Christian IDF Recruitment Numbers Affirm Israeli Democracy

Over the summer, the Israeli media highlighted a phenomenon that is both intriguing and encouraging: a movement among Israel's Christian Arabs advocating that their community be drafted, along with the country's Jewish and Druze citizens, into the Israel Defense Forces.

Historically, Israel's Arab citizens have been exempted from mandatory conscription. There have been exceptions - many Bedouin, for example, have served in the IDF with distinction - but those who actually volunteer are a tiny minority. At the same time, many Arabs have complained, not without justification, that the exemption marginalizes them from fully participating in Israeli life.

That now appears to be changing, against the background of a broader reassessment of the conscription policy. Earlier this year, a Knesset committee headed by Science and Technology Minister Jacob Perry approved measures that would draft the majority of haredi men - another minority that has largely avoided military service - with criminal sanctions waiting in the wings in the case that draft quotas are not met.

But the indications are that draft dodging won't be too much of a problem when it comes to Christian Arabs. Their community, at 130,000 strong, makes up just less than 10 percent of the total Arab population in Israel. In the weeks that followed the formation of a new political party, B'nei Brit HaHadasha ("Sons of the New Testament"), by a merchant seaman, Bishara Shilyan, whose nephew serves as a major in the Israeli Army, around 90 Arab Christians enlisted in the IDF. It seems like a tiny number, but it's a threefold increase compared to 2010. And earlier this month, around 250 Arab Christian youths attended a recruitment event organized by the IDF with the assistance of Father Gabriel Nadaf, an orthodox priest from Nazareth and a vocal supporter of Christian recruitment into the armed forces.

At a time when Christian communities across the Islamic world are facing vicious persecution, in the form of arrests, mob violence and bombings of churches, it's no coincidence that this assertive form of Christian identity has manifested in democratic Israel. Increasingly, Christians in the Middle East understand that if their faith is to have a future in the region, the states in which they live need to be governed by the values of democracy and tolerance. A state that is Jewish in terms of its identity, but which gives the same rights and demands the same duties of all of its citizens, is truly a revolutionary development for the Middle East - and a key reason why so many of its neighbors dream of its destruction.