A review of Cedrick by Amit Gish, Altneuland Press (May 2025).

“Cedrick is dead,” writes Amit Gish in the opening line of his memoir about Cedrick Green, the Israeli-born son of Filipino guest workers, who died as an IDF infantryman in the Maghazi “refugee camp” (a small slum town) in the Gaza Strip a few months after Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, triggering the current war between the Jewish state and its Islamist attackers.

Amit’s slim book, so far published only in Hebrew and German (by the Israeli-run publishing company Altneuland, based in Berlin), reviews Cedrick’s short life against the backdrop of the travails, injustices, and hopes, of southern Tel Aviv’s guest-worker community—mostly Filipinos, Eritreans, Sudanese, and West Africans—and their children, with a few segues into the suffering of Arabs and Israelis in the current multi-front war.

A decade ago, Cedrick was one of Amit’s tenth-grade philosophy pupils at the Bialik-Rogosin School in the poorest part of Tel Aviv. Amit recalls that they discussed ethical questions surrounding issues like vivisection, the bombing of Hiroshima, and how much “collateral damage” is permissible when IDF jets assassinate a Palestinian terrorist leader. In a newspaper interview, Amit claimed that he was fired by the school soon afterwards. He admits that he barely knew Cedrick—he was too busy dealing with the school’s unruly pupils—though he remembers him as polite and gentle and never disruptive.

But on learning of Cedrick’s death, Amit felt the need to tell the young Filipino-Israeli’s story. He begins by describing Cedrick’s funeral. It was special. The mayor of Tel Aviv and the cabinet minister for intelligence matters, Gila Gamliel (“who, just one week previously, had recommended transferring Gaza’s inhabitants to Sinai at the end of the [current] war”), laid wreaths on the freshly dug grave, while Valerie Hamati, a Palestinian-Israeli from Jaffa, sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  At the end, a band played traditional Filipino music.

Much of Amit’s book consists of his conversations with Cedric’s family and friends, including his mother, Imelda, who stated that, “Though he was a Filipino citizen, he devoted his life to his beloved homeland, Israel.” Imelda recalls that “On 7 October, [2023], which was the Sabbath, at 10 am [a few hours after thousands of Hamas rockets rained down on southern Israel], Cedrick arrived to collect his army uniform. I cried. I begged him not to go because I had seen many dead people on the news.”

Cedrick returned home on furlough a number of times over the following weeks. He told his mother that he was stationed on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza. “Only after he died did I understand that he had lied to me so that I wouldn’t go out of my mind with worry,” she explains. At the end of each visit, he would reassure her, “Don’t worry mum, I’ll come and visit you [again].’” But at the end of his final trip home, she reports, he didn’t say those words. Cedrick died a few days later, on 22 January 2024, when a Hamas rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) hit the building he was in and set off a pile of land mines, bringing the building down on Cedrick and twenty of his fellow soldiers. His body was returned to Tel Aviv unscarred, his mother recalls, but his internal organs had collapsed from the shock waves triggered by the RPG, killing him instantly.

Imelda initially came to Israel to work as a carer for an elderly Israeli. Later, she was a cleaner at Ben-Gurion Airport and, later still, cared for a family in northern Tel Aviv. She had lived in Israel for more than two decades and had permanent resident status. The government granted her full citizenship immediately after Cedrick’s death.