Shaul Mofaz (Hebrew: שאול מופז; 4 November 1948) is a retired Israeli military officer and politician. He joined the Israel Defense Forces in 1966 and served in the Paratroopers Brigade. He fought in the Six-Day War, Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and Operation Entebbe with the paratroopers and Sayeret Matkal, an elite special forces unit. In 1998 he became the IDF’s sixteenth Chief of staff, serving until 2002. He is of Iranian Jewish ancestry. [1]
The Iranian
Shaul Mofaz was born Shahrām Mofazzazkār (Persian: شهرام مفضضکار) on 4 November 1948 in Tehran, Iran, to Iranian Jewish parents from Isfahan and Gilan of Gilaki Jewish origin, and lived in Tehran until his family moved to Israel. His father was the principal of the ORT school in Tehran.[1] Mofaz immigrated to Israel with his family in 1957 when he was nine years old. The family settled in Eilat, where Mofaz grew up. His father’s attempt to open a small factory in Eilat failed, and he had to support the family by working as a menial laborer. His family lived in a one-and-a-half-room apartment and his parents struggled to put food on the table. At age 10 he had to work in construction to help support his family. Mofaz attended a religious elementary school in Eilat. At age 14, his father sent him to an agricultural boarding school in Nahalal in the Jezreel Valley, where studies were combined with agricultural work. Mofaz recalled the boarding school as his first real exposure to wider Israeli society and struggling to fit in and be seen as a “real Israeli”, recalling that “you’re in a class with children from Nahalal who are Israelis with real roots in the country, children of the valley nobility. These princes who live in the big houses on the big farms of Nahalal, and where do you come from? From nowhere, from Tehran, from Eilat, from a tiny apartment in a housing project.” He became determined to become a paratrooper in the army, seeing it as a way to become fully Israeli.[2][3]