UNITED WITH ISRAEL
Female Arab IDF Soldier Says: ‘I am 100 percent Israeli. And very proud of it.’
by Yakir Benzion
March 29, 2021

To millions of social media surfers around the world, the face and voice of the Israel Defense Forces is a Muslim woman. Captain Ella Waweya hails from the Israeli Arab town of Qalansawe in the center of the country, only a few miles east of the city of Netanya. Although she could have used the standard exemption, Waweya, or Captain Ella, as she is known on Twitter and Facebook, chose to volunteer for the IDF and is an officer in the IDF Spokesperson’s Office, Israel’s Channel 12 news reported on the weekend…For the first 18 months, Waweya hid her army service from her family, but during home leave on a weekend her mother came into her room without knocking and found her daughter with an IDF uniform. READ MORE