Almost since the war began, people have been writing me to ask, “Is it true that the army is actually not giving the soldiers the equipment they need? We hear of lots of people in the US helping to buy equipment, but we also hear the army reassuring everyone that there’s no shortage. What’s the story here?”
Truth was, I didn’t know. Several very serious, strategic philanthropists I know have been raising money, bringing over equipment in dozens of duffle bags, and in some cases, chartering planes to get stuff here. But I also hear, on the news and elsewhere, reassurances from the IDF that we have everything.
Recently, one of these philanthropists, deeply frustrated by what he’s learned, looked me in the eye and said, “Believe me: the army doesn’t care if your son gets killed.”
That got my attention. My colleague at Shalem College, Dr. Daniel Polisar, has gotten very involved in raising money get equipment for soldiers—not long ago, he had three sons in Gaza at the same time. So I sat with him to hear the whole story.
It’s not a pretty story, but it’s one that needs to be told.
We’re hardly the only ones wondering about this. Here’s an article on the subject in the Times of Israel.
Dr. Daniel Polisar is Executive Vice President and co-founder of Shalem College. Polisar served as president of the Shalem Center from 2002-2013, after holding posts as director of research, academic director, and editor-in-chief of the center’s journal Azure. Before joining Shalem, he was founder and director of Peace Watch, a non-partisan organization monitoring Israeli and Palestinian compliance with the Oslo Accords, and head of the Peace Watch observer team during the January 1996 Palestinian elections. Polisar received his B.A. in politics from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, where he was the recipient of Truman and Fulbright scholarships, as well as of a Mellon Fellowship. His research interests include the history and philosophy of higher education, education in Israel, and Israeli constitutional development.
Polisar has testified before the Knesset Constitution Committee on Israel’s character as a Jewish state. Since 2005, he has served on the board of Metzilah, the Center of Zionist, Jewish, Liberal and Humanist Thought, and in 2006, he was appointed by the prime minister to be the first chairman of the National Herzl Council, responsible for commemorating the legacy of Theodor Herzl, a position he held for three years.
SUNDAY (05/12): The war has led to the creation of a whole new genre of Israeli music. We are going to introduce one of those new songs by Israeli artist Noam Tsuriely, called Od Yom B'Aza or “Another Day in Gaza”.
MONDAY (05/13): Yom Hazikaron, Remembrance Day for Fallen Soldiers— On this day of remembering, my thoughts on how Israel has become a patchwork of grief.
TUESDAY (05/14): Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day— Two young activist Israelis, one male and one female, both called up to reserve service in the army, share with us their deepest worries about the Jewish state but also what gives them hope for its future.
WEDNESDAY (05/15): - The State Department has proposed an embargo on the IDF army unit Netzach Yehudah, a unit that has a long and controversial history. Israel has vociferously objected to the censure, but there’s a complicated and painful story here. We present an interview that sheds light on the full story.
THURSDAY (05/16): We had planned to run this earlier, but the news cycle precluded it: now that two more hostage have been declared dead in recent days we revisit the doctors who are responsible making those determinations.
Obviously, our schedule is subject to the news cycle and anything could change, but for right now these are the plans.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, available specially for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Dr. Polisar has provided us with the following:
For information on how to make tax-deductible contributions to support the efforts of acquiring appropriate gear for IDF soldiers, click here.
My guest today is Dr. Daniel Polisar, a longtime colleague at Shalem College. In fact, when I joined Shalem in 2007, it was at Dan Polisar’s invitation. So, I'm very grateful, both personally and professionally, for the opportunity to work together and at Shalem for almost 20 years now.
Dr. Daniel Polisar is Executive Vice President and Co-Founder of Shalem College. He served as president of the Shalem Center from 2002 to 2013. Before joining Shalem, Dr. Polisar was founder and director of Peace Watch, a nonpartisan organization monitoring Israeli and Palestinian compliance with the Oslo Accords and head of the Peace Watch observer team during the 1996 Palestinian elections. Dan received his BA in Politics from Princeton University and his PhD in Government from Harvard University.
I've asked Dan to join me today to speak not about Shalem College, which is probably something that we should actually do at another time, but about another project that he's taken on regarding the present war, procuring equipment for soldiers who would otherwise be sent to battle without the essential gear that they need. It's not really a very pretty story, the story of the idea of the IDF sending soldiers out without the equipment that they need, but it's one that Dan and I both felt needed to be shared. And you will hear more now about this from Dan, who literally knows more about this subject than almost anyone else on the planet, in Israel or outside. I'm delighted to have him join us today and thank him for his time.
So, Dan, thank you very much for doing this conversation. I want to start kind of at the end, how I found out about this issue. As long as this war has been going on, what are we, seven months in, something like that? As long as this war has been going on, I've been hearing two completely contradictory things. One is from American friends who are totally committed to Israel, who are people of means or know people of means, and they're telling me, oh, I'm raising all this money, and we're bringing in this equipment for soldiers. And we're not talking about the normal stuff, like long underwear and socks, the things that soldiers are usually asking for, but serious things. Helmets, ceramic vests, protective eye gear, and I hear from all these people, oh, we're buying all this stuff. And it sounds like a lot of bravado. And I thought, okay, that's very nice. It's great to have Zionists in the world.
And then you talk to people in the army, or you read what the army says, and they also have this similarly deep, vast voice, our soldiers have everything they could possibly need. And it was kind of hard for me to imagine that that wasn't true. I mean, you send people into battle, and they don't have what they need. So, I was just very agnostic on that issue. I didn't think about it a lot. I wasn't involved with it. I was assured by my kid that he had what he needed. And that's a selfish way of looking at it, but that made me a little bit less crazed. Until last week.
In the middle of Pesach, I was having dinner at our house on yontif with a mutual friend of ours who will remain nameless, who's been very involved in a project that you're deeply involved in, which is raising money and getting equipment in for the soldiers. And he himself has raised a lot of money, given a lot of his own money, done all sorts of really extraordinary things to get amazing amounts of material in. And okay, that's an amazing story in and of itself. But here's what got to me. At the end of dinner, as the conversation was winding down, he just looked me right in the eye, and I'm glad that my wife, I think, was otherwise occupied at the moment. He looked me right in the eye and said, “You need to understand this. The army does not care if your son gets killed.” You know him. He's the opposite. Whatever the opposite of a blowhard is, that's what he is. He's understated. He's cerebral. He's rational. He's ridiculously successful because he's so thoughtful. When a guy like that says to me, the army doesn't actually care if your son gets killed, that's just a showstopper for me.
And I know that you've been involved in this issue for a very long time of procuring material for soldiers. We're talking about the hardcore stuff, ceramic vests, helmets. You'll tell us what else. You had at one point three sons in Gaza. Nobody is in right now, but all three are poised to be back in. This is a very scary time for all of us who have kids in battle. It's petrifying, quite frankly.
So, I want to start because you have kids in and because you've been so involved in this issue, and because I trust your judgment so much, having worked with you for almost 20 years. Tell me, you've had kids in the army forever, when did you first, after October 7th, begin to understand there was a problem that our kids were being sent into battle unprotected? When did you first understand this?
I think it was around October 8th.
Okay. Took a long time.
Because my two younger ones are in the sadir, the regular army. My oldest is a reserve soldier. And already on October 8th, I knew from the Second Lebanon War, and I knew from Operation Protective Edge, the army has a problem supplying gear. And we all knew that hundreds of thousands of reservists were being called up. So, like you, selfishly, I was focused on my kids. I was not focused on the army or the Jewish people or anything like that. So, I asked each of my kids, what do you have? What don't you have? And what really struck home was my oldest. Reservist, middle of his life. Married with kids. Married, three kids, fourth one route. And I said, well, we're going to help. And we've got friends who have already said they want to help. What can we... What kinds of things do you... Can you give me a list of what you need? And he said, well, it would be easier to give you a list of what we already have. It would be much shorter. I was like, well, what kinds of things don't you have? He said, well, we don't have ceramic plates. I said, But I just heard the spokesman for the army say every soldier has or is about to have ceramic plates. He says, we don't have them, and there's none in sight.
Okay, so ceramic plates are the plates that go inside the vest. There's one plate in front, one plate in back. They have to be made to a certain grade. And they stop you from getting killed from bullets or fragments.
Yeah. And I said, All right, what about helmets? He said, well, we have helmets. They're very old. The most recent one that anyone has is 2006. We don't know when they were last tested, and they're heavy and uncomfortable and don't fit so well. And I'm worried that they probably wouldn't work to protect us from bullets. And then the list goes on. Almost every part of the body that needed to be protected, they didn't have it. They got a gun, they got uniforms, they had an old helmet, and just about nothing else.
I know they didn't have knee protectors, a lot of them, which they definitely need. A lot of people either didn't have any eye protective gear, or we've all heard about grievous eye injuries to many, many soldiers.
Horror show.
Which is largely because they don't wear the eye gear because the eye gear is terrible. It fogs up. They can't see. It's hard to see at night. So, they take it off, which is understandable. But there is eye gear, as you and I both know now, that actually doesn't fog up and doesn't distort the vision. It just has to be bought. Okay, so you began to understand… Now we're six, seven months in. So, you know a lot more than you knew on October 8th. What's the order of magnitude here? In other words, are we talking there was a couple of guys that went in that didn't have all... I mean, what percentage of the army, even if you don't have a number, we're talking a minority, talking a majority, how much of the army is unprotected when they get sent into battle?
So, every month that goes by, the situation gets better, in part because of the army, in large part because of lots of groups like the one that I'm involved in that have been supplying things. If you look at what the situation was a month into the war, as the ground war was beginning, my guess is most of the soldiers had helmets that were subpar. Ceramic plates, pretty good. They really were good about not letting people in without them. Eye wear, almost none of the soldiers had glasses that they would be wearing, protecting their ears. Almost nobody We had that. So, the situation was quite poor. And I think some of the casualties and a large number of the injuries were a consequence of soldiers going in without the protection that they needed.
Today, the situation is much better, but still problematic in terms of helmets. Every day, we're hearing about soldiers with helmets from 1978, 1979, Carter administration, and when Begin was prime minister, and they're in combat zones in Gaza or they're up north, and they're gradually being replaced by much better helmets. Safety glasses is now much better. My team has given out 14,000 plus. We've got another 4,000 coming in and thousands more to go. And there are areas where we're very much under protected. It's not part of what you wear on your body, but we need a lot more drones because much better for a drone to be out there than for a person who's a target to be out there. Night vision equipment, we're in very poor shape. It's a problem. Hamas knows the terrain better than we do. They know the tunnels better than we do. Our advantage is we are startup nation. We have more gear, but we don't have nearly enough of it. Surveillance cameras, not nearly enough. So, there's a lot to be done, and there's been a lot of progress.
We have a couple of questions about that in a second. By the way, we were talking people in our neighborhood. We live in a kind of Anglo neighborhood, so there's a lot of gadget type people. You get to our age, you can't actually do much, but you can have gadgets, right? So, there's a bunch of people in our neighborhood that actually have drones because they like to fly them around. They go to America, they go to the Rocky Mountains, they fly their drones around. Their kids from the front actually said, I'm going to meet you at X,Y, Z, you need to give me the drone. I need a drone. The army doesn't have a drone. Can I borrow the drone that you keep in your desk drawer? And they actually did, and they used them until the army got on top of that.
We also know, by the way, unrelated to the equipment thing, that during October 7th and 8th, pilots were communicating with ground troops through WhatsApp, because the army communication system was so overwhelmed. So, they're using their cell phones and they're Whatsapping each other to tell them where targets are. It's just... Okay, but let's go back to equipment. You say the situation is much better. I'm assuming the situation is much better in Gaza, right? The soldiers were aligned in Gaza, outside of Gaza. Is that true of the north also?
The north is in much less good shape because groups like ours have said, Gaza is the top priority, and there hasn't been enough funding…
Is the north in worse shape than Gaza was at the beginning, or is it in better shape than Gaza was at the beginning?
Probably in worse shape than Gaza was at the beginning. Because in Gaza there was this idea you don't cross the border without X, Y, and Z, and the army mostly stuck to that, except the helmets were subpar. Up north, I'm hearing constant talk of units literally every day I'm getting calls and texts, this unit doesn't have proper helmets. We need a lot more vests. We need the ceramic plates. So up north, it's a problem, and it needs to be fixed very, very quickly.
Because we could have hundreds of thousands of soldiers out there very quickly. If it goes, I would say, go south, because it may be people in Israel want it to go that direction. I don't mean the north going south. I mean, in other words, if we wind up in a full-fudge battle, which some people in the IDF think we should, Gallant wanted to actually attack Lebanon before Gaza. He said that on October 8th also. So, if that happens, we send hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
A lot of the troops who should be going in don't have the proper gear to go in. It might meet army standards. They have a helmet, they have a vest, they have some plates. The chances of their coming back alive and whole, in body and spirit will be limited.
Okay. Now, look, this is an uncomfortable conversation for you and me to have on a lot of levels. First of all, we're thinking about our kids, and we don't want to think about the issue of our kids being in danger, obviously. But more than that, you and I both moved here, moved here from America. We're both American. We're both educated in institutions of which we're not so proud anymore. But okay, that's a whole other conversation. But we moved here out of the love of Israel, and we moved here out of love of the Jewish people, and we have always had a certain... We know the army is not perfect. The army does things that are not okay, and the army trains kids in ways that aren't okay, and the army is like any huge organization. It makes lots of mistakes. But we have fundamental trust in the army. I think when you send your kid off, you don't really send them, they take them. But when your kid goes off, you want to basically think, okay, I know there's going to be good days, bad days, better commanders, worse commanders. But fundamentally, the system has my kid's interest at heart, and my kid's interest, of course, is part of a larger country's interest.
Now, this mutual friend of ours told me, for example, he paid a lot of money, I mean, a lot of money, to bring in a lot of these ceramic plates, which are very heavy. So, he had to actually get a plane to do this. I mean, he really moved mountains to get these things in. And as he explained it to me, you can correct me if I don't have this exactly right. He said that these things have to be tested before they can be given to the soldiers. They have to be tested. And I think they were called in American terms, Grade 3 plus, which is what the United States marines were wearing in Afghanistan. And it's the best the United States has, basically, because if it gets more protective than that, then it gets too heavy for the average soldier to actually wear. So, three plus is what you want. It's the best that the Americans have for the marines. And he was bringing that stuff in. And it had to be tested by one of two organizations. There's a private outfit that tests these things, whose results are accepted by the army.
And then the army also tests. And he told me they brought in all this stuff, and they gave samplings to the army, and they gave samplings to this private company. The private company, as I understood it, tested it and said, this is unbelievably good stuff. And the army tested it and said, it doesn't pass muster.
Now, here's when you begin to smell a rat the size of a cow. Here's where you say, okay, it's bad enough that they didn't have the equipment. I actually want to hear from you later on, what is that? Is that budget? Is that procurement? Really seriously, what the hell? But we'll come back to that. But when you hear that the army is actually putting an X over material that's been brought in, that a private outfit that the army respects and uses, says, is grade A, USDA choice, so to speak, what? Tell me, how, you’re raising a lot of money from a lot of people to try to get these things in, how do you make sense of a story like that?
So, the short answer is, I don't know how to make sense of that particular story. That story is true. The private group that all of us use is MyWall. They have a great reputation. I've seen their work.
They’re the ones who do the testing?
They do the private testing, and they're very, very thorough and precise, and everybody I know relies on them. There's a school of thought of army people that say, MyWall isn't strict enough, but they won't tell you why. And we in the Army are strict, they won't reveal the results. So, I don't know. I do not assume that there's corruption. I do not assume that there's malice. I assume for me, it's a black box. I don't know what's inside it. I know there's lots of stuff that was brought in that's excellent and that could save lives. And for whatever reason, the army was making it more difficult. For me, it's just I take it as a fact and as a challenge.
Now, you talk about this stuff all day long. You have a full-time job at Shalem College, which you helped found or founded, really, with a few people around you. You also have a full-time job doing this, procuring material for the Israeli Defense Forces right now. So, you may not know. It may be a black box to you, but you, for sure, are talking to people who are talking about this. Are there people that you're hearing that are saying this is actually about corruption? I'm actually not smart enough to figure out how there would be corruption. If somebody from America is paying to bring these things in for free, I'm not sure who makes money by saying that they're not good enough unless the army wants to procure it in its own way, and somebody's taking a slice off of that procurement, I guess. And we've done it with submarine, supposedly, in this country. I guess you could do it with vests. But are you hearing people in the know talk more about negligence and poor performance, or are you hearing people in the know talking about the possibility of corruption?
I've heard people talk about corruption, but I haven't seen enough proof to put myself behind that. What I can say is there is a lot of butt covering, meaning the army was caught with its pants down on October 7th, not only intelligence, but also in terms of procurement and supply. And they have been very unwilling to admit, we made a mistake. We're making a mistake. We're going to fix it. And so, part of that has been, they only allow four types of helmets to be given to the troops. I have not found anybody, and I've been asking for months, what’s wrong with all of these other helmets out there that we could get tomorrow that cost much less money? And they just say, we have these four. There isn't a problem. And so, it's not a priority for the army to approve new manufacturers. And my guess is they just within what's called “tzahal hagadol”, the big army, the central army, not the people out in the fields risking their lives in fighting, but the people who are in office.
The corporate army.
Yeah, the corporate army, they genuinely believe, and I've heard it repeatedly, they genuinely believe that there is not a problem. And if there's not a problem, then you keep the highest standards, you don't approve new manufacturers. And if you have somebody a little bit crazy who finds flaws with everything that's coming in that isn't made here, then you let them do their thing. Meaning a lot of it, I think, has more to do with the army has solved it. We don't need you private people to bring, there's almost this disparagement. What do I know? What do these Americans who are rich know about this? We in the army have it taken care of. We don't need your junk.
There is something very strange about private citizens of a different country bringing in a... I don't know who brings in equipment for the French army who's not in France, and it's not the French army. I can't imagine a lot of people who are not French citizens bringing them in, or the Thai army. How many non-Thai people are there in the world bringing... So, it's an amazing story of the Jewish people. And there's been an organization, and people may be listening to this and saying, well, what about FIDF, Friends of Israel Defense Forces, which does a lot of great things, but from what I understand legally, by virtue of their charter or tax status or whatever, they can't procure military equipment, right?
They can't provide tactical gear of the kind that we're providing and that the soldiers need, and they know the soldiers need it.
Right. So, it's just not FIDF's fault. They're just not allowed to do it. But people were saying, FIDF is raising all this money, which is great. It's doing a lot of very good things. It's not the solution to this in any way because it's not allowed to get this gear. All right. So, there is a great story about the Jewish people here. But you can also understand why the army would say, yes, it's a great story on one hand, but it's an odd thing for private civilians who are not Israeli citizens to be procuring material for us. So, some people are saying that it's just “tzahal hagadol”. It's the big corporate army. Some people are saying maybe it's just mismanagement and incompetence in middle-level bureaucratic systems. And other people are probably saying there's some graft here because people maybe are making money off of procurement if it goes through different routes. I don't have any idea. Is your sense, because you've been talking to a lot of people, that the people at the very top, without mentioning names, but the people at the very, very, very, top of the military pyramid, do they know about this?
The people at the very top genuinely believe that there isn't a problem.
If Herzi Halevi were to walk in here right now, and I know him personally, I think he is a menschy, menschy, menschy guy. He's in a horrible situation right now, and history will decide how he performed. He was very new to the job when this thing started, so it would be a little bit ludicrous to put all of this at his feet. But he's an unbelievably smart guy. He's an unbelievably menschy guy. He actually was raised in the broader neighborhood in which I live. His wife went to the same high school my daughter went. It's like part of that same community. If he were to walk in here now, and he would be able to look you in the face and say, Dan, I'm telling you, it's fine. Everybody has it.
100%. I don't I know a lot of very senior army people, but I have some very good friends who do. And when I tell them the story, they say, look, let me just talk to General so-and-so. He knows, and he'll be honest with me. We've known each other for 30 years. And he talks to General So-and-so, and he comes back to me and says, look, I spoke to him. The man never lies to me. The straightest arrow in the quiver. He says, absolutely. He's been assured by the people below him that every soldier has everything he needs. And it's just not true. It's not that I know this just from three boys and four people I met. Everybody. By the way, it goes up to the level of division commanders, the largest units that are doing actual fighting. Division 98, 162, 99, 36…
How many soldiers in each of these just to give people an idea of what we're talking about?
At peak, they could be several thousand. Once the reservists are out, then they might be down to 4- 5,000.
We're talking about thousands and thousands...
Thousands of people. And you talk to them, and they say, of course, I know stuff is missing. I can't tell you per squad what they're missing but let me get a list for you. And then they come back, and they say, we need this many helmets and we need this many safety glasses that don't have the problems that the IDFs have. And by the way, we're also missing some vests. And could you help us with this and that?
So, the people fighting know what's going on. Somewhere there is this Chinese wall, unintentionally put in, and the people at the top genuinely don't know what's going on. It's not that I have no criticism of them. When they hear from person after person, hey, there's a problem out there, then I think they should be checking to see whether maybe there's some truth to it. But they are believing what's coming up to them from the hierarchy, and we're paying a price.
And is that also like “tzahal hagadol”, the big IDF, or is that a guy like Herzi Halevi, who, again, just to be clear, I think is a complete mensh, he's just got bigger problems right now. He's trying to deal with very big issues. He doesn't have the time to look into vests and glasses. Is it that he just doesn't have the share of mind to deal with or is there a mental orientation of “I'm sure it's fine.”
I think both of those are true. And I think, look, when you're at the top of a hierarchy, you believe the people who report to you, who believe the people who report to them. Some guy named Dan Polisar or Joe Schmo from Jerusalem or from the five towns in New York comes in and says, no, I know better than your procurement people. Your instinct is to say, yeah, let me focus on what the battle plan is for Khan Younis or Rafah or something like that. Again, I'm not inside their heads. I don't know why they're doing it. I would say one thing, though. They might see it as not of existential importance, but the issue of gear has an incredible impact on the soldiers in two ways.
Well, one is morale, for sure.
Yeah, morale. Even before the new helmet saved their lives or the glasses saved their vision, they say, somebody cares, and I'm going into this battle knowing I'm protected as I can be, given that it's a war and people on the other side want to kill me. I think that's a bigger difference than the actual net value of the equipment. But the second thing is we know of many, many cases, we've been focusing on a certain kind of protective eyewear that the soldiers wear that meets the standards, Z87 plus, and all of those other things. And the soldiers wear it, and they'll come out and they'll send us a picture. They were hit with some terrible device. Something exploded. Their faces are covered in blood, but the area around their eyes, which is also protecting their brains, is fine. And they write, I have vision because of what you did. It's not what I did. It's what our donors did. And it's what my amazing teammates, who, by the way, are Shalem graduates, former IDF officers, Lior Hasgal and Channa Lieberman. So, you're definitely saving lives, and you're saving the quality of people's lives for the next decades. So, it's of enormous importance. I think the army underestimates that. The senior people in the army underestimate that.
Do you know of anybody trying to reach them? Like, trying to say, listen, Herzi, I know you're busy, or aluf pikud darom, or however you say that, the head of the Southern Command or the head of the Northern Command. These are big guys. They're very, very busy. But do you know, of anybody trying to say, listen, I know you're busy, but you need to give me 15 minutes for me to lay out for you what the situation here is because you just don't know. Is anybody trying to have that set of conversations?
Absolutely. Meaning I've been in conversations with people doing what I'm doing who say, we just spoke to, and I don't want to use names here, but we just spoke to fill in extremely, extremely senior political or military figure whom I've known for X number of years. I told him exactly what was going on. He said he would check with his people, but he's heard the opposite story. It's not that that's happened to me once or twice. It's repeated. And by the way, I've recently, in the last number of weeks, been trying to speak to very senior people, and they keep not, even though I'm getting to them through who know them very, very well, and they say, yeah, we'll meet with him. It doesn't happen, and we're able to get through to somebody. They say, look, I'm told that the situation is fine. One of the lines that I can't stand is, everybody has what they need. The soldiers who are requesting more are asking for prestige gear, “tziud yukrati”. That's nonsense. A guy who wants a helmet that will repel bullets is not looking for the prestige. He wants to come back from the war to his wife and children alive. So, there's a whole set of excuses that are manufactured that are sufficiently frustrating so that even I get angry, and that's not my tendency.
No, it is not. I know you for a long time. Let me ask you this. We are now at the beginning of May, and we may go into Rafah, we may not go into Rafah. Time will tell. From what I'm hearing from you, if we do go into Rafah, the situation and the protection of these soldiers is much, much, much better than it was on October 8th or 9th or 10th. Maybe not perfect yet, but a hell of a lot better. If the north explodes and we send a lot of soldiers up there. Some of them, I assume, will be moved from the south and would take their equipment with them, but a lot of other ones are not. You're saying the situation is not nearly as good as it needs to be, to put it very mildly. The listener here is probably asking herself or himself, okay, between the situation being what it is and the situation being ideal, what are the roadblocks? Is there not enough money now? Is somebody blocking the procurement? Is whoever makes these plates not able to make them fast enough? Are there not enough goggles like this in the world? In other words, to fix this problem right now in May 2024, what needs to change?
Two things need to change. One of them is we actually do need a lot more money, meaning every group involved in this knows of needs that are millions or tens of millions of dollars beyond what they're currently able to fund. I say that as somebody benefiting from incredibly generous, wonderful donors who have really opened up their hearts and their pocketbooks. But we need literally millions of dollars more, number one. Number two, the army needs to change a small number of things that they are doing that are blocking us from getting the right gear to the soldiers. One example. There are four companies that make excellent helmets that are approved by the IDF, by the Israeli army. But if you want to buy one of those helmets, it costs $1,000, which I'm willing to spend to save an Israeli life. But the waiting list to get them can be a month or two months, literally. Time, we don't have.
Why? Where are they?
All four of them are American manufacturers. All four of them are… when you order, they start making the helmets because they…
They don't exist.
They don't exist because they're in Ukraine or they're already in Israel or they're on American soldier's head.
So, the reason there's a month's wait is because they actually have to make the helmet, pack the helmet, send the helmet over.
They actually have to make it, so a month's wait, two months wait. And usually, the time they tell you it's going to take; it takes longer than that.
Do the ceramic plates not exist?
The ceramic plates are a better situation. More of them are approved. That's less of an issue there, there’s something of a money issue, but much better. On the helmets, there are other companies that make helmets that meet every specification you can imagine. There are companies the Israeli army has been ordering stuff from for years or decades.
Are they American companies or European? What are they?
There are some that are German, some that are Israeli, some that are American. I know of companies in each of those categories. Their helmets are fine. We've tested them. People we know have tested them not once, but repeatedly. And a soldier with those is much more safe than a soldier with what they have right now. The army will not accept those helmets. So, there are units, literally, that say, I'd love to take your helmets. My guys are in danger, but I'm not allowed to do this. I work for the Ministry of Defense. I'm under extreme scrutiny. Our unit is constantly being looked at. We can't take them. And for those units, all you need to do is just say the helmets have to meet the standard. Here's a list of the companies and the types that do it. And then it would just It would be a money question, and within three weeks, we could have the whole thing solved.
Right. But it sounds like it's an issue of somebody sending a memo, but it's actually changing a corporate culture. In other words, it's not just somebody writing the right email. You're saying this is so deeply rooted. That's not going to happen. I don't think, you know much more others than I do, but it doesn't sound like that's happening in May or June.
They did it for the vests, for the plates at the beginning of the war. They said, we’re not going to say that the following plates are okay forever, but for this war, temporarily, you can use them.
Wow, okay.
They didn't do that for helmets.
Why?
I don't know. It is one of the other mysteries. Nobody can explain why does team Wendy and Opscore and Gavion, why are those helmets approved, but other helmets like Marom Dolphine helmets are not approved, or armor unlimited helmets are not approved. It doesn't make any sense to me.
You're not the first person to…
That's why there are theories about corruption because there's no logical explanation. It could be butt covering. It could be some... I don't know. I don't know what it is.
You're not the first person to mention to me this company, Team Wendy. I'm just very curious, do you have any idea how the company named Team Wendy got the name Team Wendy? It's a completely irrelevant question, but I just can't help myself.
I don't know, and I don't think it's the best name ever for a helmet company, but I'll say the following. For many months, they've been the company that has had the most available IDF-approved helmets, and we have happily paid them $1,053 per helmet for those units that otherwise would be going in stuff that I know is likely to fail ballistic tests.
If the American army buys a helmet from Team Wendy, are they also spending $1,053?
I assume so. I haven't checked.
But there's no reason to think that we're getting gouged?
I don't think the issue is that we're getting gouged. It is true, though, that markets work as markets. And if you only allow four competitors and none of them have a big supply, the price is going to be high, even if they're run by angels. What I know for sure is, let the others compete and let them sell helmets, and the price of the other helmets, $350.
So, now you're saying, which is a third, but you're saying basically that these helmets are not going to get manufactured until there's an order for them, right?
It's not that they're waiting for. They have a certain manufacturing capacity. Even if we went and said, I'll give you $10 million… They can't do it. They can't do it. They don't have that ability. The only way to do this is to allow the other manufacturers to sell their helmets to the army, and it would solve the problem, that plus $20 million, and you've solved the problem in three weeks.
Is that what it is, $20 million, you think?
My estimate is that to get all the helmets needed, it's $20 million. I know of people who think it can...
Helmets, or helmets, ceramic, vests, and eye gear?
Eye gear is another $5 million. Ceramic vests is another $3 or $4 million. I think helmets is going to be the thing that we're weakest in because the largest number of people are walking around with helmets that don't pass the test. Somebody who's very into this says he thinks it could be done for less than that, $7- $8 million.
Okay, but the helmet you're saying it's $20 million, right? And then you're saying the eye gear is $5 million. That's $25. I'm excellent at math. And then the ceramic vest, you said, is another...
$4 million.
Okay, so $30 million dollars. We get the helmets, the eye gear, the vests for how many soldiers, approximately? I mean, you know this much better than I…
It depends. It's for all the soldiers out there who…
Everybody would be protected.
Yeah. Everybody would be protected.
So, you and I both know lots of people. We personally know lots of people who could write a check for that $50 million or $30 million and not even know it's gone. I mean, as I kiddingly say, sometimes in meetings, as you know, they wouldn't have to transfer from savings to checking, right? I mean, in other words, we know people that have that capacity. So first of all, there's people out there that are probably asking themselves right now, maybe people that don't have the capacity to write a $20 million check, but they can write a check, and they want to help. How do they do that? Is there a way for the private individual to contribute to this?
Absolutely is. And it can be done typically with a 501(C)(3) and a tax benefit, because these are things to save lives of humanitarian nature.
So, are there organizations that they can look up online?
They can look up organizations online. You can post our We Work Through Worldwide Friends Foundation. There are others who work through other organizations.
We'll include all these links when we put this up so people can link to it. Okay. And are you reaching out to... I mean, look, you and I built a college. We reached out to very big donors about lots of things. And we know lots of people that can write that check without even blinking, as I said a second ago. Are you reaching out to people like that and asking them to just solve this problem, make it go away?
I am reaching out to those people. I'll say two things very quickly. First of all, $30 million would be great, but we need drones and surveillance cameras and other things. $100 million solves the entire set of the problem, less than the cost of one F-35 fighter. So that's the first thing. The second thing, and here the government and the army are causing problems. Somebody hears from me, we need $10 million. And he says, I just spoke to the head of my federation who knows every top general, and he says that none of its needed.
So, there's a credibility issue.
Yeah. Again, I'm just some guy with three sons in the army from Jerusalem who helps run a college. What do I know about this compared to the generals? If the Israeli army and government would say, folks, we can't deal with this on our own. We need help. The need is real. Work with one of the groups. That plus goodwill would solve the problem, and it could literally be solved in a matter of weeks.
Wow. It's a complicated story that I didn't really want to believe was a real story until our mutual friend looked me in the eye, as I said at the outset here and said, the army really doesn't care if your son gets killed. I don't think that's exactly true. I think that's a tiny bit hyperbolic, and the army would much rather my son didn't get killed. I'd much rather that your sons didn't get killed. But the army is not doing everything that it needs to do to make sure that our collective community's sons come back, and daughters come back, as whole as we want and pray for them to do.
So first of all, I want to thank you everything that you've been doing on behalf of the soldiers and the state of Israel. Your whole life, basically, your whole adult life has been dedicated to the Jewish people in the Jewish state. This is just one more level of that. So, on a personal level, I want to thank you for that. I want to thank you for the time in telling us this rather painful, rather disturbing side of what's going on. And most importantly, I want to wish you and all of our friends and everybody that we know that our sons go out there, do what they need to do, come home safe and whole in body and soul, and that the next time you and I sit to have a conversation for this podcast or some other podcast or whatever, the war will be behind us. They'll be home safely, and the state of Israel will have moved on to better and brighter days.
Thank you very much.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
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"Believe me, the army doesn't care if your son gets killed."