Astonishing?
Splendid!
“It’s a great honor to hold a weapon in one hand and the Quran in the other to defend my homeland, Israel,” says one young [woman] soldier interviewed by Al Majalla.
Applause - from a Saudi magazine!
https://www.israelhayom.com/2022/07/13/saudi-magazine-cover-praises-arab-israelis-who-serve-in-idf/
If sincere, that’s great. But it seems like it could be a security threat. For example, in Afghanistan there were many supposedly friendly Muslim soldiers who killed the American soldiers who were there training them.
It is possibly a security threat. But these are Israeli Arabs who fight to defend their homeland. I’m pretty sure they are well vetted. The interesting thing to me is that, far from being denounced as traitors to the Arab side of the old conflict, they are being praised by Saudis - even though Saudi Arabia has not (yet?) joined the Abraham Accords.
So, funny story about that.
In the CENTCOM AOR (i.e. Iraq, Afghanistan), we referred to enemy combatants as red forces. Coalition troops were blue forces, and local (supposedly friendly) security forces were green forces. The type of incidents you refer to were called “green-on-blue” incidents.
Coincidentally, the agency I worked for had both “govies” (civilians who worked directly for the government, and who had a GS-rating) and contractors (civilians who worked for a private company that was contracted by our agency to do certain work). Govies wore a blue security badge, and contractors wore a green badge. Whenever the topic of green-on-blue violence would come up, us govies would make a point of looking suspiciously at our contractor colleagues and moving a bit further from them. This is what passed for humor.
Glad you made it out of there in one piece!