According to the newspaper ynet, Israel Defense Forces reveal that more than 50,000 of its soldiers have dual or even triple nationality. Americans, Russians, French, Germans, British, Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, Ethiopians, Canadians, Hungarians, Italians, Argentinians, Dutch, Brazilians, Australians, South Africans, Belgians, Austrians, Swiss, Spaniards, Yemenis, Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians, Lebanese, and Syrians are part of this list.
The list released by the IDF does not include citizens with Portuguese nationality, a fact that is strange. There are tens of thousands of Portuguese-Israelis, most of them of military age. It may be that the Portuguese were included in the segment titled "Spaniards," because the Hebrew word Sepharad encompasses all of Hispania (Spain and Portugal).
At the time of the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack, out of 251 kidnapped victims, two dozen were of Portuguese origin, almost 10% of the total. To this number must be added 17 deaths of Portuguese nationality, in a total of 1,195 fatalities.
Overall, the Israeli army demonstrates that Israel is a country populated by people from all over the world. In 1948, only 600,000 Jews lived in Israel. Where did all the others, about 7 million, come from? They came from all over the known world. Even OTAN cannot muster soldiers from so many different territorial origins.
