The Uzi, gun of drug cartels and movie heroes
It was designed to help create the state of Israel, but the lightweight weapon has since gained both fame and infamy
THE ISRAELI ACTION adventure Fauda (which means ‘chaos’ in Arabic) is a big hit on Netflix and chronicles the efforts of an Israeli undercover counter-terrorist team to track down and capture Palestinians in the Arab West Bank. Popular with both Arabs and Jews, the series is not without controversy and has fuelled debate on both sides of the religious divide. What cannot be denied, however, is that it is a gripping, tense and emotionally draining roller-coaster ride with bursts of often extreme violence, much of which spews forth from the muzzles of Uzi machine guns that look as if they have just been borrowed from a science fiction movie.
The state of Israel came into being in May 1948 and immediately found itself at war with surrounding Arab countries. Fighting with an assortment of ill-matched small arms, the new and impoverished state clearly needed an inexpensive home-produced weapon. German emigré Uziel Gal provided the solution.
Gal was born Gotthard Glas in Weimar, Germany, in December 1923 to Erich and Miele Glas. Erich had been a pilot in the German Army in World War One and was an avid collector of antique guns, an interest that he passed on to his son. Gotthard’s parents divorced when he was still young and in 1934, after the Nazis gained power and following a short stay in England, mother and son moved to a kibbutz in Palestine, at that time under British mandate.
There, Gotthard changed his name to Uziel Gal, which was inevitably shortened to ‘Uzi’. While still in his teens he designed weapons and soon joined the underground commandos fighting the British. In 1943 he was arrested and imprisoned for illegal possession of a firearm, and returned to the design of weaponry on his release two-and-a-half years later. In 1949, by then a captain in the Israel Defense Forces and with the war of independence in full swing, he won the competition to design a lightweight automatic weapon.
Gal did not want the gun to be named after him but, despite his protestations, it became known by his catchy diminutive. None of the features of the Uzi was new – it was similar to a Czech ZK 467 prototype – but Gal had refined them and simplified production by using metal stampings rather than expensive castings, which would have required time-consuming skilled machine work. As one commentator put it, the Uzi is ‘just a few pieces of metal, one spring, and that’s it’.
The original Uzi featured an open breach with a partially hollow ‘wrap-around bolt’ that telescoped around the barrel, allowing it to be shorter than a conventional sub-machine gun. It used 9mm parabellum ammunition, which it squirted at 600 rounds per minute, making it an effective close-combat weapon. The 25-round magazine slotted into the central handgrip, which made for good balance and also provided an easy ‘hand-to-hand’ motion for rapid reloading in the dark or difficult circumstances.
The first-series Uzi had a fixed wooden stock, but in 1960 Gal designed a folding metal stock that gave the gun its now familiar look. Apart from military use, it became the weapon of choice of drug cartels, secret service personnel and Hollywood action film directors. The most famous images of an Uzi are those of President Reagan’s bodyguard brandishing one, after the 1981 assassination attempt on the President.
Scaled-down versions, the Mini Uzi and the Micro Uzi, were barely larger than a pistol and could be fired one-handed if required.
The Uzi was phased out by the Israeli Army in 2003 but a version is still in production. This latest model is the ‘space age’ Uzi Pro, which incorporates a few more bells and whistles and utilises polymers in its construction.
Uziel Gal moved to Philadelphia in 1976, where he continued to run a weapons consultancy and designed the Ruger MP9, an ‘improved’ Uzi. He died in 2002 and was buried in Israel. As a government employee of Israel Military Industries (IMI) he received no royalties. Had he done so, he would surely have become a very rich man.