Knesset Intelligence Committee Ups Shoe-Theft Allocation

The theft involves athletic shoes, boots, dress shoes, slippers, sandals, clogs, and those creepy shoes with individual toes.

Jerusalem, June 13 – Building on the success of recent operations against anti-Israel agitators, the Israeli legislature’s Intelligence Committee held an emergency session to approve further funding for agents to steal more shoes from such activists.

The Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, requested the emergency allocation Friday after discovering the surprising effectiveness of what had theretofore been merely a pilot program to intimidate or confuse political opponents of Israel by making a single item of footwear disappear, leaving the other half of the pair. Activist Ashgar Bukhari’s lengthy online diatribe yesterday against Israeli agents stealing his shoe drove home to Mossad officials just how important the program cold be, and the experimental operations will give way to an organized program of theft involving athletic shoes, boots, dress shoes, slippers, sandals, clogs, and those creepy shoes with individual toes.

Committee members scrambled to reach the meeting this evening at the Knesset, hoping to achieve the necessary quorum. The measure passed unanimously, and the full plenum will vote on the increase tomorrow morning. Political experts anticipate the measure to pass handily, as several Opposition parties concur with the centrality of clandestine operations to befuddle enemies by surreptitiously confiscating their footwear. Zionist Union MK Tzipi Livni, in fact, worked for the Mossad in a capacity similar to the current shoe-theft program, at one point replacing the toothbrushes of several Iraqi and Syrian military commanders with duplicates that had been used to clean the tile grout and toilet bowl rims of a prominent Baghdad hospital.

A quorum at the Intelligence Committee session was by no means assured. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who called the meeting, told reporters that Committee Chairman Yuval Steinitz was initially unable to confirm attendance, as he was busy overseeing the entire inventory of stolen shoes, numbering in the tens of thousands, to warehouses near the Polish town of Oświęcim to help maintain the hoax exhibit at nearby Auschwitz. However, Steinitz was able to make it back in by hijacking an airliner and framing Palestinians for the act. MK Gilad Erdan was also iffy, as he was supervising the disposition of stolen socks to be used in clogging the engines of Gaza’s fishing boats. Erdan also made it to the meeting, but was only able to do so by not stopping after running down a group of Palestinian children on the way.

Mossad officials testified before the committee that in addition to the confusion that the program had sown among the enemy, the shoe theft operations enjoyed unanticipated success in distracting unwanted attention from more important operations. According to committee members present who declined to be identified, those programs include an ongoing effort to replace everyone’s regular brewed coffee with Folger’s crystals.