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Abstract
At the establishment of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) in 1948, women served as pilots. In the mid-1950s, however, the IAF decided to remove women from flight training and ground all female pilots. That policy persisted until the High Court of Justice's ruling in the Alice Miller case (1995). This article narrates the experiences of women pilots before and after the IAF decision to ground women, demonstrating that the decision was based not on professional or security considerations but on patriarchal social attitudes; that the excluded pilots and trainees protested against their discrimination but were silenced; and that changes in IAF policy with respect to women pilots reflect broader attitudes about gender in Israeli society.
Contributor Notes
SHARON GEVA is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at Kibbutzim College. Her first book, To the Unknown Sister: Holocaust Heroines in Israeli Society (2010), published in Hebrew, was awarded the Mordechai Ish Shalom Prize by the Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi Institute. She is also the author of Women in Israel: The Early Years (2020) and Zivia Lubetkin and Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman: A Double Biography (2023), both published in Hebrew. Email: Sharon.Geva@smkb.ac.il