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The Americans interrupted Aviam Sela's military career.
Now they have closed the circle
Twenty-four years ago, Pollard's operator learned that he would not be able to continue his service in the IDF due to pressure from the United States.
The runway of the brilliant officer, whose cabinet members were delighted with his lectures and was on his way to command the Air Force, was stopped with a series of successful operations under him.
At the age of 75 he received the coveted pardon
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Jonathan Pollard
Air Force
Eli Ashkenazi
Wednesday, January 20, 2021, 7:40 p.m.
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Aviam Sela is considered a brilliant officer in the Air Force.
In the 1980s he seemed to be on a path that would end in command of the corps, as Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir also said in 1987 when it became clear that he would not be able to continue in service under American pressure following the operation of spy Jonathan Pollard.
The pardon he received today (Wednesday) from outgoing United States President Donald Trump has closed the circle.
Sela, 75, was a key partner in two of the Air Force's most famous operations: the bombing of an Iraqi reactor in June 1981 and just a year later the destruction of the Syrian air-to-air missile array in the Lebanese Valley, during which Air Force pilots also shot down 23 Syrian planes.
He was born in Haifa in January 1946. The joy of his birth came after the great rift experienced by his father, when he learned that both his parents had been murdered in the Nazi extermination camps.
The name given to him by his parents commemorates his father's parents and consists of the words "father" and "mother".
You changed his last name from Slaviatsky to the rock.
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Commemorates his grandparents.
Aviam Sela (Photo: Official Website, Raanan Cohen, Maariv)
All his years of study were in the real school in Haifa.
He spent many hours as a child in the pine groves on the Carmel, and his eldest son named Oren, after the place.
In 1963 he enlisted in the Air Force.
When the Six Day War began he was an instructor at a flight school with the rank of lieutenant, and during the war he was in the Mister Squadron, with whom he participated in the first wave of attacks in the pads.
Later the squadron operated on both the Syrian and Egyptian fronts.
In 1968 he began studying economics at the Hebrew University and later at the University of Haifa.
At the same time he served in the Air Force, a combination that was unusual at the time.
A year later he married his wife, Judith, and in the same year was a partner in the establishment of a phantom squadron at the Ramat David base.
He served as the deputy commander of the squadron that participated in many battles in the War of Attrition.
Sela himself shot down several planes in the same battles, including a MiG-21 in battle on the last day of the war, in which Air Force pilots shot down five such planes, including Soviet pilots.
During the Yom Kippur War he took part in many battles on the northern and southern fronts.
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After the war, when he was already a major, he was transferred to the Air Force headquarters and was part of a team whose job was to apply the lessons of the war in various operational areas.
The products of the work of the same team, in which Sela was a key figure, were seen a few years later in Operation Aretz 19 in June 1982, on the fourth day of the First Lebanon War.
In the same operation, the Air Force destroyed an array of 19 surface-to-air missile batteries deployed by the Syrians in the Lebanese Valley, and an air battle took place with the participation of dozens of aircraft on both sides.
During the battle, Israeli Air Force pilots shot down 23 Syrian planes - and for their part did not lose a single plane.
Sela in 1991 (Photo: Official website, Reuven Castro, Maariv)
Sela's team developed a command and control system and used groundbreaking solutions, which included new intelligence, deception and new weapons systems.
A year before the operation in the Lebanon Valley, Maariv's military correspondent Yaakov Erez told "whoever thinks that in this generation the missiles will bend the wings of the planes - his operational perception is flawed. He is not in existing technologies, and I am not sure he knows the Air Force pilots well enough."
Things were only allowed to be published a few years later, and it was proven to be accurate in the forecast.
His determination came in response to a feeling expressed by Ezer Weizmann after the war of attrition when he said that "the missile bends the wing of the plane," a feeling that continued to accompany the corps even after the Yom Kippur War.
In 1976 he was appointed commander of the Phantom Squadron and after three years went on to study for a master's degree, which he completed in one year.
In 1980, Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered a military operation to destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor.
The task was assigned to the Air Force, which was then commanded by David Ivri, and the planning was assigned to Colonel Sela, who was then head of the Air Force Operations Department.
He did it flawlessly.
The outgoing prince
In 1984 he went on to study for a doctorate in New York.
During his stay there he met Pollard, a meeting that later turned out to interrupt the continuation of Sela's runway.
His studies were also discontinued and he did his doctoral dissertation at Tel Aviv University, entitled "Estimating Perceived Information Value and Real Information Value for Decision Support Systems in Environmental Conditions of Lack of Time".
The research was done on the decision-makers at the most senior level in the Air Force, and Prof. Niv Ahituv, Sela's facilitator, was amazed when he saw that Sela had the honor and the resources that the corps had dedicated to that work.
"This study is of great importance beyond the academic importance," Ahituv explained.
Pollard removes electronic handcuffs, November (Photo: Official Website, ----)
Alex Fishman, the military correspondent for a news paper, described Sela as one of the "aces' class" among the fighter pilots. He wrote that "the aces are the leading, the daring, the virtuoso, the sophisticated, the special role people. Not only the number of planes you shot down in air battles makes you an 'ace', a member of the parade. There are aces in this gang who have proven themselves in command "I will mention a few names: Ran Packer, Rafi Harlev, Asher Snir, Shmuel Hetz, and another long list. The current group of aces includes Aviam Sela - a true prince."
Even when he was a major, the head of a division at the Air Force headquarters, he was voted as the future commander of the Air Force. A prince that even the "Greens" fell in love with. A prince who was invited to lecture his plans to members of the government, and they were delighted to hear him.
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