If you’ve ever driven a car in Israel you already know that betting at Las Vegas roulette or entering the lion’s cage doused in barbecue sauce are safer endeavors. It’s not exactly that Israelis don’t know how to drive-they can operate tanks and fighter jets and huge navy ships, and for the most part can operate a family sedan; that’s not the problem. Rather, the issue is one of attitude, or as is commonly described in Yiddish: c hutzpah.

The Israeli driver may be divided into roughly four typologies: the most common is “The Road Owner.” Typically, this Israeli feels that, as a somewhat regular taxpayer and someone who has given three years of his life to the military, he has thereby purchased the national road system and may do with it as he wishes. Ownership of Israeli streets and highways entitles the local driver to zoom by at supersonic speeds, overtake other road owners on the right and, if necessary, use the sidewalk, and generally drive with no regard to the laws of civil society, physics, or the penal code.

The second type of Israeli driver is known as the “5 mph Enforcer”-that quaint driver who believes that any speed over 5 mph is dangerous both to his vehicle and to his own safety. Typically, this driver’s car will be over 15 years old and may be recognized by its strict adherence to the left (supposedly passing) lane on major highways. The 5 mph enforcer will glare at anyone overtaking him and will consider it a personal affront if anyone within a radius of a mile uses his horn.

The third type of Israeli driver is the “Zig-Zagger.” Intuitively, he believes that the shortest route between any two points is a zig-zag with sharp turns and quick changes of direction. As an astute mathematician, he will calculate the relative speed of every car at a red light stop in order to determine which lane will move faster once the light turns green. As a seasoned Zig-Zagger, he will weave in and out of traffic, missing other cars by fractions of inches, in order to gain a full car length over the course of a three-mile stretch of road. In the process, he will have imperiled a hundred other drivers, but as a road owner himself, he will pay no attention to them.

The fourth type of Israeli driver is the “Multi-Tasker.” In terms of driving skills, this driver considers himself second only to Mario Andretti. In fact, he is so adept at handling his vehicle that he can place his left foot on the dashboard, send text messages with his right hand, and make obscene gestures at passersby with his left. His eyes will be riveted to the rearview mirror so he can ascertain that he is as handsome as he was when he left his home in the morning. With all those tasks being handled, it is probably understandable that the Multi-Tasker cannot signal before turning or indeed keep to one lane for more than two or three seconds.

And then, in a category unto himself is the ubiquitous Israeli taxi driver. Much like Darwin predicted in The Origins of Species , the local cabbie is the evolution of all types of drivers (except for the 5 mph Enforcer), forged through years of road rage into one mega-driver, Israel’s solution to Tokyo’s Godzilla in sheer destructive capacity. He owns the road and will let nobody forget it (in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and even English). He will drive all other road owners off his turf without batting a lash. He will zig-zag in a way that can only be described by other drivers as a haphazard, chaotic trajectory of something that only incidentally resembles a motor vehicle. And he will do all that while texting with one hand and holding in his other a dripping heap of shawarma in a humid wrap that may explode at any instant, scattering bits of lamb, tomato, cucumber, and tahini all over his clothes and panicked passenger.

This is Israel’s secret weapon against Iran, against Hamas, against Hezbollah, and against ISIS: if worse comes to worst, Israeli drivers will be unleashed upon the streets of our enemies, wreaking confusion, havoc, and destruction. At the very least, let them suffer from our taxi drivers-after all, why should we suffer alone?

*Disclaimer: though I only used the male pronoun, proof of full Israeli equality is that our women are “just as good” at driving as Israeli men, and driving skills are equally suspect among our Jewish and Arab citizens.

Ofer Bavly is the director general of the JUF Israel Office.