Giora Romm

Romm was born in 1945 and grew up in northern Tel Aviv.[1][2] Both sides of his family had immigrated to the Land of Israel before 1930, and he had two brothers.[2] He attended a military boarding school and was, by multiple accounts, achievement-oriented from childhood.[3]

His family's history intersected directly with the turbulence of the era: during the 1948 War of Independence, Arab women who had worked as caregivers for the family came to warn his mother to flee, telling her, "Take Giora and run away; they will come to slaughter you."[2] Romm joined the Israeli Air Force in 1962, completed flight school, and was assigned to a Mirage squadron.[3] He later earned a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Bar-Ilan University and an MBA from UCLA.[1]

When the Six-Day War began in June 1967, Romm was a 22-year-old lieutenant in the 119 "Bat" Squadron under commander Ran Pekker.[1][4] That squadron's demanding standards required pilots to hold their gun sight on an opposing aircraft for sixteen consecutive frames before a kill was credited — a measure of precision that shaped Romm's approach to aerial combat.[5]

During Operation Focus, Romm downed two Egyptian MiG-21s in the Abu Suwayr sector and then destroyed a third MiG-21 over Syria's T4 airfield, which he had just bombed.[3] Anti-aircraft fire over the Golan Heights wounded him in the leg, and he was taken to a hospital in Afula — but he left the hospital before being discharged, returned to his squadron, and on June 7, 1967, shot down two Egyptian MiG-17s.[3] The five victories — four aircraft over Egypt and one over Syria — made him the first pilot in the history of the Israel Defense Forces to achieve ace status, defined as five confirmed aerial kills.[3]

Romm later reflected on the IAF's advantage during that war, noting that "although the enemy aircraft on paper had numerical superiority, in practice we could put more planes in the air."[6] The IAF's preparations enabled pilots to attack runways, return to base, rearm quickly, and then support ground forces, sustaining the operational tempo behind Operation Focus.[6]

Two years after the Six-Day War, on September 11, 1969, Romm's Mirage was hit by a missile fired by an Egyptian MiG-21 during an aerial battle over the Nile Delta.[3] During the ejection, his leg was shattered and his elbow was fractured.[7] Descending by parachute into the Egyptian Delta, he was surrounded by villagers armed with pitchforks and narrowly survived an attempted lynching before Egyptian forces took him into custody.[3]

Romm spent about three months as a prisoner of war, enduring interrogation and torture.[3] To conceal sensitive information, he fed his captors carefully engineered falsehoods while trying to appear credible.[3] A photograph published in Haaretz on September 21, 1969, showed him recovering from his wounds in a Cairo hospital.[8] He was released in December 1969 in a prisoner exchange involving 70 Egyptians.[3]

The physical and psychological impact of the experience was lasting. After a lengthy rehabilitation, during which he studied for a bachelor's degree in economics, he returned to operational flying as a Mirage pilot.[3][2] When he later flew over the Nile Delta again, he experienced uncontrollable shaking, an extremely dry mouth, and a rapid heartbeat.[8]

Romm's return to active duty was gradual but complete. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he was assigned to command 115 Squadron, which flew A-4 Skyhawk aircraft — a type unfamiliar to him at the time.[3] In one episode described in detail by Calcalist, he flew his first combat mission in the Skyhawk against Egyptian forces near the Budapest outpost: he initially failed to release his bombs due to a weapons-computer setting, then returned alone and successfully dropped all eight bombs on target.[3] He also took part in bombing runs during that conflict alongside his command responsibilities.[1]

In the years that followed, Romm commanded the Hatzor and Tel Nof air bases, qualified to fly the F-15, and headed the Research Branch in the Air Force's Intelligence Department.[3] He served as head of Air Force staff and, in 1985, participated in Operation Wooden Leg, the raid on the Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis.[3] He was a candidate for commander of the Air Force in 1992 but was not appointed to the position.[3] He subsequently served as Israel's military attaché to the United States and retired from the IDF with the rank of major general in 1996.[3][4]

Romm's post-military career spanned government, civil aviation, and civil society. He was appointed director-general of the Ministry of National Infrastructures by Ariel Sharon, though he left the post after a short time.[3] He subsequently joined the Clal conglomerate, where he founded a technology company.[3]

He served three years as director-general of the Jewish Agency and headed the Metzila Center, an organization dedicated to balancing liberal-democratic principles with traditional Jewish values.[3] As director-general of the Civil Aviation Authority, he is credited with restructuring the organization and improving Israel's international aviation-safety ranking.[3] He also served as chairman of the National Road Safety Authority.[1] In 2019, he ran as a candidate for state comptroller.[1]

In 2008, when he was in his sixties, Romm published his account of captivity and recovery.[3] The Hebrew edition, titled Colorful Four (Tzivoni Arba), appeared in Tel Aviv and was dedicated to Reuven Rivlin.[9] It won the 2009 Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for Military Literature, shared with Koah Tzvika, with judges praising both its treatment of captivity as an element of military coping and its literary quality.[10]

The English-language edition, Solitary: The Crash, Captivity and Comeback of an Ace Fighter Pilot, was published in 2014 by Black Irish Entertainment, translated by Anne Hartstein Pace.[9] Romm said he wrote the book to examine whether a person who experiences severe trauma can return to the course of life they followed before it.[2] His daughter Neta Gurevitch described the memoir as "testament to the fact that you can recover from this thing. There is life afterwards. There is life with meaning afterwards, with all the difficulties along the way."[8]

Beyond his memoir, Romm contributed strategic analysis to Israeli defense scholarship. His chapter "A Test of Rival Strategies: Two Ships Passing in the Night," published in the 2007 INSS volume The Second Lebanon War: Strategic Perspectives, presented his interpretation of the competing strategies pursued during the war.[11] Romm argued that the IDF sought to use its air superiority against Hezbollah's military deployment, while Hezbollah fired short-range rockets from civilian population centers toward Israel's home front.[11] He characterized the conflict as involving strategies that did not directly destroy one another, comparing them to "two ships passing each other in the night."[11]

Giora Romm died in August 2023 at the age of 78 after a battle with cancer.[7] He was survived by his wife, Miriam, whom he had met when she was a soldier at Hatzor air base during his time there as a pilot, and by three children.[12][2]