This article was published in 2000.

All civilized nations use air forces in time of war to defend their homelands. But colonia land  imperial powers have had no limits in using warplanes to suppress revolutionary movements of the third world. For example, the United States leaned heavily on its Air Force in Vietnam in the second half of the last century. American military aircrafts were active in 1960s and 1970s not only in bombarding major Vietnamese cities and harbors like Hanoi and Hyphong, but also in spraying chemicals to transform forests into wasteland.

Israel, as Washington’s strategic ally in the Middle East, has pioneered in capitalizing on its air force as an effective means for mass destruction and implementing horrible massacres against Arabs and Palestinians. Many Egyptian civilian targets were hit by Israeli warplanes and gross massacre ensued during the war of attrition in the late years of 1960s.  Bahr Al Baqar School and Abu Za’abal Prison in Upper Egypt have entered history as two massacres conducted by the Israel Air Force.

Israel used to dispatch its American made advanced jets to bomb and rocket Palestinian refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries on the pretext that “ terrorist bases” existed there. Shortly after the eruption of the second Intifada two years ago, Ehud Barak, the former  Israeli prime minister, ordered the bombing of a Palestinian Security Compound in Nablus  by F-16. More than a dozen of young police officers in their early twenties were massacred  when the F-16 dropped its one ton-bomb at the Palestinian compound.

His Successor, Ariel Sharon, dispatched the F-16s many times against Palestinian public and private institutions. Later on, he enlarged the scope of the F-16’s deadly missions so  as to in include residential buildings. 17 Palestinians, including nine children and mother, vanished under the debris of their building in Gaza when Sharon ordered the one-ton bomb to be dropped (June 26) at the heavily populated neighborhood of Al Mawasi Ben-Gurion was the first Israeli leader who conceived the idea of  “retaliatory” air strikes against Palestinian civilians. He ordered in 1953 the air and land attack on the village of  Kibya. Moshe Sharit, then the Prime Minister of Israel, wrote in his Diary:

“I told Lavon that this attack [on Kibya] would be a grave error…Lavon smiled. Ben-  Gurion, he said, didn’t share my view.”

Ezer Weizman, former chief of the Israeli Air Force, glorified the massacres implemented by the Air Force saying:

“The talent of the nation is to be found in the Israeli Air force…Here, the Jewish people stands out more in its talent, and therefore we are more capable than the enemy.”

On November 20,1967 Israeli war plane bombarded Al Karama refugee camp, near the Jordan River, killing 14 –some of them were children–and wounding 28 Palestinians.