Mordechai Yosef was raised as a Palestinian and taught to despise Jews, but all of that changed when he took a closer look at his own family tree.
By: Benjamin Kerstein, The Algemeiner
A young Palestinian Muslim man was raised to hate Jews, but then discovered that he himself was Jewish, embraced his ancestral faith, and became an activist against the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA.
The man, who has taken the Hebrew name Mordechai Yosef, was born into a Palestinian refugee family with one Jewish grandmother.
“My father was born in 1945 in Beit Shean,” he told an interviewer. “His family left in ’48. The Arab armies, my dad would say, told us to leave, so they could go and kill the Jews … and then you could go back in and take all the property of the Jewish people.”
“They were stuck in Jordan,” he added, “put in refugee camps, my dad suffered from this, he never forgot, he was three and a half years old.”
Growing up, said Yosef, he learned that “Jews are pigs and monkeys and animals and they all want to kill you and they’re just planning to kill Palestinians every day.”
While he was studying in Kuwait, he recounted, a math teacher “would walk in and say, ‘Hey, listen, I’m going to ask you a different question today. What if one bomb could kill five Jews, how many Jews could you kill with seven bombs?’”
‘My Grandmother was Jewish’
Yosef eventually made his way to Canada, where a chance meeting changed his life.
“The last year of my school I bumped into a gentleman who was wearing a kippah,” he recounted, “and I told him, ‘Hey, listen, I learned a lot of bad things about Jews, I don’t hate Jews 100 percent because my grandmother was Jewish.’”
“This guy was from Chabad,” he continued, “I didn’t know. So he goes, ‘Your grandma’s Jewish? Have a seat.’ We sat down, started talking, and he goes, ‘By Muslim law you’re a Muslim.’ I’m like, ‘Yes, yes.’ And then he goes, ‘By Jewish law you’re a Jew.’ I go, ‘What are you talking about?’”
The man then explained about Jewish matrilineal descent, saying, “If you’re grandma’s Jewish, you’re mom’s Jewish, and you’re Jewish, your whole family.”
“I thought this guy is crazy or a liar,” said Yosef, but the experience quickly led to a revelation, and he embraced his Jewish ancestry.
“I lived all my life hating me,” he stated. “Looking at myself as an enemy.”
Today, Yosef works an activist against corruption at UNRWA, which is commonly accused of being anti-Israel and collaborating with terrorist groups.
“$1.2 billion being given to this organization called UNRWA,” he pointed out, going to people such as himself and his parents, even though “we’re not poor, we’re not millionaires, but we’re not poor,” as well as “a lot of people [who] are famous Hollywood actresses and models like Gigi Hadid and her family.”
“We don’t get the money directly,” he pointed out, “the money goes to the Palestinian Authority, goes to yimach shemo Arafat, goes to Abu Mazen [PA President Mahmoud Abbas]. How do you think Abu Mazen builds all these houses and buys a private plane?”
“There’s a system [that encourages terror],” he said. “How do you think $400 million goes to pay the terrorists that stab people in the street and blow up and kill Jews? This is an incentive. You kill Jews, you get money. You work hard, you don’t find anything.”
“They don’t build a single hospital in the West Bank,” he noted. “None of that stuff. It’s a shame, and this is the time for this to stop.”
Watch the full interview below (via Israel’s Channel 20):
A #Muslim #Palestinian was raised to hate #Jews. At age 26 he finds out that he himself is Jewish. In his interview he reveals what he was taught about Jews & sheds some light on the connection between @UNRWA‘s funding to financing terrorism & the Palestinian leadership’s wealth. pic.twitter.com/ttIkvJMn0T
— Udi Avivi
(@UdiAvivi) February 19, 2019
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