TOM EATON | Listen to these Israelis if you want to know plane entitlement

In a world choking on the hypocrisy of warmongers and powerful con men it takes something quite remarkable to stick up out of the slime. But this week Israeli officials managed to be so astonishingly entitled and hypocritical that they surely deserve special mention.

As you and your enormous petrol bills will know, it has now been four and a half months since Israel finally found an American president who was stupid and arrogant enough to attack Iran for it.

Since then, the US has spent billions of dollars, killed untold thousands of Iranians along with at least 14 US service members, and flattened great swathes of Iran, partly to keep Israel safe from an extremely unlikely nuclear attack (because Israel is apparently the only local power that is allowed to kill tens of thousands of civilians with fire from the sky) and partly to keep Benjamin Netanyahu out of jail.

It goes without saying that Donald Trump might also have found all sorts of ways to profit from the war, but the short version of all of this is that there’s a strong case to be made that, insider trading aside, Trump and the US are doing this for Israel.

Which brings us to the last couple of weeks, and one of the most outrageous bits of entitlement and hypocrisy I’ve seen in a long time.

Fighting a large modern war requires a large number of aircraft flying multiple sorties, and, as part of the huge deployment to the Gulf, the US has sent “dozens” of large Boeing refuelling aircraft, roughly the size of commercial airliners and designed to refuel fighters and bombers in mid-air.

I mean, if you believe, as Israeli officials have repeatedly claimed, that you and your country face an existential threat from Iran, it makes sense that you’d happily turn over sections of your main airport to the aircraft that are fighting the war you started, the war that you claim you need in order to save yourself, right?

Now, not every military airbase in the region can accommodate aircraft of that size, and so, at the start of the war, a large number of these planes, including some hefty cargo transports, were stationed in Israel at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv.

And fair enough. I mean, if you believe, as Israeli officials have repeatedly claimed, that you and your country face an existential threat from Iran, it makes sense that you’d happily turn over sections of your main airport to the aircraft that are fighting the war you started, the war that you claim you need in order to save yourself, right?

Wrong.

No sooner had Ben Gurion been asked to accommodate 75 tankers and cargo planes than Israeli officials began to grumble, eventually demanding that the number of planes stationed at the airport be capped at 20.

This week, however, as Trump won the war for the 38th time and fighting resumed, the US halted the withdrawal of the planes, and some Israelis are very, very unhappy.

Why, you ask? Well, because Israelis want to go on holiday and American planes, fighting their war for them, are getting in the way.

“Hundreds of thousands of tickets were bought by Israelis to fly and enjoy their summer vacation,” transportation minister Miri Regev told The Times of Israel this week. “We promised that we will enable commercial flights and we will not cancel a single ticket because of American refuelling planes.

“Therefore, I have given instructions that we will not allow any US refuelling tankers to land at Ben Gurion Airport beyond the agreed number of 20 planes, and the remaining planes can land at Israeli Air Force bases.”

According to the same report, “the Israel Airports Authority has warned that unless US aircraft continue to be removed from Ben Gurion Airport during the busy summer months, as many as 50,000 flight tickets could be at risk of cancellation.”

50,000?! Oh, the humanity! Those poor, poor people! I mean, fighting a war of survival is one thing but potentially missing out on your summer hols? Surely that’s a crime against humanity? My god, can you imagine the suffering right now of possibly having to reschedule your trip to Paris? And Palestinians in the rubble of Gaza think they have it rough …

Yes, there’s a lot of entitled, hypocritical bull flying around right now. But take a bow, Israel. You’ve achieved something truly special.