MK whips out old boots to make a point

MK Yoni Chetboun (Jewish Home), a deputy battalion commander in the Golani Brigade in reserves, went to extreme lengths on Monday to save the last factory in Israel that makes boots for the Israeli army.

Speaking at a Knesset Finance Committee meeting, the reserves major, who was awarded the chief of the General Staff citation for his actions during the Second Lebanon War, pulled a pair of well-worn black infantry boots out from under the table and said, “No one’s going to spin these kind of stories to me; 10 years I ran around with these boots as a soldier, an officer and a commander…10 years of combat and [life in the] field, and not a single malfunction,” he said.

Chetboun was protesting the Defense Ministry’s decision earlier this month to stop ordering boots from Brill Shoe Industries Ltd. and instead to purchase the IDF’s boots from US-based companies.

The move would force the closure of the company, Brill’s boot production director, Shimon Horovitz, told The Times of Israel at the time, putting 120 employees out of work and leaving Israel without any domestic boot production capacity.

“The Brill group is not interesting,” Chetboun said, “the workers are the concern. They don’t have a job waiting for them at Har Hotzvim or Ramat Hovav; the high-tech [industry] is not calling out to them.”

Chetboun said maintaining a local capacity to produce boots on demand was of strategic importance to the state. “I don’t see how in a war the logistics officer is going to pick up the phone and say, ‘Obama, my brother, send me a thousand size 43s. That’s not going to work. As a lesson of the Second Lebanon War, there is decisive importance in the immediate availability of army boots.”