If Texans find safety in strutting around Houston brandishing holstered Colt 45 pistols, Israelis are more defense minded, at least judging by a new bill just submitted by MK Yoel Hasson (Zionist Camp), looking to furnish every Israeli man, woman and child with a government issue bullet and knife-proof vest. Hasson argues that the fitting response to the terror wave that’s been sweeping Israel over the past four months is not more checkpoints, mass arrests of terror suspects, or the shooting on sight of terrorists, but “effective defensive means to minimize as much as possible the grave damage to personal safety.”
In the introduction notes accompanying the bill MK Hasson submitted this week he writes that “over the past months the personal safety of Israeli citizens has deteriorated severely, in face of an ongoing wave of attacks that included hundreds of car ramming, stabbing, shooting and stone throwing incidents, which some are calling ‘the third intifada.'”
Hasson notes that “unfortunately, the government has yet to eliminate the wave of terror. Some government members have recommended that the public carry weapons and act to stop the attacks and neutralize the terrorists.” But the concept of having a government in the first place, Hasson argues, is that it is its job to care for the safety of the citizenry. And since government has failed to provide adequate safety, “we must take drastic steps to reinstate personal safety as soon as possible. One of the steps, presented in the enclosed bill, is the distribution of protective vests to all the residents of the state.”
MK Hasson believes that the widespread use of these vests would greatly reduce the danger of lethal outcomes of terrorist attacks. “Even though this will entail an enormous budgetary expenditure and a complex logistical effort, the need to provide personal safety to the residents of the state justifies it,” he argues.
Meanwhile, the IDF is already searching for protective gear against the stabbing of security forces’ upper bodies. It turns out that Palestinian social networks are full of instructions on the most effective ways to stab a soldier — in the left side of the neck, where the main artery to the brain is located, so that a well placed stab can virtually guarantee a fatality. Indeed, according to unofficial reports, many soldiers who wear protective vests arrive in emergency rooms with stabbing cuts in their throats and necks. The IDF is now looking at furnishing combat soldiers with a special gear that would fit above the normal ceramic vest and protect the back of the neck and the throat. According to the IDF magazine Bamakhane, 850 such units have already been distributed to soldiers and security guards manning checkpoints in volatile areas.