By John Abdalla —
But for a chocolate bar, Mohammad Massad might be a terrorist still.
Born on the West Bank to Arabs, he got instilled continually the hatred towards Israel and the Jews.
“Our heroes were not builders or scientists. They were martyrs, people who blew themselves up,” Mohammad said via translation. “In our culture, you weren’t raised to live for something. You were raised to die for something.”
Even though he joined the fight to push Israelis into the sea, he never forgot the time when he was seven and an female IDF soldier gave him a chocolate.
“I was hungry and alone. She smiled at me, she hugged me, and she gave me chocolate,” Mohammad tells. “At 7 years old, I was taught that Jews were monsters who wanted us dead. But this soldier, she treated me like I was her little brother.”
At 15 he was plotting to kill soldiers and civilians. But the memory of that female soldier bothered him. “How could I kill the same kind of person who once gave me kindness when no one else did?” he thought.
All he learned in school was hatred of Israel near Jenin. “Our goal is not peace,” West Bank leaders and teachers taught. “Our goal is to control the entire world.”
He joined the Fatah terror unit, the Black Panther Cell, during the 1990s.
“We were young, we were angry, and we were told we were fighting for freedom,” he recalls.
Mohammad and other youth met the legendary bomb maker Yahya Ayyash, known as The Engineer.
“He spoke to us about joint operations between Fatah and Hamas. Attacks that would kill Israelis, civilians and soldiers alike,” he recalls.
The Oslo Accords of the 1990s were supposed to usher in peace. “But i”It was the biggest lie in the modern history,” he says.
Under the Oslo Accords, Yassar Arafat returned from exile as leader of the Palestinian Authority. The accords granted the Arabs territory, money and legitimacy. Behind the scenes, weapons and militias also came into the West Bank “to continue the war,” he said. “Money flowed in from the world and went straight into building the next wave of terror.”
“I am a Muslim. I will always be a Muslim. But here is the truth. The Jews are my brothers in faith and my cousins in blood. We were both the children of Abraham. We are meant to live together, not die together,” he adds. “If I want to be a complete Muslim, I must respect all holy books. The Torah, the Bible, the Quran, all of them come from God.”
He rejected the notion that Israel occupied Muslim land. “I don’t believe that anymore. “That was a lie, a distortion of Islam, a weaponized beliefs used to keep us in a permanent war,” he said.
“The real enemy of peace is not Israel. It’s the Palestinian Authority: terrorists in suits, corrupt leaders who live like kings while their people suffer. They silence moderate voices like mine. The Arab moderates are the majority, but we are afraid, afraid of Hamas, afraid of the PA, afraid of being killed, tortured or disappeared.”
To be sure, 75% of Gaza, 50% of West Bank and 25% of Arabs in Israel supported what happened on Oct. 7, he said.
“They celebrated the massacre. They raised their children to praise death. These people cannot be part of peace. They must go,” Mohammad said. “You cannot make peace with those who celebrate genocide.”
For participating in terror attacks on Israel as a youth, he was arrested, imprisoned and moderately tortured (sleep deprivation, slaps, insults, standing chained to a pipe) for 45 days of interrogation. Later when he grew disenchanted with PA, he left the terror group and began working. The PA arrested him and tortured him for 23 days far worse than the Israelis had done.
“Each day of interrogations by the PA was harder than all 45 days together in Israel. They beat me with anything that came to hand. They insulted the honor of my sisters and mother with curses. I expected the Israeli enemy to humiliate me, but those I had helped bring into the land over the dead bodies of my friends, I did not expect them to humiliate me or my family. This was unbearable,” Mohammad said. “Before the Israeli applies physical force, he gets permission and makes sure the prisoner can tolerate it and it is according to the law. But here was a mafia running things.”
“I am not the minority. The truth is not the minority. The moderate Arab is the majority, but we have been silenced. Truth is the majority even when it stands alone,” he said. “I once a terrorist, but now I’m a servant of peace, and I will never stop telling the truth.”
