2023-11-09 01:28:19
In the midst of the Gaza war, one of the most complex missions of the Israeli Army outside the combat area is to explain to the Arab world what is happening in the strip, especially when the number of Palestinian deaths in bombings exceeds 10,000, according to Hamas. That effort corresponds to a woman, Ella Waweya, known as ‘Captain Ella’, a Muslim Arab who has been part of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) for a decade and is in charge of disseminating Israel’s doctrine in the Islamic world. .
‘Captain Ella’ represents realities of Israel that are little known. One of them is the ‘Triangle’, the area of Arab villages that are located on Israeli soil, near Haifa and that are not part of what is considered Palestine, that is, they are neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank. These are Muslim-majority areas, where Arabic is spoken and not Hebrew, and they are mainly dedicated to agriculture.
The case of Ella Waweya illustrates these multicultural realities. She was born in Qalansawa, an Israeli Arab city, into a traditional family with strong Islamic convictions. In her youth, as she herself has pointed out, she wore the hijab and watched the Qatari network Al Jazeera. However, at the age of 16, after working in a hospital, she enlisted in the IDF. To do this, she had to hide her new destination from her family and she had to take part in a special program of the Israeli Army, the ‘lone soldiers’, for those who have no family. Her own identity was kept hidden and not even her family knew what she did for a living.
As a soldier, Waweya was stationed in the ‘Triangle’ itself but also participated in military actions such as ‘Protective Edge’, carried out in Gaza in 2015 and which, as now, involved entering the strip with troops. Everything changed one day when her mother discovered at home that ‘Captain Ella’ had the olive green uniform of the Israeli Army. According to the soldier herself, she had a confrontation with her family until she convinced them that she was going to continue down that path.
‘Abraham Accords’
Waweya represents the opening to the Arab world that Israel was carrying out until the October 7 massacre. On his social networks, he celebrated, for example, the progress in relations between Morocco and Israel, which had one of its most symbolic aspects in the participation, in June of this year, of IDF units in military maneuvers on Moroccan soil. Likewise, the official, who does not deny the Muslim faith, represents the background of the so-called ‘Abraham accords’, the pact of recognition of the State of Israel by Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain that hoped to bring peace to the region with the incorporation of Saudi Arabia and which has been put on hold after the invasion of Gaza.
In her comments, Waweya is quite active in explaining the objectives of the Israeli Army in the strip. The captain almost always appears in uniform, without covering her face and with her hair open, that is, like a Westerner. Her social media accounts disseminate, in Arabic, content in which the IDF explains her progress or, for example, the existence of Hamas tunnels under health centers, with the intention of using hospitals as shields. But ‘Captain Ella’ also has videos in which she explains that Islam has nothing to do with the murders of children, the elderly and women like those perpetrated by Palestinian jihadists in southern Israel. According to her version, the fight against Hamas should be part of the global fight against terrorism. Her final sentences are always forceful. “We want peace, not war,” she says .ca
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