IDF veterans share positive experiences

Two veterans of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shared stories about how their military service shaped their lives in an event hosted by the Hopkins American Partnership for Israel (HAPI) and the Coalition of Hopkins Activists for Israel (CHAI) in the Charles Commons Barber Room on Sunday.

Sophomore Jeremy Fraenkel, an officer in both HAPI and CHAI, organized the event.

“The reason why I wanted to hold this event was to educate students on a different perspective on what the IDF is and what the IDF truly stands for,” Fraenkel said. “This was the best way to do it, to bring former Israeli soldiers to campus and have them tell their stories.”

Fraenkel, also an IDF veteran, is part of an organization called Stand With Us, which trains and assists pro-Israel activists on American college campuses. The two veterans, Gal and Yehuda, are currently touring in the southeastern United States as part of Stand With Us’s Israeli Soldiers’ Stories campaign.

Gal, the first soldier to speak, immigrated to Israel from Peru. After volunteering with the Jewish community in Toronto after high school, she enlisted in the IDF’s ground forces. She said that she felt she had to give back to her adopted home.

“My late grandfather was a colonel in the paratroopers,” Gal said. “He established the IDF paratrooper school and the paratrooper battalion. Since I was a little girl, I’ve always heard about serving in the army, about the fact that it’s not only mandatory, and it’s not only something that I have to do, but it’s something that I want to do. It was a privilege to me to serve my country, the country that gave me so much as a youngster, and I knew that I wanted to do something meaningful.”

Gal served as a basic training commander, a role in which she was expected to train recent high school graduates to be soldiers. Gal described her time in the IDF as an experience in diversity, where members of Israeli society and diaspora Jewry mixed and worked together as a cohesive fighting force.

She also emphasized that female soldiers were not treated differently from their male counterparts.

“[In the IDF], most basic training commanders are women who lead squads of men and women from different religions, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds... I can tell you that my army service imparted on me a lot, not only as a person, but mostly as a woman, as I led squads of men and women without any easier terms because of my gender,” she said.

Gal also talked about one of the most memorable experiences during her service. For her first deployment, Gal was sent to man a post on the Israeli-Egyptian border with three female soldiers under her command. One night, Gal and her soldiers saw three figures, seemingly armed and clad in black, moving toward the border.

Gal decided to attempt to spare the men’s lives, so she called for reinforcements and captured the men. The men turned out to be Eritreans who were attempting to cross into Israel for asylum. Gal later worked in a cupcake store alongside one of the Eritreans who she spared that day.

She credited her decision to the IDF’s rule of Purity of Arms, which stipulates that any member of the IDF is not to use lethal force when less extreme options are available.

The second soldier to speak was Yehuda, who was born and raised in Ethiopia but moved to Israel when he was 21. At age 23, he enlisted in the Israel Border Police, a branch of Israel’s national police force.

Yehuda was sent to the West Bank, where he was tasked with staffing checkpoints between Israeli and Palestinian communities.

“Some of the things we face at the checkpoint are terrorists hiding as civilians,” Yehuda said. “Sometimes they are coming with explosives or attempting a suicide attack, or trying to smuggle a material, or one individual person has decided to come with a knife.”

Yehuda described one instance in which a car arrived at the checkpoint that separates Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, from Jerusalem. A woman in the car was screaming that her son was unconscious and needed to go to a hospital immediately. Yehuda’s commander ordered the car to be let through and to be given a military escort to the nearest hospital.

“It sounds so terrible that we have to stop a sick child in the checkpoint, but that is the reality we are living in,” Yehuda said.

Fraenkel viewed the event as a success.

“I think it went really well,” he said. “I had hoped for more people to come, but it was good, because people who were interested came and asked intelligent questions... People have the tendency to be very biased against Israel, and I think that... [by] asking people who went through those experiences about what’s actually happening in the conflict is a better way for people to learn and know more.”

Fraenkel said that he is always on campus and willing to share his experiences in the IDF, but emphasized that the two visiting veterans were only touring in the area for a limited time.

“I wanted to let them talk,” Fraenkel said. “A lot of people know me on campus and they know my story, and I can always tell my story to anyone.”