I don't have any doubt that the American pilots were by far, the best trained during that time in history! However, again, the Israel air Force proved how well their pilots were trained during the 67 war.
I think you should distinguish between personal record of a fighter pilot and a general ability of the air force.
You can have some amazing aces with bad overall airforce performance/training and have a great airforce without some outstanding pilots (although the further is less likely)
Finally you need to get the overall picture - the combination of training, tactics, experience, command and control and at the LAST stage the equipment.
For example Japanese navy had one of the most trained pilots, they were very good, but... they flew without radio for a long period, many of them didn't use chutes(!!!) until they were given very-very explicit order and in general had no good training program to that allowed to bring new recruits to the business. They were very stubborn despite it costs lives. So they had experienced and well trained pilots but the overall system was in pretty bad shape.
If you take as an example Claire Lee Chennault and its AVG - they had crappy planes, horrible logistics problems and overall training wasn't comparable to the of IJAF but the system of early warnings, suitable tactics, good intelligence and finally ability to outsmart the enemy did the job.
Israeli Air Force had some interesting history and damn good overall performance... otherwise probably Israel wouldn't survive and we wouldn't talk about IAF...
I think if you describe IAF, in few words you would say as
realistic with a "legs on the ground" an addition of lots of
Chutzpah...
It started by a WW2 veterans who searched some action after a war during 1948 (also most of them left after the end of the war)... so it had a good opening position.
It always had a good emphasis on the training and being adopted to local realities. For example if not Israeli requirements the Mirage wouldn't get its 30mm canons which was the major weapon in 1967. They related to missiles in that period as mostly useless drag on wings (and indeed the first Shafrir I missile in 1967 was a horrible missile)... The Mirage radar had many problems as well and was barely used.
In contrast to USAF/USN in that period that believed that guns aren't for use any more... Russians designed strict interceptors (and accidentally created quite a maneuverable MiG-21 [1]) Later USAF "rediscovered" energy maneuverability theory...
So finally IAF had good realistic training good overall system that allowed to bring stuff like operation Moked. Ground crew is also very well trained to allow very high sortie generation and serviceability rate... (and that I can tell from a personal experience) IAF have had too many opportunities to "learn" so it had to. The dogfight was very important part of training and IAF related always on a close combat - but it is also due to a simple fact - that there is no "much of Israel" and you have to be proficient in close areal combat.
Of course IAF tries to keep technological edge and bring some innovations others dismiss, like it was the first western air force to operate HMD and have high off-bore-sight missiles - having them in operational way-way-way before USAF even started to think about them. The ECM is considered state of the art (but nobody really knows).
And finally Chutzpah factor... for example:
- Operation Moked... otherwise Israel wouldn't exist today
- Operation Entebbe
- Operation Opera - otherwise the Gulf war and the middle east in general would be very different place.
- Operation Wooden Leg
But some of the Chutzpah come at price during many other operations.
Finally in general I think IAF was and still one of the best if not the best air force around with nice amount of aces relatively to its size [2]
[1] When MiG-21 arrived to the Middle East it had lots of problems of engine failures - much higher than in Soviet air force. When MiG test pilots were send to Syria they discovered that they fly MiGs at much lower speeds and higher AOA and higher engine settings then they thought it was designed for (i.e. dogfighting in it hardly rather than running intercepts)... So Russians were oblivious to importance of the dog-fighting as well.
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_flying_aces
