Apr. 12, 2007- As someone who flies regularly between the United States and Israel, I was startled by a headline from this morning’s Haaretz newspaper. “Israeli Air Force Comes Close to shooting down Continental Plane”.

How close is “close”?

I mean… Were the fighter pilots ready to hit the button on their missile-launchers?

I’ve been on that flight. Continental Airlines out of Newark. Imagine: the plane’s coming in for a landing, passengers are scurrying back from the bathrooms or fumbling with the tangle of headsets and two F-16 fighter planes pull up screeching next to the window.

Many passengers no doubt would have taken this as an exuberant welcome to Israel and clapped at the grand spectacle of it all. (Tourism is a bit off after the Second Lebanon war, and Israelis, who can be a tad rude at times, are trying harder to woo back visitors.) But a few passengers with sharp eyesight might have noticed that the F-16s were loaded with enough weapons to obliterate a large target, such as , oh, I dunno…, a Boeing 777?

Ha’aretz quotes an unnamed officer saying: “This was the closest we ever came to intercepting a civilian airplane.” Well, not really. In 1973, Israeli jets shot down a Libyan commercial airliner over the Sinai, killing 108 people aboard.

This would have been far worse. Just think: Continental is an American airline, and most of its 251 passengers were Americans and Israelis. And the F-16s were sold to Israel by the U.S.A. Ouch!

So, how close was “close”?

Apparently, the Continental pilots failed to check in with the Air Control Tower at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on the plane’s descent to the runway. So IAF jets were scrambled to see if terrorists had taken over the plane.

Now, how exactly did they do that? By getting so close they could peer in the windows of the airliner? Were the Israeli pilots asking each other: Wait a minute, are those bearded jihadi terrorists staring back at us or rabbis? Are they waving or shaking their fists? Third Row back, is that guy wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Long Live Osama bin Laden’ or ‘I love ZZ Top’?

Or, did the Israeli pilots interrogate them by radio, asking them the kind of questions you get at Ben Gurion airport when the immigrations officers want to find out if you’re Jewish (and therefore not likely to be a terrorist) but can’t ask outright? Questions like: “Do you speak Hebrew? Do you have any relatives who live in Israel?”

Anyway, the American pilots persuaded them that they were the genuine item, not some conniving pack of terrorists who boarded the flight disguised as Evangelical tourists or high-tech investors, and the plane landed safely. Welcome to Israel. Shalom.

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem