IDF Ordered To Re-examine Death Of Hebrew Israelite Soldier
Image by YouTube
By Sam Kestenbaum June 2, 2017
The president of the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Court of Appeals has ordered an official reinvestigation into the death of Toveet Radcliffe, the first African American to die while serving in Israel’s armed forces.
The order may be the first of its kind in more than 30 years, Israel’s Channel 2 reported.
Radcliffe, 19, died from a gunshot wound to the head in February 2015 while guarding a Patriot missile battery at the Palmachim Air Force Base. The IDF closed its investigation into the incident in January 2016, dubbing the death a suicide and finding that no one else was involved.
But Radcliffe’s family and friends were not satisfied with this explanation. Some believed that Radcliffe had been killed.
Radcliffe was from the tight-knit Hebrew Israelite community based in Dimona, called the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. The group, made up of mostly African Americans, began moving to Israel in 1969. For the younger generation, like Toveet, citizenship is not granted at birth, but predicated upon serving in the army. The Hebrew Israelites in Dimona have had, historically, a relationship with the government that is sometimes fraught, though this has improved in recent years.
But Radcliffe’s death “has galvanized the tight-knit community,” according to the Dimona-based writer and activist David Sheen: “Suspicion that Toveet was actually murdered, and that the army has been protecting Toveet’s true killer, is widespread in the African Hebrew Israelite community.”
Reporting on the development, The Jerusalem Post wrote that this does not “mean that others were involved or that Radcliffe’s death was a murder. But it does mean that those possibilities are being taken seriously by the IDF’s highest judge.”
Contact Sam Kestenbaum at [email protected] or on Twitter, @skestenbaum
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
