A young man who was raised in Jordan and attended university in Syria and then Canada discovered recently that he is Jewish because he has a Jewish grandmother. This new knowledge turned him from hating Jews to serving as an anti- United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) activist.
In an interview with Israel's Channel 20, the young man, who now goes by the Hebrew name Mordechai Yosef, tells his story.
Mordechai Yosef’s father was born in 1945 in Beit She'an, a city in the Northern District of Israel. In 1948, during the War of Independence, his father’s family fled Israel for Jordan.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
“The Arab armies told us to leave so they could go and kill the Jews and kick their a**, and then you could go back and take all the property of the Jewish people,” he recounts. “You know, the rest is history. We were stuck in Jordan, put in a refugee camp. My dad suffered from this. He never forgot. He was three-and-a-half years old.”
Mordechai Yosef said that growing up he was taught that Jews were pigs and monkey and that they wanted only to kill Palestinians.
“In math class, in Kuwait, a teacher would walk in and ask: ‘What if one bomb could kill five Jews? How many Jews could you kill with seven bombs?” he described.
But recently, while studying at a Canadian university, Mordechai Yosef bumped into a man wearing a kippah, who turned out to be Chabad. They sat down for a minute and the Chabad emissary explained to him that by Jewish law, if he has a Jewish grandmother this would mean he is Jewish.
“I thought this guy was crazy or a liar. I lived all my life hating Jews,” Mordechai Yosef said. “I was looking at myself right now as an enemy.”
The discovery led the young man to do more research into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He discovered that $1.2 billion dollars is given annually to UNRWA and he told the interviewer in the video that this money is being misused.
“We don’t get the money directly, the money goes to the PA [Palestinian Authority] – goes to yimach shemo Arafat, goes to [Palestinian Authority President] Abu Mazen,” he said. “How do you think Abu Mazen builds all these hours and buys a private plane? There is a system.
“How do you think $400 million goes to pay the terrorists that stab people in the street and blow up and kill Jews?” he continues. “You kill Jews, you get money. You work hard, you don’t find anything.”