An article published by Haaretz stated that 50 years ago the Israeli Air Force killed 108 people when it shot down a Libyan passenger plane that had accidentally flown over an Israeli army base, and that the Israeli government at the time refused to take responsibility.
The article, written by Israeli historian and writer Yaakov Lozwick, showed that recent declassified cabinet minutes showed how Israel refused to conduct an investigation and covered itself with its own belief that it had not made a mistake.
The road got lost due to dust storms
He said the pilot, a French national, got lost on a flight between Cairo and Benghazi because of dust storms over the Sinai Peninsula. After a series of navigational errors, he flew over an Israeli air base at Rafidim in southern Israel and east of the Suez Canal. Two Israeli warplanes then appeared and added to his confusion, approaching the passenger plane, pointing at something the pilot did not understand, and opening fire.
He added that the recordings from the black boxes of the Libyan plane documented confusion, psychological pressure and misunderstanding, and then the Israeli planes fired and the Libyan plane crashed. Of the 113 passengers and crew on board, 108 were killed, all innocent civilians.
The Israeli government refused to take responsibility
Then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and IDF Chief of Staff David Elazar were quick to explain that the incident was a tragic mistake, but added that the Libyan pilot, "who did not obey the instructions of the Israeli Air Force planes and refused to obey," she said.
Lozwick criticized the position of Israeli government leaders, arguing that if they had sacrificed their positions on February 21, 1973, and their successors began to serve in their new positions with fear of responsibility, the October War (the Yom Kippur War), which broke out eight months later due to the arrogance of these leaders, might have been averted.
That evening, he added, the feeling that Israel's leaders knew what they were doing and that they had acted right was forever. Leaders, teachers, rabbis, the media, and friends, almost none of them saw any moral problem in killing innocent people.