Muslim became a Jew became Christian

By Jasu Diaz —

In his school in Ramallah, they told Elias that Jews were monkeys who gorged themselves on the blood of Palestinians, so when he took refuge in a halfway house for runaways, he was afraid to sleep for many nights as his roommate was Jewish.

“I couldn’t sleep for one week,” Elias says. “A Jew is a monkey. They are blood-suckers. That’s what they teach us.”

After two years in Haifa at the halfway house and in an Israeli school, Elias realized that the Jews looked just like him, so not monkeys. He also realized they don’t suck blood.

Then he realized he was himself a Jew.

It happened when, at age 16, he went to get his national ID, and they looked him up on the computer. He had thought he was a Palestinian orphan. But he wound up in a Gazan orphanage because his dad was Palestinian, his mom was Jewish and they had fought.

His dad took him and his brother to the West Bank because he didn’t want them raised Jewish. He wound up in a Christian-run orphanage in Ramallah (in Gaza) and attended school with the Muslims. (The Christians who ran the orphanage abused him, so he inclined towards Islam, he says.)

At the government office where he took his ID, he saw his mother’s name was Sarah Cohen. “You don’t get any more Jewish than that,” the worker told him.

“What are you talking about? I’m not a Jew. I hate the Jews. That cannot be. This is a big lie. I am a Palestinian,” Elias retorted. “I was shouting. I was angry.”

Jews trace their Jewishness through the maternal line, not the paternal.

So he found out he was Jewish. Since he was Jewish, he had to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces at age 18.

A powerful sensation came over him the first time he read Deut. 6:4: “Hear o Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

He was used to the god of the Qur’an, a god of “aggression, violence.” He liked aggressive Allah. He questioned who was the God of the Jews. “The God of the Bible is not the same god of the Qur’an,” he says.

In the IDF, he enjoyed the camaraderie, the brotherhood. “I felt I was a special guy, I have a country, I have a flag. I am not rejected. I’m wanted. I’m a strong person,” he says. “Not like in Ramallah. I was rejected, abused, very weak, hated myself.”

But after killing terrorists in the First and Second Intifada, he dealt with his PTSD with heroin. He resorted to stealing for his habit. He had his own family now, and he made it “hell.” He tried to commit suicide several times. Mental hospitals didn’t help.

He wound up in the streets.

“I was like a dog living three or four months in the streets eating from the rubbish,” he remembers.

Finally he cried out to the God of Israel, Isaac and Jacob: “If you are real, take me or help me,” he prayed.

“The next day, somebody took me to Teen Challenge,” he says. “House of Victory was so unique, so special. The people were beautiful. They had so much love. They acted the Bible, they acted Jesus. It was not like when I was in the IDF or in Ramallah.”

The Teen Challenge rehab workers were patient with Elias for many years. “They never gave up on me,” he says.

After eight years, Elias “surrendered” to God. It was a step beyond merely believing in God.

“God I know nothing,” he finally relinquished. “Let’s just give you everything.”

Finally, he found a Father. (He had met his father, who was ambivalent about meeting him. His mother received him equally coldly.)

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