutes. But not as a pilot. A pilot is not involved in any of that. He received information, fired precisely and from his point of view, the mission is over. A somersault or two and he cruises back to base. That’s why pilots hardly ever get shell shock, unless they are taken captive, and cases of pangs of conscience are rare. They happen, but they’re really rare.

What’s most dangerous is that as you head home after a perfect sortie in which all the targets were destroyed, the news programs broadcast photos of dozens of little children whom you murdered. At first you are probably taken aback and say to yourself, Hey, man, I was there, what’s the story, was it my bomb? It’s really not pleasant, especially because you’re a sensitive guy from a good home. So let me tell you that you can rest easy, it’s never you, you have nothing to worry about. Right away a commander will appear and then another commander, and a reporter will show up and after him a commentator and explain to you very clearly that it’s not you, it’s not your bomb, and if it is, then bloodthirsty Arabs made cynical use of your bomb. You’re an okay guy, always were, always will be.

First of all, the inquiry hasn’t yet been completed. Anyway, the bombing was seven hours earlier, time gaps, you know, just like on the Gaza beach. Anyway, we filmed everything and no attack on children is seen on the screen. We know that Arabs lie and that’s a fact, so let’s wait for the international commission of inquiry, and if they say we are to blame, it’s because they’re lying, and that’s another fact. They just don’t feel comfortable with our moral criteria, they can’t accept the fact that we are small, strong, accurate and, above all, humane.

Sleep, nice pilot, sleep. It’s all right, we’re protecting you. Sleep, and have no worry in your heart, otherwise the whole thing will be considered a bitter defeat. And that’s exactly what Nasrallah planned: If we feel guilty, we won’t achieve our aim and will fall into the trap he set.

Sleep and know that they are nothing like us, they think differently. It’s not like here, where every child is important, where human life is sacred. There they produce a lot of children and don’t care about them. They have a lot of children precisely for cases like this. “Bring two children,” the bearded Hezbollah man, the heartless murderer, will say to the father, “with two children we’re organizing a massacre,” and the father will hand them over gladly, because he too hates people and especially his children.

It’s different with them. It’s the accepted thing. What do you think, that it was by chance that they crammed children, with an emphasis on the disabled, into that small room? Come on, they locked them in there without food or water and prayed for an Israeli bomb.
It might have happened, the investigation isn’t over yet, and I’m pretty convinced that it wasn’t us, not you, pilot. What probably happened is that they cracked. They waited for some miserable bomb to score a direct hit on a missile launcher in the village and then immediately exploited the opportunity and with their own hands blew up the building with the children and the disabled. Did you wonder why the disabled? I know you did, because they forgo them easily there. For them a disabled person is not a human being, not like here, where there are access ramps and all that.

Sleep, pilot, and know that it’s only for fear of being accused of racism that I don’t note the fact that we are not talking about human beings at all.