Where have all the helmets gone?

0:42 – GS:

Okay, so October 7th happened, and you’re just a Liberal Arts University, and all of a sudden, a hamal started here. Talk to us about that. How was that natural, organic? Were you just in the right place at the right time? And you really were, at least for us, you were the voice of Shalem. So it was your story and Shalem’s story. How did that happen?

1:10 – Daniel Polisar:

So, it was organic in the following sense. Shalem College was built in order to educate future leaders, and the first step to being a future leader is to be a heavily involved, caring citizen. And so, after October 7th, our student body kind of moved in two directions. We had something like two-thirds of our students in uniform in the reserves, a large number of them either inside Gaza or on the northern border or West Bank, Judea and Samaria. It is, by the way, the highest percentage of any college or university in Israel and that goes back to what I was saying.

1:55 – DP:

It’s a Zionist institution and we attract people who want to serve their country. One of the ways you serve your country is by putting on a uniform if your country is attacked.

2:04 – GS:

So you’re saying that your student body had the highest percentage of people. They all say that normally when you have milu’im (reserve call-up), it’s 80% coming, and in this one, 130% came?

2:14 – DP:

130%, but that’s of the people who are called up. There are a lot of people who, for various reasons, no longer do reserve duty. Either because the units they’re in don’t call for it, or they just, if you say no for enough years, they’ll just stop calling you. Our students are the ones who say yes, and they do their service. A lot of them who weren’t called up use their “Protecktia”, their connections, in order to get placed into a unit that needed people. But that they didn’t technically belong to.

2:46 – DP:

We have a number of our students who just said, look, my unit’s not calling me up. Your unit is about to be deployed. I have the following skill. Bring me in. And in the hubbub of preparing for a war and the intensity of it, if somebody comes in and says, look, I know how to use this piece of equipment, or I’m a squad commander, or I’m a this or that, and you need one of those, and you can vouch for him, you take him. So that’s how we got to the highest percentage.

3:14 – GS:

It really is a people’s army. I mean, it sounds like you talk to your commanding officer, he goes, I got a friend, Smulik, who knows how to…

3:22 – DP:

We have one of our… One of our students was, he’d been dropped from the ranks of the army because of like a medical issue that he had run into. The war begins and he wants to be in. And he just goes to somebody else and we know since this is what I did when I was in the army, I’ve got these skills, I’m in good physical shape. Do you have a place for me? The guy said, yeah, we could use somebody like you. He’s in Gaza for seven weeks. When he comes out of Gaza, the army for the first time discovers that he’s literally not listed in their roles at all.

3:59 – GS

He’s a walk-on.

4:00 – DP:

He’s a walk-on, but they didn’t, like, not just a walk-on. A walk-on ultimately makes the team and is listed. And they actually told him he can’t go back in. And he then appealed the decision, went to Russ Roberts, our president, and said, I need your help in getting back to Gaza. And Russ was like, I don’t want you to be killed. And he said, but I want to go back. And he was like, that’s where I’m needed. And so we signed off on requests asking to have him brought back in. And then it took a while.

4:25 – DP:

And then I saw him at one point. He said, I just got out. I just got back. I’ve been in Gaza for a couple of weeks. Oh, wow. So you got through the whole approval process. He said, no, I didn’t. I just went in.

4:37 – GS:

So your academic year hadn’t even started yet, had it?

4:40 – DP:

No academic year. Almost nobody started the academic year anywhere before late December. We started in late January.

4:47 – GS:

So what I’m saying is the morning of October 7th. It wasn’t as if school was even in progress.

4:52 – DP

It hadn’t started yet.

4:53 – DP:

We were due to begin on Sunday, October 15th. And then so the building is empty. So two-thirds of our students are making their way to Reserve duty the other almost all of the other one-third are immediately saying what can I do to help the war effort? What can I do to help the people who are being displaced from the North and the South? Originally from the South, from the Gaza envelope communities, then from the North, these border communities, and then what can I do to help all the people who are in agriculture, who just lost their Thai workers and the men who used to work here.

5:31 – DP:

And so, literally within hours of the war beginning, the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, there was a group of, I think, they reached a hundred, hundreds of people, a lot of students, that afternoon, and they found space somewhere in central Jerusalem, actually in a theater college. And a lot of our students were in that group. And within a few days, they had organized themselves into what was called Hamal Yerushalmi, the Jerusalem Civilian Command Center.

6:10 – DP:

And it happened that a number of the leaders in this were our students and our alumni and also our staff. So, the army needs medical equipment that they’re not able to move quickly enough to get. Well, we’ve got a guy, Gilad Jacobson. He teaches neuroscience, but he’s like, well, I understand something about, you know, biology and medicine. Let me help. And he became one of the most active wings of acquiring medical equipment, everything from cats, a certain kind of tourniquet, all the way up to these like portable ICU, portable ultrasound machines and all kinds of fancy equipment for blood and whatnot as well.

6:53 – DP:

And so within a few days, it was almost like a branch of Shalem in the center of Jerusalem. They were great at bringing in volunteers, but they didn’t get money. And it’s not a short process in Israel to become recognized as an amuta, a non-profit. And to go through the steps of good governance, or to be recognized as having good governance.

7:20 – GS:

One, you have to get a Nihul Takhin, and then maybe three years later you get this Chapter 49, enables you to get tax-deductible contributions in Israel. People always mistake that to mean you can’t register with PEF until you get Chapter 49, follow U.S. Law, you have 501c3 on day one, you can collect.

7:42 – DP:

So even to get to that initial status that you need, there are a few steps before the final one. The final step that you’re talking about is actually technically Article 46. You actually need to get the approval of the Knesset Finance Committee and signed off on by the Minister of Finance.

8:05 – DP:

So, they don’t have any kind of a legal or financial infrastructure, and they need money. The work is all volunteer, but you want to buy things, meals for people, you want to transport things, gas, whatnot. And so, within a matter of days, Shalem said, you know what, we’ll be your financial infrastructure. There was some kind of regulation passed that at least for a period of time said that any amutah, any non-profit that wanted to help out in the overall effort post-October 7th, could do so even if that did not fit

8:43 – Multiple Speakers

within their normal charitable things.

8:44 – GS:

I think Achim L’Neshech is a good example in part of the protest movement. They can’t come back. I’ve heard lately they can’t come back and start protesting because they were doing such a good job on the social level. They have to start a new charity …. But here in Jerusalem, you guys were the address or were you doing the same thing? We were the address. This is amazing. You did the Hamal Yerushalayim.

9:09 – DP:

If I walk down the hall, 20 seconds from here, there’s a woman named Tal Levy. She is the number two person in our finance department, and she also works in the Dean of Students Office on the financial aspects of financial aid for students. She was the treasurer. For the Hamal. I mean, they were putting through millions of dollars and when they needed to go out and buy clothing because people who left, I don’t know, Kibbutz Be’eri and were staying in hotels here. Hadn’t had the time to bring their clothing, well, they got a check or a, you know, a credit card or a bank wire from Shalem, so we were taking in…

9:57 – DP:

The people who set up the Hamal Yerushalmi were great at getting volunteers, great at organizing. Within a couple of weeks they had 16 different departments, they were taking over six floors, they were transporting, it was an incredible operation. There was one thing they didn’t have, which was the financial legal infrastructure, so we provided that. There was a second thing they didn’t have, which was access to donors. Because these are just like a bunch of 27-year-old Jerusalemites trying to help people flooding in from the south.

10:36 – DP:

At Shalem, we’ve been building our institution with philanthropic support for over a decade. So, we reached out to our donors. I wrote to a number of my friends and said, look, this is something that Shalem’s doing. It seems like a very worthwhile thing. It was actually very low-key. I’m not even sure it would technically qualify as a pitch. But some of them got the not-so-subtle hint. I’m like, oh, you’re trying to help these people who have just gone through hell and back? Or you’re trying to keep our soldiers protected who are risking their lives, limbs, and vital organs for all the rest of us?

11:08 – DP:

Can I help? And so We ended up raising over three million dollars from Shalem donors through Shalem people soliciting the funds and from October 7th through December 31st, the Hamal Yerushalmi was one of the most active of the civilian command centers anywhere in the country. It was a huge place helping tens of thousands of people. The goal from the get-go was to go out of business. The idea was, we’re doing functions that should be performed by the government. The government isn’t able to respond quickly enough.

11:50 – DP:

We’re not going to tell somebody who’s just come in from Ner Oz, would you mind waiting a few weeks before you get your first hot meal? The municipality’s got to get up to speed and the national government even more slowly. So, we’re going to act as quickly as we can act. And as there are areas that others can take over, we’re going to hand them over because that’s the way that things should work. It took us until December 31st, more or less, to be able to hand everything over in a way that we felt comfortable with.

12:24 – DP:

So the Jerusalem municipality stepped up to the plate. The national government did, other elements, like long-term organizations, not something that grew up overnight, stepped in.

GS: The regular suspects were able to then do their job.

DP: The organizations that are built, that have the infrastructure, and that have the legal structure, and that have the donor base, and that have the volunteer base, to do these kinds of things. Ours was also largely drawn from students and young people.

12:58 – DP:

Not exclusively, there were also older people volunteering, but it was the perfect thing until the colleges and universities began. Most universities in Israel began their studies in late December, meaning they postponed by two and a half months. And so most of the people who would have been the volunteers were back to school at around the same time that we were able to hand over the key functions to others. So that was the chapter of the Jerusalem Civilian Command Center.

13:29 – GS:

It’s an amazing story and hopefully you’ll write it up one day. I mean it’s part of Shalem’s basically… I mean you were in the right place at the right time, but my sense is it was who you were and who your students were that enabled you to act.

13:44 – DP:

It was our students. It was our students and our alumni and our staff. The leadership team had a very simple thing, okay, this great…

13:51 – GS:

Don’t get in their way and give them money.

13:53 – DP:

Yeah, like these amazing people are doing amazing things at a time the country needs it. We are blessed with incredible donors. Let’s reach out. And if the donors had said no, we wouldn’t have been able to do very much. And the donors said yes, and some of them came through. As you said, we never got a grant from PEF, all of a sudden $50,000 is in. We had this basic policy, money cannot sit in an account. It’s like the opposite of normal conservative policy. Normally you want to keep some rainy-day money.

14:22 – DP:

In this case, the instructions were, once the money clears in the account, there’s no good reason for it to sit there for more than 48 hours because somebody needs a meal, somebody needs transportation, soldiers on the front lines. Already starting to rain. Rains came fairly early this year. It’s already starting to rain. They don’t have… They don’t have rain jackets. They don’t have rain suits. They don’t have decent boots. They don’t have… They don’t have any… They don’t have almost any of the basics that they need.

14:54 – DP:

So, the moment you have the money, turn it into gear, turn it into food, turn it into fuel, and send it out.

15:00 – GS:

So, let’s talk about the next time we heard from you, which is the Meitarim Lacheish.

15:04 – Multiple Speakers

Is it Lachish?

15:05 – DP:

Yeah. So there were a couple of people who were working within the Jerusalem Civilian Command Center on helping out army, helping the army. You were involved in that.

15:19 – Hannah Lieberman

I wasn’t directly involved. I kind of started it on my own. The same thing happened to me that I didn’t get called up by my unit for Miluim (Reserves). I was working like full-time in high-tech. And people through the Shalem WhatsApp group just started reaching out and saying, there’s this unit up North, they don’t have anything there. They just got sent literally that day. They didn’t even have socks. They didn’t have time to pack anything from home. And I just started going out in…

15:55 – Multiple Speakers

A women’s unit?

15:57 – GS:

No, no, no.

15:57 – Multiple Speakers

No, just a unit?

15:58 – Hannah Lieberman

Yeah, a regular unit. So just started buying tents and little mattresses for them to sleep on, just really basic things initially.

16:07 – GS

And when was this?

HL: This was in Jerusalem.

GS: But when?

16:11 – GS:

October 9. So this is about the same time?

16:14 – Multiple Speakers

Yeah.

16:14 – Hannah Lieberman

So I just kind of started doing it independently and then I started working a little bit more with the civilian command while I was still working full-time.

16:25 – DP:

I didn’t realize you were doing that while working full-time. Wow. Okay, so Hannah was doing that and then another woman, Lior Haskal, was working with the Jerusalem Civilian Command Center to help the soldiers to get different kinds of gear.

16:39 – GS:

And I was… Jerusalem Civilian Command Center, what is that?

16:43 – DP:

That’s not your Hamal, is it? It’s a translation of Hamal. Okay, good. It’s a bad translation. Okay, good, good. Hamal technically means war room. War room, yeah. But, which is a term taken from the army, but all of these things around the country were called war rooms. Got it. We said civilian to make it clear we’re not buying guns.

17:00 – GS

Okay, and that’s important for us.

17:02 – DP:

Yeah. So… In parallel to what Hannah was doing first on her own and then with the Civilian Command Center and what Lior Haskal was doing with the Civilian Command Center, I was spending the first several weeks of the war outfitting the units of my three sons, all of whom were called up, all of whom went into Gaza …. the two younger ones are still there. And they and their 300 closest friends got almost none of the gear that you need to protect your life when you’re on the front line. So the helmets were subpar, probably wouldn’t pass a ballistics test.

17:40 – DP:

They didn’t have ceramic plates. They didn’t have knee pads, which you desperately need if you’re kneeling in ambushes. They didn’t have tactical gloves that you need if you’re holding a weapon. They didn’t have fire-resistant uniforms.

17:53 – Multiple Speakers

They had virtually nothing.

17:54 – GS:

Was this a distribution problem, that they were called up too quickly for the storage rooms to be emptied? Or they had, but they had antiquated equipment?

18:04 – DP:

The storage rooms, the famous yamachim as they’re called, were missing equipment and a lot of what they had was no good. A student of ours was just in my office yesterday saying, here’s what happened. On day one, it was called October 8th, we get to the Yamach, the storage room, we open it up, there’s a sticker there saying that it had been inspected by such and such only weeks before. And he’d gotten there to put the sticker in, but one of the most crucial pieces of equipment you need is you have to have a can, you have to have a water carrier.

18:39 – DP:

Because otherwise you could dehydrate, you’re in these war conditions, right? It’s not like you can just turn on the tap wherever you are. He said, I remember it vividly. Each soldier comes in, proudly gets one of these, it’s called a shluker in Hebrew, it’s like a water carrying unit. Fills it and immediately they start leaking and then there was just a pile of these on the on the ground and I said how many of them were good? He said zero and I asked well and he said it

19:09 – GS:

took weeks for us to get them he said meaning the army came through he said what army um private donations this is a cataclysmic failure massive and at the I think you’ve written about this in a recent article that talks about donor fatigue we’ll get to that in a second but When the the next day the quote-unquote next day when everybody looks into the security failures of intelligence failure The failure of the equipment. I mean …..  I go around we go around the country and we go to an old age home, we go to a children’s breakfast, whatever it is, and we go, why isn’t the government helping?

19:47 – GS:

Over many years. Defense. “The government needs the money to defend us”. So where is the money? Where was it spent? And I mean it’s an amazing story what you did what a foreign Jew we did to descend all this That’s the good news. Yeah, the bad news is this was a

DP: Cataclysmic failure cataclysmic failure Where did the money go?

20:09 – DP:

F-35s and their cover tanks meaning an f-35 I hadn’t bought one for myself recently, but it’s a state-of-the-art airplane probably the money that one of those costs could provide helmets for every soldier in the army. It went for these big ticket… You win wars with tanks and planes and artillery and well-trained, highly motivated troops. And Israel has those. But if you also want the maximum number of your soldiers to come home alive, and unmaimed, then you need all this personal protection.

20:50 – GS:

Well, and these are experts that know all this. I mean, we shouldn’t be telling, we don’t need a professor of humanities at Shalem to teach us this lesson. That’s the challenge.

21:02 – DP:

Hopefully the money is all accounted for in terms of your f-15s and it was just misspent money But I have no reason to think that the Israeli army is any more corrupt than any other large body that’s spending a lot of money not 100% of which will get to where it should go, but the vast majority I don’t think the it’s this is not a situation like Russia or Ukraine Where if the reason that Russia’s army doesn’t have

21:25 – GS:

what it needs …. thank God is because it’s such a massively corrupt society your guess is when that Second-guessing occurs. It’ll be where the money was allocated more than that It was but anyway,…

21:33 – Hannah Lieberman

The call-up also was completely unprecedented both in how many troops were called up and actually needed and again people 130% showed up like you said people my my sister’s husband is high up in one of the Italians and they had people showing up with nothing that hadn’t been there for 10 years. So there’s some people that they didn’t even have in mind to prepare for came and needed to be outfitted. So that’s part of it.

22:06 – Hannah Lieberman

And there’s other just Milwim before prior to October 7, the army thinks 10 times before calling up a battalion of Milium for training because it’s very expensive. So that’s also the amount of money that has been spent now on the reserves is astronomical. So, I think personnel and the big ticket items is where the money is spent.

22:29 – DP:

So I’m spending the first several weeks just outfitting 300 soldiers who happen to include my own three boys and they’re…..  in one case, an entire company, in another case, an entire platoon, in another case, an entire medical team.

22:44 – GS:

Your experience was duplicated pretty much by every parent, probably, who’s getting calls from their kids saying, I don’t have equipment. It’s crazy what was going on.

22:51 – DP:

Completely crazy. But we figured by the time we’re done, you know, we took our 300 soldiers. That’s not bad for one couple. Probably the other parents are taking care of the other the others and maybe the army is actually coming through on its promise that every soldier has or will soon have everything they need. And then somehow I got in touch with Hannah and Lior, they got in touch with, I don’t remember quite how the Shidduch was made, and I remember saying to them, you know, I’ve started getting these calls from people saying, Hey, we heard that you’re really good at getting gear, and such and such unit also is missing gear.

23:29 – DP:

Could you help them? To what extent is this just like a couple of outliers? And so they said, well, we’re actually getting a lot of those calls, and we’ve started to put together a list. So I’m a very conventional thinker. I can’t think about numbers without a spreadsheet. So I say, I want a spreadsheet. Shows on the right side, because this is a right-to-left document, every unit we know of in Gaza that’s missing some essential piece of equipment. I’m not talking about the nice-to-haves.

23:54 – DP:

I’m not talking about the things that make them much more comfortable. I’m talking about the things that save your life, your vision, your hearing. The things that enable you to come back as a whole person. And let’s just see what that looks like, Very quickly, it was a list of 39 different units. Everything from individual squads within the Duvdevan Anti-Terror Commando Unit, all the way up to 870 soldiers in the Elite Ya’alom Combat Engineering Division. Not a single one of whom had a proper tactical helmet.

24:31 – DP:

And so we create this massive, there are like 14 essential items across the top, 39 units down the right side. If we know of this many units, let’s assume the actual number is triple this. And there are needs we don’t know.

24:45 – Multiple Speakers

Isn’t there someone in the government with the same spreadsheet?

24:48 – DP:

Here’s the absolutely frightening thing. When I’ve said to some very serious people. Well, you know, the only people who have better information than we do is the army….. I’ve seen what the army has. You have better information because the army’s point of view which I will have a tremendous amount to say on the day after, and for the moment I try not to spend too much time on it, the army’s point of view remains, every soldier has everything they need. Meaning, I’m getting calls from units, Hannah’s getting calls, she’s visiting units, she’s like going, she’s going Bashetach, out into the field, she’s talking to people, she’s looking at a junkie helmet that is 20, 30 years old, it is, very heavy, doesn’t fit properly, and can’t have attached to it night vision equipment, or flashlights, or any of the other things that you might want on a helmet.

25:45 – DP:

And if the five of us went into Gaza for a day trip, for a picnic, and we’re wearing helmets that were a little bit too heavy, not a big deal, probably not going to be shot at, and you know, for one day you can handle it. The soldiers there, they’re wearing these helmets 18 hours a day. There are times when they sleep in their helmets if there are particular warnings in an area. If that helmet weighs a lot extra, and it’s flopping around because it doesn’t fit, and it’s weighing down, and your neck muscles, even though you’re in great shape,

GS: You don’t wear it. Or you take it off or you have neck injuries…

26:17 – DP:

What? You take it off. Either you take it off… Or you have neck injuries. Or you have neck injuries, or you have bad headaches. You literally fall asleep during ambushes, because the weight and the pressure. So, anyway, the army’s point of view, though, is that everybody has what they need. So, if you believe, and they genuinely believe it, at least at some level they genuinely believe it, if you believe that every soldier has everything they need, there’s no reason to create the Hannah Lieberman, Lior Haskal chart.

26:47 – DP:

Because what would you provide it for? Everybody’s got what they need. And so we figure, all right. We know of these needs, let’s assume the actual needs are triple this, so it’s $20 million that’s needed. Why don’t we say we’re going to do half of it? And in one of the stupidest things, I’ve ever done in my life, I mean, genuinely, like really irrational, we announced we were going to start a $10 million campaign. And it was on Friday, December 1st. Actually, I’m Sabbath observant, and I spoke to my rabbi that afternoon and said, we’re starting this campaign.

27:28 – DP:

I believe that every day sooner that we can get the funds is a day sooner we can get the gear, which is a day sooner we can save lives. It’s pikuach nefesh. Pikuach nefesh dochayet ha-shabbat, right? Saving lives takes precedence. I think I should work on this on Shabbat. What do you think? I mean, he’s like a very, very serious scholar, been through the Talmud, the Shulchan Aruch, multiple times. He writes back to me within minutes, of course, triple exclamation point, kol ha-kavod.

27:58 – DP:

All right, so that’s the atmosphere of this campaign, and I send this thing out to 400 of my friends, including Sharon’s. And over the course of the next few days, I think we get commitments for about $150,000, which is like one and a half percent of what we’ve said we’re going to be raising. And I remember turning to my wife and saying, I just made one of the biggest mistakes of my life because I’ve publicly gone on record. There are soldiers who know of what we’re doing. They’re counting on this.

28:30 – DP:

They’re thinking because I speak unaccented English and I must know wealthy people and the money’s going to come in. Donor fatigue, it had already set in at that stage.

28:41 – Multiple Speakers

December? Yeah.

28:43 – DP:

I know this because I spoke to lots of people. The initial weeks, people were just opening up their checkbooks after that. They’re like, didn’t that solve the problem? And the army’s telling me it’s been solved anyway, and a different unit just asked me, and maybe that it’s not all getting. There were all kinds of reasons.

28:57 – GS:

I mean, but meanwhile, there must have been And there still are people who are doing the same thing. I mean, it’s the amount of people that have taken themselves on. So, you know, you guys are doing a great job, but you’re not talking amongst yourselves either.

29:13 – Multiple Speakers

We are.

29:14 – DP:

Not among all of ourselves. I’ve spoken to more than 50 people who are doing the kinds of things we’re doing in order to cooperate. First of all, for very selfish reasons, I want to learn.

29:23 – Multiple Speakers

I don’t want to make the same mistakes.

29:26 – GS:

And there’s still no one that you’re coordinating with in the government.

29:30 – DP:

We’re trying. I’ve got a meeting that’s supposed to be set up for next week.

GS: This is 6 months in….

DP We’ve had multiple meetings. The problem is everybody in the government defers to the IDF, the IDF defers to the logistics and supplies team, and their team just keeps feeding them the information. Yeah, it’s literally unbelievable.

29:49 – Hannah Lieberman

We’ve gotten, initially it was to the level, let’s say, of a battalion. Which the commander is higher, but they still don’t have influence.

29:59 – DP:

Let’s say if it’s infantry, it’s 500.

30:02 – Hannah Lieberman

Yeah, around 500 soldiers. But over the time that we spent doing this, we’ve gotten to the division commander of Division 98. So that’s several brigades. And that’s like half the force. Yeah, that’s half the fighting force in Gaza. And we’re working across the entire division. And that’s Dan Goldfuss, who, who spoke now on television. So that’s someone that we’ve been in touch with that he said we’re missing XYZ probably is in meetings on a weekly basis.

30:34 – GS:

Who’s Dan Goldfuss?

30:35 – Hannah Lieberman

So he’s the division commander of Division 98, commando unit, and the Tsanchanim.

So he is above those brigade commanders.

30:47 – DP:

And right now in Gaza, there are two. The biggest unit that actually does any fighting, as opposed to just being sort of an administrative unit, is the division. We have two of them in Gaza. 98 is in southern Gaza, 162 is in central and northern Gaza. So, 98 is basically half of the force and they’re the people bearing the brunt of the new fighting, except at Shifa Hospital.

31:11 – GS:

You know, the question is, all of that stuff that was sent over, was it all up to Spec and was it all used?

31:18 – DP:

We have not given a single thing to the soldiers that they didn’t use. My army service was brief because of the age at which I made Aliyah. There’s nothing to write home about. Hanna was an officer in the IDF. Lior was an officer in the IDF. They talked to soldiers and officers and senior commanders all the time. We have no interest in using money to buy things the army doesn’t need. Because, like, maybe if we had extra money, we would just buy things they need and things they don’t need.

31:47 – DP:

We don’t even have enough for the things they most need. So we find out, would you take Rudy Project ImpactX lens glasses Rhydon’s black of this kind. Yes, you would? Okay, great. How many do you need? Terrific. How many guys do you have who need prescriptions? We need you to fill out this very simple form because we’re going to provide the prescription lens with the clip-on that then goes inside the glasses. So we don’t give out anything that we haven’t vetted. Again, I’m not a big expert on these things.

32:21 – DP:

I know something about raising money and something about cooperating with other groups. Hanna and Lior know the stuff backwards and forwards, so they have conversations. What about this spec? What about this spec? Would it be better to get this? We can also get this. This will take two weeks longer, but we can get it. Would you rather have this one sooner? All the groups that are doing it well are doing this.

32:42 – GS:

So you can make the case that all these commissions need to wait till the end of the war and will have due time. This is the war. I mean, if a front opens up in Lebanon, all of this stuff will be needed on steroids. The government needs to address this now. You’re having meetings. Do they have to be presented publicly with a bill that says, this is how much money has been spent. This is how much goods and services have been sent over. It’s a Busha (Embarissment).

33:12 – DP:

It’s a dispute within the set of people who do what we do. There is a point of view that says we have to “out” the government. We have to not kick them out, but we have to make this public.

33:23 – GS

Maybe kick them out too, but certainly “out” them.

33:26 – DP:

Yes. I’m not on that side. And the reason I’m not on that side is because there are voices raised in places like Washington. Maybe Israel can’t even win this war. Maybe they don’t know what they’re doing. We should stop them from going to Rafiach. They don’t have a plan. I don’t want to be responsible for newspaper headlines in Hebrew that are converted into newspaper headlines in English within 24 hours that basically say our army is incompetent. Because it’s only going to undermine the support that has been incredibly vital and will remain incredibly vital.

33:57 – DP:

With all the talk now about the split, there’s still these articles about the weapons that the U.S. Is approving for Israel. I don’t want to undermine that. And that’s number one. Number two, I don’t think the government would care.

34:08 – GS:

In the meanwhile, we’re enabling the government.

34:13 – DP:

The government is going to fail in this in any event. For me, the only question is how many soldiers come home with their vision intact? How many soldiers come home with all four of their limbs? And if I had a way to get the government to do the right thing, I’d prefer to do that because that’s how it should work. I have been involved in so many efforts to try to get the government to do it. And by the way, there have been plenty of articles appearing in Hebrew, none of them with help from me, but there have been articles in Hebrew and in English.

34:44 – DP:

The government, I mean, this government is impervious to criticism about the unequal burden of serving in the IDF. Do you think they really, and they’ve got, they have a party line, their party line is They’ve actually put in writing that any officer who accepts donated goods that come from a private institution, like us, and that didn’t come through the Army’s logistics supply will be subject to a court-martial.

35:15 – GS:

Okay, so that exactly, and is that being enforced or that’s just lip service?

35:21 – DP:

Lip service. I mean, to be perfectly American, my response to that is “go ahead, make my day”. Like you try to court-martial the first officer. Do you ever speak to it, like when you talk to officers about getting them protective glasses, do any of them say, I can’t take this because I’m afraid of a court-martial?

35:36 – Hannah Lieberman

We have, I have experienced that once.

35:38 – DP

And what did you do?

35:40 – Hannah Lieberman

It was, we got glasses for Caracal and I went through the head of the battalion and the Rav sar and he said that he checked and that they couldn’t accept it and I told him we’ve given to literally every other unit serving in Gaza but everyone else has been able to…

36:03 – DP:

When we’re working with Miloyim, they basically don’t care about this kind of stuff I mean, they care about the gear, they could care less about the, like, these are private citizens.

36:10 – GS:

Okay, so there’s that distinction. But people are arguing this war is not going to be over tomorrow, right?

36:16 – DP:

It’s not

That’s why we’re staying in the business.

36:18 – GS:

This is unsustainable, I think, at the end of the day. You talk about donor fatigue. We are not enablers. The government is, you know, and that’s, this is going to be a challenge here, and I think that fight is important. Yes, I have a meeting later this week.

36:35 – DP:

I can’t say with whom, but he is a general. He is the senior person responsible for overall logistics of all of the ground forces. And a very close friend of mine said, who’s well connected in army circles, set up the meeting. And this guy said, I’ll meet with him, but the army has, I’ve been told by all of the people under me that everybody has everything they need. And the requests that are coming in are for Yetziot Yikrati; prestigious gear.

37:09 – GS:

No, it’s like talking to Westmoreland. He’s saying everything is fine. Don’t worry about it. It’s that mentality.

37:15 – DP:

Yes, we’ve got it all taken care of Anyway, so my view is I will try to affect what the government does. I will succeed or not succeed. What I can do is make sure, to the extent that the people I know can put in the money, I have a phenomenal team, so any money that comes in is spent immediately and with the best prices, with great logistics and instant delivery. Like, I mean, when you get glasses, how long does it take for a unit, for them to get to the unit?

37:44 – Hannah Lieberman

Within a few days, because what we’ve established, we don’t have any kind of logistics of getting the gear to the units. We’re working with large units, so they just know in advance when it’s coming in and they pick it up for themselves.

37:58 – DP:

If you’re a division commander and somebody offers you five glasses to protect the eyesight of your guys, you know literally tens more people are going to come through the war with vision. You find an army driver with a truck and you come and you pick it up.

Keeps our overhead to zero.

38:12 – GS:

It’s been an honor and a pleasure to provide the support that we have. It’s amazing to hear the narrative. What went behind it in the last six months, but I think that your voice will be critical when that day happens, because you have both the academic and the other credentials.