Ben-Ami Gov: The Engineer Who Built Israel's First Fighter Jet Through an Embargo
In 1967 France, Israel's main supplier of warplanes, imposed an arms embargo. Ben-Ami Gov, a 39-year-old Air Force engineer, was handed the job of building a fighter jet anyway. The result was the Kfir, the first combat aircraft developed in Israel, put together from crates that left Marseille labelled as farm equipment. In October 2026, two months before his 99th birthday, the Technion awarded him an honorary doctorate.
A Name for a New Country
He was born Ben-Ami Godovich in Jerusalem on 28 December 1927. His father, who came from Siberia, wanted to call him Alexander. An uncle objected: the Jews were about to build a state and would speak Hebrew, so the boy needed a Hebrew name from the Bible. Ben-Ami, "son of my people", won. Americans later shortened it to Ben; many Israelis call him Ami.
The family moved to Haifa and then to Tel Aviv, where he finished high school in 1946 and grew up in the socialist Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. He joined the Haganah and served in the Jewish settlement police at Tel Aviv port under the British Mandate. By his own account he refused, on principle, to salute his British commander, and was fined every time the man came to inspect.
Barley, Bullets and the Road to Jerusalem
In the 1948 war he drove trucks in the convoys that fought to break the siege of Jerusalem, including Operations Nachshon and Maccabi. His first load was eight tons of barley; in a besieged city, he points out, barley was ammunition. At Bab al-Wad his convoy came under heavy fire and trucks burned. In a later ambush near Sha'ar HaGai he stopped to take in a stranded driver, who was shot in the head as he closed the cab door.
Stuck inside the city, he watched a shell hit a running child and carried the boy to Bikur Holim hospital, where he died within minutes. He has never forgotten it. Then he found friends from his kibbutz training group who had joined the Palmach on their own, and slipped into the Harel Brigade's Fourth Battalion without his name ever appearing on a roster. He fought with it in the Old City, in Katamon and at the police school. "If I had been killed, they wouldn't even have known who I was," he told N12 in 2026.
He was among the founders of Kibbutz Sa'ar, and in September 1949 he married Zahava Holtzman, a girl from the movement he had been too shy to approach until the day he gave her a lift.
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He had wanted to be a surgeon since he was twelve. But he was married, neither family had money, and Israel had one medical school, in Jerusalem. What he did have was English, which made him the kibbutz's man for assembling every new piece of imported farm machinery. A friend mentioned that the Air Force was sending a group to the United States to study aeronautics. One meeting at Air Force headquarters in Jaffa got him a place.
He enlisted in 1950, trained as an aircraft technician in a two-year course in the United States, completed officers' school in 1952 and graduated from the Technion in mechanical engineering in 1959. In August 1960, as a major, he took command of the maintenance squadron at Ramat David air base.
In 1961, when David Ben-Gurion told officers to adopt Hebrew surnames, Zahava spotted a death notice for a man named Dani Gov. Short, and close to Godovich: they took it. Only later did they learn the dead man was the father of the singer Gidi Gov. The two families are not related.
Fixing What Could Not Be Fixed
At Ramat David the French-built Vautour bombers were wearing out their bearings, and there were no spare parts. Gov had a Technion laboratory analyse the original metal, found a close substitute, reverse-engineered the part and machined new bearings on the base's new French lathes, without asking headquarters. Those Vautours flew in the Six-Day War. From late 1963 he headed the maintenance operations branch at Air Force headquarters, and he held that post through the 1967 war.
The Kfir
Decades later, after a three-year fight for access to some 400 classified files in the Defence Ministry archive, Gov found that the idea of an Israeli fighter predated the embargo: a committee to study it had been ordered in March 1967, and early work went back to 1965. By the autumn of 1967 he was running the project.
The concept was blunt: take the Mirage 5 airframe and replace everything inside it, from the engine to the cockpit to the weapons systems. Israel bought 25 aircraft from Dassault as kits of parts, together with the huge, precise assembly jigs, and Dassault engineers came to Israel to help put them together. Crates left Marseille marked as agricultural equipment; later, orders went to Dassault's subcontractors through a private company set up in Belgium. Gov believes the French authorities knew and looked away.
The same team produced the Nesher, a simpler first step that fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Kfir entered operational service in 1975 and was later flown by Colombia, Ecuador and Sri Lanka, and leased to the United States Navy and Marine Corps as the F-21. Gov received the Israel Defense Prize for the project in 1971, the year he retired from the military as a colonel after missing out on the post he wanted most, head of the Air Force's equipment department.
Teledyne, Intel and a Telephone Monopoly
He turned down the directorship of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. Instead he represented American communications companies in Israel, founded and ran the Israeli branch of Teledyne and became its vice-president for international marketing (1982 to 1987), and took part in establishing Intel's Israeli operation in the 1970s. He later sat on the board of Intel Israel.
In 1987 he became director-general of the Ministry of Communications. He wanted to confine the state telephone company, Bezeq, to the businesses it already ran; Communications Minister Gad Yaacobi disagreed, and Gov resigned in May 1988. He went on to chair Beit Shemesh Engines, a laser-technology company and the Ein Harod steel plant, and led the innovation committee of the Manufacturers Association of Israel. In recent years he has volunteered to bring computers into boarding schools for children at risk. In 2023 he published his history of the project, *From the Thunder Soared the Kfir* (Tafer).
Ninety-Eight and Still Curious
He lives in Tel Aviv, in an apartment whose balcony looks straight at Air Force headquarters in the Kirya. He drives himself to small fringe theatres because that is where the young people are, writes on WhatsApp, works for hours at his computer and reads books on mathematics. Doctors keep asking for his secret; one introduced him to a full waiting room as an exceptional case of longevity. He has no theory. "In my mentality I'm about fifty," he says. "I like to investigate things."
His view of today's push for full military self-reliance is an engineer's. Israel's industry, he says, is a thousand times what it was in his day, but a modern fighter would demand enormous new investment, and he would build one only with at least one partner country.
Why Ben-Ami Gov Is Called a Genius
Gov never claimed to have drawn an aircraft on a blank page. His genius was the rarer kind that turns "impossible" into a schedule. A would-be surgeon who reverse-engineered bearings nobody would sell him went on to run the program that gave an isolated country its own fighter jet, and with it an aircraft industry. He treated engineering, logistics and diplomacy as one problem and solved it under an embargo. At ninety-eight he is still reading mathematics for pleasure.
Achievements
- Headed the Kfir project, Israel's first indigenous fighter jet, from 1967
- Israel Defense Prize, 1971, for the Kfir project
- Reverse-engineered and manufactured bearings that kept grounded Vautour bombers flying
- Convoy driver in the 1948 siege of Jerusalem and Palmach fighter in the Harel Brigade
- Founded and ran Teledyne's Israeli branch; took part in establishing Intel's Israeli operation in the 1970s
- Director-General of Israel's Ministry of Communications, 1987-1988
- Author of 'From the Thunder Soared the Kfir' (2023)
- Honorary doctorate from the Technion, 2026
