Yoseph Haddad speaks during a press conference in Tel Aviv, September 2, 2026 | Photo: Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90
Takeaways
Yoseph Haddad is an Arab Christian from Nazareth who volunteered for the IDF.
A Hezbollah missile nearly killed him in 2006.
Israel gave him full medical care until he healed.
He calls the IDF “the most humane and moral army in the world.”
He says October 7 proved his warnings about Hamas right.
In 2006, a Hezbollah missile struck Yoseph Haddad at Bint J’bail and took part of his leg. His fellow Golani soldiers pulled him out while the fire kept coming, and none of them stopped to sort him by background. He was one of theirs, and that was enough.
I return to that scene more than any other in his story, because everything he has said since is already in it.
A Boy from Nazareth Who Chose the Army
Haddad was born in Haifa in 1985 and grew up in a Christian Arab family in Nazareth. Israel does not draft its Arab citizens, yet he enlisted at 18 in 2003 and joined the Golani Brigade, one of the army’s most demanding units.
After Lebanon, he went public. In 2018 he founded Together – Vouch For Each Other, which encourages young Arab Israelis to serve their communities and join Israeli society more fully, and he works with Reservists on Duty against BDS and antisemitism on campuses. In 2022 the Menachem Begin Heritage Center awarded him the Begin Prize.
Equal Among Jews, Druze, and Bedouin
Haddad served beside Jews of every background, Druze, and Bedouin, and he writes in Aish that “we were all equal.” He credits commanders like Major Roi Klein, who died trying to save his soldiers, with making him a better person as well as a better soldier.
After the missile, the State of Israel paid for his care until he was completely healed. So when people call Israel an apartheid state, he answers from his own body. Israel treated him as a citizen, a soldier, and a brother-in-arms, and he says he is proud to be both an Arab and an Israeli. He prefers the word partnership to coexistence.
October 7 and Hamas
Haddad says October 7 confirmed what he had warned about for years. If Israel did not defeat Hamas decisively, he said, it would pay “with compound interest.”
He rejects the word resistance. He describes the massacre as the murder, rape, kidnapping, and mutilation of civilians, and he draws one moral line: Israel defends life, and Hamas celebrates death. In his view, terrorists respond to strength and deterrence, the language of the Middle East.
His anger has a precise target: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the ideology that sanctifies terror. Muslims, he says, are partners in Israeli society, and he has praised a Muslim bus driver who saved more than 30 people at the Nova festival.
His Warning to the West
Haddad aims his sharpest warning at Western societies. He argues that Islamist extremism is gaining ground there, partly through immigration from Middle Eastern conflict zones, and that institutions often amplify anti-Israel lies instead of confronting the ideology behind them.
He accuses outlets like CNN and the BBC of distortion, and in 2018 he accused Breaking the Silence of feeding Harvard students a slanted, partial picture of the IDF. Appeasing terror and mainstreaming hatred of Israel, he says, invites the same violence Israel has lived with for decades.
Still Standing at Bint J’bail
Somewhere in the memory of a man from Nazareth, there are hands lifting him out of Lebanon. Those hands belonged to his fellow soldiers, and they saved an Arab Christian who had volunteered to stand beside them.
He fought for Israel, bled for it, and calls it his country. Of everything he has said, that sentence has stayed with me longest.
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