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After the Israel Defense Forces rescued Noa Argamani and three other hostages from Gaza in June, the military turned to social media to celebrate the operation’s success and the hostages’ emotional reunions with their families.

In one Instagram video, an IDF spokesperson gives a brief recap of the day’s events.

“These hostages were released during a high-risk, complex mission deep inside of Gaza,” the spokesperson says in fluent English. “We will continue doing everything in our power to bring our hostages back home.”

What’s remarkable about the video is not that it was “liked” more than 68,000 times or that the comment section was overrun by anti-Israel trolls. Rather, it’s the fact that the spokesperson in the video is Lilaq Logan, a 24-year-old woman who grew up in the African Hebrew Israelite community in Dimona, near Beersheva in the Negev Desert.

This community’s involvement with the IDF — the subject of my 2015 master’s thesis at Tel Aviv University — is a fraught one. In many ways, it is a microcosm of the African Hebrew Israelites’ relationship to the State of Israel as a whole.

For decades, the Hebrews (commonly referred to as Black Hebrews, though they have never called themselves that) were excluded from military service, long considered a rite of passage for young Israelis. As non-Jewish African Americans, they were ineligible to make aliyah, so they mostly settled in the country illegally. The state viewed them as a cult and a potential security threat because of their leaders’ anti-government rhetoric.

Inducting their youth into the IDF, therefore, was out of the question.

Today, after much political wrangling, most of them are permanent residents, with some holding citizenship. (As I’ve reported in J., a small number remain undocumented.) Permanent residency entails mandatory military service, and hundreds of young Hebrew men and women have now served in the IDF alongside their Jewish peers.

Logan is the first to hold such a powerful, public-facing role. Naturally, she’s a big source of pride for her community.

“We are extraordinarily proud of our daughter Lilaq,” Sar Ahmadiel Ben Yehuda, the community’s minister of information, told me last month on WhatsApp. “The Hebrew Israelite presence here is rather complicated, and Lilaq’s personal story is equally so. She actually personifies the complex mosaic that is contemporary Israeli identity.”

In December, I interviewed Logan — the daughter of an Israeli-born Hebrew woman and a Jewish Israeli man — for a story about Black Israelis who are involved in hasbara, or public diplomacy. A couple weeks after Oct. 7, the Air Force logistics commander started recording her thoughts about the war and the online discourse surrounding it during downtime on her base. She had around 27,000 Instagram followers when we chatted.

Now she has more than 51,000 (plus another 24,000 on TikTok), and she has gained some famous admirers. They include activist Noa Tishby, actor Michael Rapoport and comedian Tiffany Haddish, whom she accompanied around the country during a solidarity visit in February.

Logan also received an award in February from the Peres Center for Peace & Innovation for “fighting disinformation against Israel on social media.”

How did a young Hebrew woman become one of the public faces of the IDF? And what does it mean for her and her community?

Gradual acceptance

When Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack against Israel on Oct. 6, 1973, on Yom Kippur, hundreds of Hebrews were living in the country. They had begun moving there four years earlier, motivated by the belief that they are descendants of the ancient Israelites and that Israel is their homeland. Many entered as tourists and stayed after their visas expired.

Less than a week before the Yom Kippur War began, a number of these undocumented Hebrews appeared at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv seeking to renounce their American citizenship. Their goal was to become stateless and avoid deportation. Then the war broke out.

The Hebrews couldn’t fight, but they could sing. Their soul singers and musicians entertained Israeli troops on the Sinai and Golan fronts, earning official IDF commendations, along with some goodwill within the broader society.

Ben Ammi Ben Israel, the group’s charismatic spiritual leader until his death in 2014, had once predicted that millions of African Americans would immigrate to Israel and seize control of the country. 

“We are not a religious sect; neither have we returned to Jerusalem to co-habitate with the European-Jewish community presently occupying our land,” reads a 1974 community manifesto.

By the late ’70s, however, Ben Ammi had adopted a more conciliatory tone. “We regard ourselves as Israelis bound up with the fate of the State of Israel both spiritually and physically,” he wrote in a 1979 letter to Interior Minister Joseph Burg. “We will be a productive community for the good of the state.”

Ben Ammi went even further when speaking to a gathering of Jewish leaders in New York in 1993, publicly expressing his desire for his followers to be able to serve in the IDF in order to “perpetuate the Jewish state.”

It would take another decade for the Israeli government and the community to reach an agreement that would make that possible. In 2003, then-Interior Minister Avraham Poraz agreed to give most members permanent residency; in exchange, they accepted the burden of compulsory military service. With this agreement, the African Hebrew Israelites became the only non-Jewish minority group in Israel whose male and female youth are conscripted into the IDF. (Other communities, such as the Druze and Circassians, are required to send only their young men to the IDF, while Arabs are not conscripted but may volunteer.)

“We wanted it, they wanted it, it’s good for everybody,” Poraz told me when I was conducting my thesis research. “I don’t think that it would have been smart from an Israeli point of view to let them stay without military service.”

On July 29, 2004, the first African Hebrew Israelite enlisted in the IDF. 

“This is an historic day of great joy,” Ben Ammi said about the induction of 18-year-old Oriyahu Butler, as quoted in Haaretz. “From now on we will be an inseparable part of Israeli society. Until now, other people sent their kids to protect us. Now it’s time for us to pay our debt.”

The 20 years since then have been a mixed bag. Many soldiers have experienced hardships in the army, including harassment by their commanders for requesting accommodations to practice their unique lifestyle, as well as a lack of access to vegan food. (They keep a strict vegan diet based on a literal interpretation of Gen. 1:29.)

My research suggests the IDF prevents Hebrew recruits from joining certain intelligence units. Some community members remain bitter about how the military handled an investigation into what happened to Toveet Radcliffe, a Hebrew soldier who died under mysterious circumstances on her base in 2015.

Still, the community boasts a 100% enlistment rate, and a handful have demonstrated exceptional leadership and gone on to become officers. Hebrew teens have told me about how they grew through their IDF experience, improving their Hebrew language skills, making friends outside of their community and learning how to navigate Israeli society.

Another major benefit of their army service: It provides a pathway for soldiers and their parents to receive Israeli citizenship, a special government concession that many families have taken advantage of.

A rising star

Logan enlisted in the IDF in 2018 after graduating from her community’s high school in Dimona. She initially worked as a nutritionist in the Air Force. After the horrors of Oct. 7, a friend encouraged her to use her English fluency to defend Israel’s response on social media. Haim Etgar, an Israeli journalist with a large online following, shared one of her videos, launching her to greater prominence. The IDF brass took notice.

On April 18, she posted photos with the army’s top spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari. “The duo you thought you never needed,” she wrote in the caption, along with three Israeli flag emojis.

Since spring, Logan has appeared in a handful of videos on the official IDF accounts. In one posted on June 17, she stands at the Kerem Shalom Crossing to Gaza. Dressed in her olive-green uniform, with red braids and bright-red acrylic fingernails, she explains how Israel facilitates humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza. 

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A post shared by Israel Defense Forces (@idf)

“We have implemented daily tactical pauses along the road leading from the crossing into Gaza to make sure that aid safely gets inside and in the hands of those who need it,” she says.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit declined to comment when I asked why Logan was selected to join the group following Oct. 7. But the reasons seem clear to me: She’s young, she’s fluent in Gen Z speak, and she’s a person of color. Her face alone tells a story about Israel that runs counter to the “white colonizers” narrative advanced by some of Israel’s critics.

Meanwhile, on her personal Instagram account, she provides more raw commentary about the war, often mocking those who are involved in pro-Palestinian activism.

“For the life of me, I can’t understand an American telling me I’m living on stolen land,” she says in a Feb. 12 video. “Because while you learn my history on TikTok and Instagram, I really hope you have the decency of learning the history of your own country and what had to happen for you to live there.”

“I’m sharing how I’m feeling,” she explains about her approach in a July 15 video produced by the Israeli Air Force that’s part of a series of soldier profiles. “It’s important that we speak out and say our piece.”

The work has come at a personal cost for Logan. She shared on her Instagram story recently that she feels the stress of doing hasbara while navigating her own personal issues, including debt that prevents her from leaving Israel. She also revealed she has received death threats from anti-Israel social media users. But she continues to post regularly and speak her mind.

Logan’s upbringing in the African Hebrew Israelite prepared her for this moment, according to Sar Ahmadiel.

“Everybody’s in hasbara,” he said of community members. “When you step out of your house, you’re on display. You’re a representative of the community, whether you look at yourself that way or not.”