Warner Bros, Aaron Sorkin To Tell Story Of Al Schwimmer, The Unlikely Father Of Israeli Air Force

EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros has made a deal to develop a film about the unlikely father of the Israel Air Force, and Aaron Sorkin will write the script and possibly direct the film.

The deal includes America’s Greatest Gift To Israel, an article published in Business Insider. The film will be produced by Gotham Group’s Eric Robinson and Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, who are in production on Deliver Me From Nowhere, with Scott Cooper directing Jeremy Allen White in a drama about the existential crisis Bruce Springsteen worked through by writing and recording his masterpiece album Nebraska.

The preeminent wordsmith Sorkin, whose recent credits include Being The Ricardos, The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Broadway’s To Kill A Mockingbird, will script the story of Al Schwimmer, a post-WWII arms smuggler who helped create Israel’s air force, which helped the fledgling country survive.

Schwimmer was a decorated World War II veteran from Connecticut. In 1948 and on the heels of the Holocaust, a homeland for the Jewish State was being carved out of Arab territory, and countries like Egypt and Jordan readied to drive out these new neighbors. America, not eager to inflame the Cold War in Middle East countries, publicly announced it would not provide military aid to Israel. Schwimmer masterminded a covert, illegal, international operation that the article describes as one part Argo and one part Mission: Impossible.” Schwimmer aligned with the Haganah, the Jewish underground paramilitary, and put together a rag tag group of WWII vets who defied an American embargo to smuggle 125 military planes and more than 50,000 weapons to Palestine. The volunteer accomplices included Bugsy Siegel’s publicist, mobster Meyer Lansky, Pee-wee Herman’s dad Milton Rubenfeld, and Frank Sinatra. 

Many of the rifles and other arms came from Czechoslovakia, and were used by the Nazis. Accounts say that this action helped save Israel by giving the country a fighting chance in the war by establishing air superiority. Later, Schwimmer and accomplices turned themselves in; most of them were Jewish, and argued that seeing the abject cruelty and genocide perpetrated against the Jews in the Holocaust steeled their resolve to make a righteous moral choice. While they were spared prison terms, Schwimmer and others were fined and stripped of their civil rights. Schwimmer refused to seek a pardon at the time, but was pardoned anyway by President Bill Clinton in 2001. He died a decade later.

The heroic exploits of Schwimmer and his cohorts have been captured in several documentaries. There is the 2015 PBS docu A Wing and a Prayer by filmmaker Boaz Dvir, who interviewed Schwimmer and many of the surviving troops. The prevailing opinion was their efforts prevented a second Holocaust. There is also the Roberta Grossman-directed Above and Beyond docu, and Where I Stand: The Hank Greenspun Story, about the Bugsy Siegel publicist who fought for Israel.

Sorkin, who is separately working on a continuation of ground he covered in his script for The Social Network, is repped by WME.