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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
To anyone who remembers the bitter cancellation of the Lavi fighter jet in 1987, the proposition sounds almost surreal.
For nearly four decades, Israel’s defense dogma has been to let the Americans build the airframes, while Jerusalem will install proprietary avionics and electronic warfare packages, and let foreign military financing foot much of the bill.
Yet that dogma has collapsed.
The recent multi-front war — and the alarming spectacle of falling support for Israel on the American Left and a rise in isolationism on the American Right — has spurred Israel to commence a huge structural pivot toward defense self-reliance. At the center of that ambition sits the resurrection of an indigenous combat aviation capability, featuring stealth fighter jets.
Building a frontline combat aircraft in the 21st century is a punishingly complex and exorbitant enterprise, but Israel is one of the very few nations that has designed, built, and flown world-class fighter jets from scratch. It possesses the institutional memory, the aerospace talent, the combat-tested electronic warfare ecosystem, and the technological might to do it.
More importantly, Israel’s defense leadership has rightly concluded that whatever it costs is worth it to stop foreign politicians holding a kill-switch on the Israeli Air Force.
Israel’s return to building fighter jets is not just part of a self-reliance push. It stems also from deep institutional memory of betrayal.
In the 1950s and 1960s, France was Israel’s primary military supplier. French Dassault Mirages were the Israeli Air Force’s crown jewels. Then came June 1967. Two days before the Six-Day War, French President Charles de Gaulle abruptly froze the delivery of 50 Mirage 5 aircraft that Israel had already paid for. De Gaulle calculated that sacrificing a tiny, embattled democracy was a modest price to pay for diplomatic favor with Arab oil states. By 1969, France had imposed a blanket arms embargo on Israel.
It was a classic European colonial-style betrayal: sleek, cynical, and unbothered by the possibility that Israel might be eradicated. France still imagined it was a world power even though European decline had begun and its colonies were seceding.
Israel was furious did not waste time weeping into its diplomatic cables. Through daring spycraft and audacious reverse-engineering, Israel Aircraft Industries acquired the blueprints, swapped the French engines for American General Electric J79 turbojets, and produced the Nesher, which in Hebrew means eagle or vulture. Easily the world’s best-named fighter jet, the Nesher proved devastating during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, racking up scores of air-to-air kills.
Israel Aircraft Industries followed this triumph with the Kfir (Lion Cub), an aggressively upgraded, indigenously produced delta-wing fighter equipped with Israeli avionics and radar. Unlike the Nesher, the Kfir was not a makeshift patch; it was a front-line multirole platform that served the Israeli Air Force with distinction and was exported to Ecuador, Colombia, and Sri Lanka, with even the U.S. leasing some to use as adversary aircraft.
This was an extraordinary achievement. Israel’s population was barely 3 million people and it was a middle-income country surrounded by enemies, not the global technological powerhouse that it is today. Yet, it managed to out-engineer global superpowers.
By 1980, Israel was ready to take the next logical step: a clean-sheet, fourth-generation combat aircraft designed from the ground up for the Israeli Air Force’s unique tactical doctrines.
The result was the Israel Aircraft Industries Lavi (Young Lion), a triumph of aviation design. Israeli engineers designed the jet to be deliberately agile and aerodynamically unstable, relying on redundant flight computers (rather than mechanical cables) to keep it steady. Packed with high-tech composite materials and a fully digital glass cockpit, the Lavi made early American F-16s feel like museum pieces. When test pilots took the prototype up on New Year’s Eve in 1986, they marveled at its effortless handling and cockpit layout.
The Lavi did not fail in the air. It was murdered in the boardroom.
The Pentagon, having funded much of it, grew terrified that the Lavi would undercut American defense contractors (specifically General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas) on the global export market. Washington applied immense financial and diplomatic pressure. With development costs climbing and Israel enduring brutal economic stagflation, the Israeli cabinet voted 12 to 11 in 1987 to cancel the project
The decision sparked violent protests, aerospace worker strikes, and a wave of institutional depression across the defense establishment. Nearly 5,000 top-tier engineers and technicians were laid off overnight. Yet the Lavi was the most profitable “failure” in military history.
Those brilliant engineers did not disappear; they scattered across other parts of Israel’s defense ecosystem. The fly-by-wire expertise, radar algorithms, composite engineering, and electronic countermeasures developed for the Lavi directly seeded the technologies that define modern Israeli military supremacy: the Arrow missile defense system, the Phalcon airborne early warning platform, Elbit’s world-standard helmet-mounted displays, and the unmanned aerial vehicle revolutions that made Israel a drone superpower.
The Lavi’s airframe was abandoned, but its soul built the modern Israeli high-tech economy.
For 35 years, the strategic bargain seemed sound: Why spend billions developing sovereign airframes when the U.S. can supply off-the-shelf F-15s, F-16s, and even F-35s with adjustments for Israel’s bespoke needs?
Israel’s recent multi-front war — when Iran and its proxy armies attacked the country from seven fronts — showed why such spending might have been money well spent. The Israeli Air Force burned through munitions at a rate unseen in modern warfare. While American logistical support was initially robust, it quickly became an instrument of political coercion under then-U.S. President Joe Biden.
Israel raged as shipments of 2,000-pound precision-guided munitions were deliberately withheld over Israel’s plans to attack the Hamas-infected Gazan city of Rafah. Routine deliveries of Joint Direct Attack Munition kits and 155-millimeter artillery were also held up in Washington’s domestic political maneuvering.
Having the world’s most advanced stealth fighter is useless if the foreign power that sold it to you can decide whether you have the bombs to drop from it based on polling numbers in Dearborn. When an ally treats the tools of your immediate survival as bargaining chips in its own domestic politics, staying dependent is negligence.
Israel’s new aerospace program will not look like the Lavi program of 1980. Nobody in the Ministry of Defense is proposing a 20-year, $100-billion program to build a copy of an American fifth-generation manned stealth fighter. The economics of manned combat airframes have become unsustainable for small states.
Instead, modern air warfare has evolved into the exact areas where Israel already holds global dominance: autonomous systems, collaborative combat aircraft, modular airframes, standoff strike systems, and algorithmic electronic warfare.
The next-generation Israeli combat aircraft program will likely center on sovereign, highly automated or optionally piloted strike platforms designed around open-architecture mission computers. These planes will be built to operate alongside manned assets, carry indigenous precision ordnance, and integrate seamlessly into Israel’s networked battle-management systems.
Israeli companies already produce every high-value subcomponent required for sovereign combat aviation: radars and sensor suites (Elta Systems), mission computers and avionics (Elbit Systems), precision standoff munitions and interceptors (Rafael Advanced Defense Systems), and airframe design, aerodynamics and composites (Israel Aircraft Industries).
National resolve, not technology, was the missing piece. That resolve is now back and seen as essential.
Alongside the jet initiative, Elbit, Israel Aircraft Industries, and Rafael are building domestic production lines for 155-millimeter shells, indigenous alternatives to American Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kits (which turn dumb bombs into smart ones, allowing for precision strikes), and accelerating deployment of the “Iron Beam” high-energy laser.
Predictably, the usual crowd of fiscal doomsayers will argue that developing an indigenous combat aircraft program will drain the national treasury and strain ties with the Pentagon. This is nonsense.
To begin with, the U.S. wants to cut back on the $3 billion-plus a year it gives Israel in defense support (even though this is really a subsidy to U.S. defense contractors, with whom Israel is required to spend the money.)
Israel’s defense industry is also not a subsidized state charity but an export colossus that generates over $13 billion annually. Between 75 and 80 percent of what Israel’s defense companies build is exported to allies who are eager to purchase combat-proven systems. Even Israel’s vocal European critics are lining up to buy it.
The capital invested in sovereign aerospace research-and-development flows directly into high-tech employment, patent generation, and domestic industrial capacity.
More fundamentally, a price cannot be put on true sovereignty in today’s unstable geopolitical environment in the face of existential threats such as the Iranian regime’s mad mullahs or whoever is in charge there these days.
History has taught the Jewish People a non-negotiable lesson: When survival is on the line, foreign promises evaporate and international sympathies run dry. The Jewish state must never again be forced to beg others for the means to defend itself. Building sovereign fighter aircraft is a welcome step in the restoration of strategic self-determination.
What was worse was that America's special envoy who was sent to Israel in 1987 to persuade us to give up on the Lavi project was a religious Jew who wore a black kippa called Dov Zackheim. According to Wikipedia, he was also an ordained rabbi. This was a cynical move by the US.