On March 6, 2008, a small infantry unit from the Israel Defense Forces’ Givati Brigade left camp with the rising sun to comb the Gaza border for arms smugglers, terrorists, and assorted other unwanted visitors. Israel shares 1,017 kilometers of borderland with its neighbors, and patrols much of it every day. On the average morning, these patrols turn up very little. But when this group of soldiers pulled into the still-cool sand outside their base’s gate, the first of two Jeeps in their convoy caromed over a remote-control bomb and burst into flames. The vehicle jumped, hit the ground, and rolled to a stop. Inside, the front seat was slick with blood. A young soldier lay slumped against the dashboard, dead.
Had he been a typical Israeli soldier, what happened next would have followed a predictable routine.Haaretz, Yediot Ahronot, and Ma’ariv, Israel’s three major dailies, would have run front-page stories detailing the attack and the ensuing military funeral, their reporting flanked by outsize color photographs of the dead man as he was in life, a hand still resting on his shoulder where his wife or girlfriend had been cropped out. Human-interest pieces would have followed— Yediot recounting how, during the shiva mourning period, the soldier’s grieving mother had brought out his soccer trophies, Ma’ariv relaying an eerie story about something prescient he’d said the last time he’d visited. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, the prime minister would convene an emergency meeting of his cabinet to hash out a military response.
When this soldier died, though, things went differently.
Suliman abu Juda, one of several thousand ethnic Arabs who serve, almost unnoticed, in Israel’s military, was buried in a civilian ceremony in the unregistered Negev village he called home—a settlement not officially recognized by Israel. In the days following his death, only one newspaper printed his name. The foreign ministry’s website, which lists soldiers killed in action, posted a nameless bio of abu Juda, a twenty-eight-year-old father of seven. Next to the profile was an empty box where a photograph would normally go.
The muted response came at his parents’ request. It was an effort on their part to avoid retribution from other Arabs in Israel, and from Palestinians who might have opposed their young son’s decision to cast his lot with the Israeli army. Abu Juda had two wives; one hailed from the West Bank city of Hebron, an incubator of Palestinian violence. His parents worried that their in-laws’ standing, to say nothing of their physical safety, would be jeopardized if their son’s name got out. And so abu Juda’s death was allowed to pass almost unnoticed.
His faceless online obituary is an apt illustration of the Israeli Arab soldier’s predicament. These men—and they are almost entirely men—are despised by much of the Arab world as traitors, and feared in Israel as a potential fifth column. The average Israeli Arab simply lives in the Jewish state; Israel’s Arab soldiers are its collaborators. Some, like abu Juda, fall in love and marry women from the West Bank and Gaza, and then, quite literally, must raise their rifles against family members. They are at once Muslims and citizens of the Jewish state; the first line of defense and a “demographic threat.”
