The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Monday arrested three of its own soldiers on suspicion that they carried out a revenge attack against Palestinian Arabs.
The three soldiers are all from Israel’s Druze minority, which participates in full mandatory military service alongside the nation’s Jewish majority.
The soldiers are accused of hurling a bomb at a Palestinian house near Bethlehem earlier this week. Officials believe it was an act of revenge just days after Palestinian terrorists snatched the body of a Druze teenager who was killed in a car accident in northern Samaria.
The abduction of Tiran Fero’s body, possibly while he was still breathing on life support, infuriated the Druze community in Israel.
The body was returned just 24 hours later. The mainstream media attributed this to heavy diplomatic pressure from Israel, the United States and Egypt. But local social media revealed that threats and acts of retribution by the Druze community compelled the Palestinians to back down.
See: Eye for an Eye: How the Body of an Abducted Israeli Teen Was Really Returned
IDF is a moral army, Druze have full confidence in its commanders
As usual in such instances, even the arrest of three minority soldiers again serves to demonstrate that Israel is not an apartheid country, as so many of her detractors like to claim.
First of all, the soldiers were arrested after a Palestinian Arab man spotted them and complained to the IDF. This Palestinian man knew that the Israeli army would take his complaint seriously and investigate, and so it did, which does not at all fit the typical narrative of Israel being an uncaring “occupier.”
Next, the spiritual leader of Israel’s Druze community, Sheikh Muafak Tarif, spoke out.
In remarks carried by the Ynet news portal, Sheikh Tarif urged an end to the cycle of violence over Tiran Fero, and reminded everyone that “illegal acts against a person or property is not the way and spirit of IDF soldiers in general, and of Druze soldiers in particular.”
In other words, the IDF is a moral military force, and its Druze combatants are expected to live up to that standard.
That coming from the leader of a minority community. Hardly what you’d expect to hear if Israel were truly an “apartheid” state.
Sheikh Tarif drove that point home by concluding: “I have full confidence in the investigation officials and the commanders of the IDF.”
For more on the relationship between the Jewish state and its Druze minority, see: What Do the Druze Think of Zionism?
