The trailblazing female Muslim Arab IDF major

[Mosby]

She is a Muslim Arab woman.

She’s an iconoclast and a pioneer.

An army officer who has received both the President’s Award of Excellence and that of the minister of defense, she is the first Muslim Arab woman to publicly become a major in the IDF.

Meet Ella Waweya, 33, internationally known as “Captain Ella” (even after her promotion), the IDF’s deputy spokesperson for the Arabic media.

Captain Ella’s unconventional life journey begins in the central Israeli city of Qalansawe, located east of Netanya, where virtually all the residents are Muslim Arabs. Although she was born into a conservative, religious family, from a young age Waweya felt that she wanted to be part of Israeli society.

She recalls her family watching the one-sided reports of the Qatari-based Al Jazeera on the Second Intifada when she was 12 years old. Confused about her identity and confounded by the unchartered questions of a preteen—was she Arab Israeli or was she Palestinian?—she knew one thing: She wanted to be a journalist but she wanted to show the side that Al Jazeera was not presenting—that of the State of Israel.

She had many questions but did not find anyone who could answer them in what is a very cloistered society.

“Until I turned 16, I was in sort of dilemma as to what was my identity,” Waweya recounts in an interview with JNS in her Tel Aviv office at the IDF Spokesperson Unit’s foreign press branch. “It was as if I was in a type of bubble and I was coming out of a cave to a different, very strange world.”

https://www.jns.org/the-trailblazing-female-muslim-arab-idf-major/