Amos Yarkoni
Bedouin-Israeli military officer and civil servant (1920-1991)
Amos Yarkoni (Hebrew: עמוס ירקוני; born 1 June 1920 — died 7 February 1991), was an officer in the Israel Defense Forces and one of six Israeli Arabs to have received the IDF's third highest decoration, the Medal of Distinguished Service. He was the first commander of the Shaked Reconnaissance Battalion of Israel's Southern command.
Service in the IDF
Early years
Yarkoni was born Abd al-Majid Hidr (Arabic: عبد المجيد خضر المزاريب) in the Bedouin village of Na'ura (east of Afula, in the Gilboa region of northern Israel). His family were Muslim Bedouin of the Mazarib tribe.
In 1936, at the age of 16, he joined a band which sabotaged the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline), an oil pipeline running from the Iraqi oilfields to Haifa while Palestine was under British Administration (after Israeli independence, the Tapline was redirected to Sidon, Lebanon). Due to an internal disagreement within the band, Abd el-Majid fled to a Jewish area of Palestine, where he was sheltered by Jews. There, he made contacts in the Haganah through Moshe Dayan.
Abd el-Majid kept in touch with Dayan up until the War of Independence. In December 1947, as the war raged, he placed his destiny with the Jews, joining the nascent IDF and changing his name to Amos Yarkoni.
Yarkoni served in a number of units during the War of Independence, eventually settling in the Minorities Unit, and proved himself to be an excellent tracker and patrolman, continually astounding his fellow soldiers with his abilities.
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This entry incorporates text from “Amos Yarkoni” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.