The story of the Dror is a fascinating tale of clandestine arms procurement by the fledgling Israeli state. Plans covertly purchased from Johnson Automatics, redesigned to use .303 British ammunition, with a production line produced in Canada. The first prototype guns were brought down to New York for test firing (which got one of the involved parties arrested at the border, leading to a whole additional interesting story). The tooling was packaged up and shipped to Haifa, to be unpacked and turned into a working machine gun factory by none other than Israel Galili…but too late to use in the War of Independence. And that’s without even getting into the second version in 8mm Mauser (which is a tale for our next video)!

Many thanks to the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History in Brussels for access to this very rare piece!