Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 20/9/2023
She is the most beautiful Israeli you can imagine, all of the good and beautiful Land of Israel in one person. Raised in Maccabim by a pilot father and a psychologist mother, she is a combat helicopter pilot. She studied at Oxford and is a principal at Vintage Investment Partners [an investment fund with $3.5 billion under management]. She headed the Bnei Zion premilitary academy after the 2018 tragedy in which nine students died in a flash flood, and she was a strategic consultant at McKinsey.
It’s the most Zionist non-Zionism possible. She is 36, with a wife and a daughter [and a dog]. If you asked artificial intelligence for a beautiful, “quality” Israeli woman, you’d get Shira Eting. Now she is also the beautiful face of the protest – a pilot and a principal. At Kaplan Street she swept up the masses: “The moment they tried to rob us of our most important values, we embarked on the struggle of our lives. Our cart is full of freedom and equal rights,” she said to the sound of cheers. How that audience loves to hear such nice things about themselves, the fighters for freedom and equality, and that from the mouth of an attractive combat pilot.
Last week all this beauty was also exposed to the world. In the military-like khaki T-shirts of Brothers and Sisters in Arms, an organization that is fighting for democracy in Israel, Maj. (res.) Eting explained in polished English and measured words to Lesley Stahl on the U.S. show “60 Minutes” what the protest is all about: “If you want pilots to be able to fly, and shoot bombs and missiles into houses knowing they might be killing children, they must have the strongest confidence in the people making those decisions.”
Go
to 9:19 to hear Maj. (res.) Eting's statement
It’s been a long time since we’ve had such a succinct moment, the essence of the Zionist left distilled into in a single sentence. We will continue to kill children, but only under our own people. We will continue to kill children, only if Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid order us to do so. They are people in whom we have confidence, under them it will be principled and moral to kill children. Killing children under Benjamin Netanyahu is unthinkable; he is, after all, opposed to our cart that is bursting with so many values. If Gantz-Lapid order us to kill children, as they have before, then the pilots will report for duty and the courageous and principled refusal to serve if the reasonableness standard is revoked will be forgotten as though it never existed.
Maj. Eting will put on her flight suit, don her helmet, climb into her advanced combat helicopter, which can direct a bomb at a bunk bed in a children’s bedroom, and bomb between Gaza City and Rafah. This is not only Zionism, it is also Israeli feminism, soon in the Sayyeret Matkal special operations unit, by order of the Supreme Court and the chief of staff.
The next time Eting kills children she will do it unintentionally, of course. She is a pilot with a conscience. Some will be killed by mistake and some because she had no alternative. The Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit will post a video showing that Eting refrained from bombing a home due to the presence of children.
When the next war is over Maj. Eting will again come to the city square and speak passionately about values, freedom and equality. Then she will be interviewed again by Stahl, who was moved to tears by the principled pilot, and will tell her how much easier it is to kill children under a center-left government. When it orders pilots to bomb, they will do so without batting an eyelash, as they did in Operation Cast Lead (344 children killed) and in Operation Protective Edge (518 children, 180 of them 5 or younger).
Who killed the 180 young children? Eting and her comrades. They did so in Protective Edge under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and in Cast Lead under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi. Five of the six commanders of those two disgraces, among Israel’s most barbaric attacks, are now leaders of Eting’s democratic protest. On their orders, only theirs, she will again kill children. That is what she told the viewers of “60 Minutes,” and she is the most beautiful embodiment of Israel.
