The following interview is an exclusive conversation with Eli Moyal, a former Shayetet-13 operator currently living in New York. Moyal founded and currently runs Chapter, a New York-based construction company, while also serving as an ambassador for the American Friends of Israeli Navy Seals. All answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.
What is Shayetet-13?
Shayetet-13 is the equivalent unit to [U.S.] Navy SEALs. Israel has the top-tier commander units of air, sea, ground and Shayetet. In Israel, because we’re the equivalent of Navy SEALs, we trained with Navy SEALs a lot. I trained with Navy SEALs and Navy SEAL Team Eight in Israel. We went to Virginia for two weeks of training. I trained also with Navy SEAL Team Six in Israel. We work a lot together. It’s practically the same unit.
The way to use it is different because of the way that Israel is situated. A lot of the places that you want to go without being known is the sea. If you want to get to Gaza, Syria or Lebanon, one of the only ways to get there without being noticed is through the sea. That’s how Shayetet developed their fighting methods and the skills and the tools that they have today to be able to get to certain places without being noticed.
The difference between the Navy SEALs and Shayetet is a big one. In Israel, everyone knows that they have to go to the military. In Israel, you have a broader pool; everyone goes to the military. The smart kids, the less smart kids, the ones that come from good families, the ones that come from rough beginnings. If you have money, if you don’t have money, everyone goes to the military and everyone wants to go to the best units.
If you ask most 18-year-old kids before they go to the military if they want to go to combat, Shayetet is like a top two unit. In the US, it’s a little bit different because the pool is smaller. Not everyone goes to the military from the get-go. The type of people that get to the Navy SEALs, which is the top unit in the American military, is not the same quality of people that goes in Israel, because in Israel everyone goes to the military. In the US, it’s just a limited amount of people that go.
What inspired you to join?
I was always into sports, from basketball to boxing Muay Thai. I was always in good shape and always liked to compete. When I was about to get recruited to the IDF, my goal was to get to the best unit and the best combat unit I can get. Then, obviously, the name Shayetet comes because they’re known as a unit that will take on any challenge in no time and are very, very active.
But the first time I actually got introduced was in our school [at around 16 or 17]. We have a day that’s called day after soldiers: telling the stories of fallen soldiers from that school and having soldiers that used to go to the same school come and talk with you and explain what they were doing. On that day, they showed a video of a soldier called Neil Kritchman. Neil Kritchman had the same path as me and was in the same science class in school. He was the joke-around guy. He started the unit in a short medic school, he continued and he was in the same unit in the Shayetet as me. I remember just seeing all the videos of him and seeing who he is and the stories about the Shayetet and all these crazy movies about this crazy secret unit that nobody knows exactly what they do.
Then I was like, wow, it’s like me, it fits to me and it fits to who I am and their values are fitting to who I want to be. I just put it as a goal. But the difficult thing about Shayetet is every year, you have anywhere between 15 to maybe 30 soldiers that finished the course, meaning 30 Shayetet soldiers got to the unit of soldiers. You don’t have a lot of people that are from Shayetet. You only hear about this unit. But I never knew anyone from Shayetet. I didn’t, not in my family, and maybe one or two people before me from Hadera that went to Shayetet. Hadera is my hometown. It was a little bit challenging to get guidance of what you need to do and how you get there. Not a lot of people actually believed I can get there. But from that day that I saw everything, I started looking online, watching videos and reading whatever I can read. I knew that’s the unit I want to be.
What is the training process like? How rigorous is it?
When you come to the military for the first time, you do some tests like the SAT to see where your level of school education is. They check you physically to see if you’re healthy. Based on all the information that they gather, they give you a one-day tryout to get accepted to one of the special units. They come in for 24 hours. I remember it’s like a mountain full of sand and basically, you start and it’s 24 hours of just running, crawling and carrying weight. That day, there were hundreds of kids coming in and, at least from my group, it was like 30 people. A lot of people didn’t stay until the end. They just quit.
At the end, there may be one or two people that get accepted to the tryout, that is a one-week tryout in in the base of Shayetet. It’s basically the same thing just for one week: not sleeping, going to the water in the middle of the winter, doing some drills and walking with a lot of weights. It was the most difficult thing you did in your life before the military. You go in groups of 25 to 30 kids; from every group, only two get selected to start the course. From one consolidation date of hundreds of kids, maybe 400 or 500 that start the one-week trial, a lot of people sign out. They just give up but you have every year around 40 kids starting the course as one team. Then you start the course. The course back in my time was one year and eight months. Today, I think it’s a little bit more and wow, you can’t even describe it.
We train with the Navy SEALs, so we hear about their course. When they start their course in the Navy SEALs, they’ve already been in other units. They live in a base with their family and they go, they do training, but at the end of the day, they’re coming back home and they go to sleep and they have conditions and everything. For us, you’re basically starting as nothing. You don’t have any scheduling, very limited sleep and it’s physically drilling. At least for the first year, they’re really trying to break you. All you do is just physical drills and obviously some training, but they don’t get to the professional part—six months of like very hardcore drills like Krav Maga, or walking with weights on your back on the beach. On the sand, the biggest track that we did was 80 kilometers and doing a lot of punishments on the monkey bars and ropes. Crazy stories like today I think about it’s like super funny. It wasn’t in the moment. A lot of people quit.
The one thing that is different from any other unit in Israel is on top of all the difficulties, you have to deal with the cold. Every morning you start with three minutes of speedo on the beach. It can be like the middle of the winter. You go into the water and you swim. One night, it was the coldest night in Israel. It was snowing in Jerusalem. Since the sea was too high, they sent us to the pool. But in the pool, the thermostat didn’t work. The water was freezing [at a temperature of less than negative ten degrees Celsius]. You felt the cold in your bones. They did a full night of just giving us the morning swim.
When you’re being pushed to the limits, you can see the real values of people. One thing that I took for the rest of my life is every night before we go to bed, we stand in the U-shape and every person has to say the values of the unit, like friendship, perseverance, liability and more. Then, you have to stand and say all the bad things that you’ve done. In the hard moments when they push you to the edge, that’s where you see the true colors and that’s where you see the values of people. I think, in Shayetet, that’s the most important part because if you have the values, they can teach you everything. If you’re not giving up, they can make you the best athlete. You can really improve in all different aspects, like swimming and running and whatever you need. But mentally, you need to be there. You need to have the values that goes along with the unit and the values go with you forever. Being accountable by acknowledging the things that you’re doing wrong and saying them out loud is a big step to improve yourself as an individual.
We started with like 45 people and we finished the course with 16. In that period of six months, you’re not going home every time. It was like 28 days in the military and 24 hours at home. You will leave on the last train on Friday and you will come on the first train on Saturday. That’s for six months. After they’ve seen that we have a great group of people here that are mentally strong and have the values of our unit, the professional part starts. You start working on your professional skills and tools and everything that comes with it.
What role has Shayetet played in the Israel vs Hamas conflict?
First of all, the most important thing to understand is there’s a certain fighting that’s called terror fighting, which is in a situation when you have hostages and the enemy at the same time. You need to be very skilled at how you approach that. In the unit, you have to be ready with 10 hours in the base and they have the team that stays in the base for situations like that. Reserve teams are 10 hours call from the unit. The first units that got to Be’eri and the other places that got hit were Shayetet and other commander units. A very limited amount of units were getting there, from the active combat fighters to my team. My team is a reserve team. They’re my age at 34-35. They were there at 2:00 PM in Be’eri. They got to the base within like an hour or two after everything happened. They took all the equipment they could and they got on the helicopters. The helicopters dropped them in the middle of Be’eri, a small team. Nobody knew what’s going on and boom, just go out there. The first few days were just like that. [My team] are walking in. As soon as they’re landing and they start going and start scanning, they face sniper shooting at them and then a lot of situations with fire. They killed a lot of terrorists in those two days. They were so significant. Who would know how many other people would have been killed if they were not there at like 1-2 PM on the same day?
As a commander unit and one of the only units that is trained in terror fighting and hostage situations, they were very active in the first days. Later on, the unit just has the mentality of, yes, we are a commander unit, but we will do whatever you want. The entire reserve team was there maybe eight months out of the 10 months of first fighting. They were there and they took any test given. We’re not too good for anything. It was administrative work, logistics, joining with these guys and going to tunnels. I heard only good stuff and a lot of good feedback for the Shayetet. Wherever you need us, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re not too fancy for anything. Regarding the active fighters, they released that base that was taken over in the first day or two and they were very significant again because of their skills. [They have] the ability to still come from the water if needed, the ability to do very special, precise operations in a short period of time; that’s where we excel. They were involved in probably every complicated operation that was happening in Gaza.
What is the role of Shayetet-13 in hostage rescue?
We had the release of [Farhan al-Qadi on August 27] that Shayetet intercepted. They were involved in the release. But again, just to understand the situation, there are only maybe four or five units that are trained for hostage situations in the military. There are not tons of units that can do what they do. For anything that is related to that, Shayetet is going to be involved in some capacity. There are only a few units that are really training very hard and very focused on hostage situations. They were involved in releasing base Sufa. Shayetet did it and released the soldiers that were locked inside, killed dozens of terrorists and captured whoever got left alive or surrendered. They were involved in a lot of them.
What is AFINS?
AFINS is American Friends of Israeli Navy Seals. Their goal is to support the unit in Israel. Imagine you’ve been in the Shayetet for five to seven years. You get released and you don’t know what to do or where to go. There’s a seminar that they’re creating for the soldiers with psychologists and all kinds of professional people to guide you through what you’re going to do next. They work with a lot of PTSD. One of their amazing programs is called Buddy Line. The idea is taking a [former member of] Shayetet and pair them with the PTSD [patient], who is not necessarily from the unit, but just anywhere in [the IDF]. They treat the PTSD through the waters and through the beach. [It can be] surfing, kite surfing, swimming, or going on a boat. Just doing like one thing, one hour a week and help these guys get out of their PTSD and share a little bit. When I was young, there was only a legend to be in Shayetet. I didn’t know anyone from there. All of a sudden, having someone that had been there, done that, had the same experience as you come in and go on a boat with you or surf together and talk about the experience and share.
You have a significant role in giving back to society. They make sure that you take these people that like I said they’re the best. It’s difficult to say because it’s about [me], but really the top people of Israel and making sure to give them the tools to go back to society and give back to the community. I can tell you that it’s an amazing community. I was helped a lot when I got here for example. People were just embracing me and making sure to introduce me to the right people and give me opportunities.
Today, I can give back and be involved in the organization. They also donate money and help the families that lost their son or family member of Shayetet from fighting. But the goal eventually is to give back to the community, eventually to Israel and support these people to go back, have significant roles in life and make sure that they don’t get lost. It’s about keeping the Jewish community together as well. I feel like there are a lot of important nonprofits there. I support practically all of them because at the end what it does is connect Israelis and Jewish people here. It makes you feel that it’s not only you; you’re not going crazy. You can talk and you can share and we’re here for each other and we’re supporting each other. That’s why we’re so strong and united: because we’re working for something greater than us.
What would you say to Jewish students, faculty or parents who read this?
My message is stay strong; you’re not alone. We hear all these loud voices from everywhere, but the majority of people differentiate between bad and good and understand what’s going on. Obviously, war is never fun. There’s suffering in both sides and we clearly understand that. But I can tell you that that I’ve been in [Shayetet] and I’ve been training with other units all over the world. We have values like no other and our values guide us and we’re fighting for good. And we are. We are not demons like they try to present us. We have amazing values. We have amazing people. You’re not alone. Go and talk with your friends, talk with your Jewish friends, share your experiences, be there for each other and educate yourself about what’s going on. Ask questions and don’t be afraid. You’re not alone. That’s the most important thing.
