Avigdor Kahalani
Avigdor KahalaniArutz Sheva

In an interview with Galei Israel Radio, Reserve Brigadier-General Avigdor Kahalani expressed his opinion on the IDF's recent decision to integrate women into the Armored Corps.

"When I was injured and burned, and I couldn't leave my tank, I screamed one word: Mommy!! There's only one mother to a child, and a girl who fights in a war will end up completely different [than a mother should be]," Kahalani said.

Kahalani also thinks the danger in putting women in the Armored Corps is the emotional damage they'll suffer after the war.

"I'm just thinking of seeing women injured from wars, like some of my comrades were," he said. "I think at the end of the day, a woman's job is to be a mother, and after the traumas of war, she'll be completely different. The motherly feeling, the mother's touch, the ability to nurse and give birth, it won't be the same."

Kahalani is currently CEO of the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel's Soldiers (Ha'aguda Lema'an Hachayal). He has decorations from the Yom Kippur War where his battalion held off a Syrian force of 500 tanks, the Medal of Distinguished Service for service during the Six-Day War, where he was badly wounded when his M-48 Patton tank caught fire and a medal from the president for his contribution to Israel.

Former IDF Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Yisrael Weiss, was also interviewed in the program. He said women in the Armored Corps sounded like a crazy idea no matter how you looked at it.

"If we put two people into a closed box, there's no way something won't happen," Rabbi Weiss said. "We can't put a couple, a man and a woman, a male soldier and a female soldier, into a closed box for a week and expect that nothing will happen. You'll get a little tank soldier in another nine months."

On Sunday, former Major Gen.Yiftach Ron-Tal said the idea to put women in the Armored Corps was a leftist plot to weaken the IDF. In his words, the decision is a "scandal that will harm everything you can even think of, including the IDF's abilities to fight."