Poverty of the Soul

What opened the eyes of a Palestinian Terrorist ? Something Israel ignores to her peril.

exerpt;

I remember interviewing many years ago for my TV program, Yosef Mendelovitch, a prisoner of conscience who had just been freed from the notorious Soviet prison system.
"Tell me," I asked, "while you were sitting in the horrible darkness of solitary confinement, did you ever dream that you would be free again?"
"I never gave up hope, I never stopped dreaming," came his immediate reply.
"Did you ever try to imagine the very first place that you would visit upon being
granted freedom?"
"Yes, I knew exactly where I would ask to go," he answered without hesitation."
"Could you tell me?"
"Hebron."
"Hebron..." I repeated. The words shot out like a bolt of lightening, pierced the walls of the studio, spanned the centuries, and took us thousands of years back to our roots, to the cradle of our existence, to our patriarchs and matriarchs. Today, we can all go to Hebron - we can all pray at the grave sites of our holy ancestors...Today we can all stand in the presence of the shechina, before the Wall in Jerusalem. Today, we can all breathe the air of our holy land, but somehow, we’ve lost it. We don’t feel the magic - We no longer have the vision. We have forgotten our royal past. As for our secular leadership, regarding them you can’t even say they forgot - they just never felt it.Time and again, through this column and my speeches, I have posed a simple question to those who are our policy makers: If we have no right to Hebron, then by what right are we in Tel Aviv? This question has become especially poignant since the ill-fated Oslo accords, but amazingly, no one wakes up.....

Shoebat became involved in various terrorist activities including Arafat’s Fatah group. He was indoctrinated to believe that the way to get to heaven and atone for his sins was to die fighting and killing Jews, and if he did, Allah would grant him a special place in heaven with beautiful women to fulfill his most secret wishes. He had been imprisoned in Israel for his terrorist activities, following which he came to the U.S. where he continued to be a PLO activist. His change of heart occurred when he married his Christian wife who challenged him to prove his Islamic belief that Jews corrupted the Bible and were prophet killers. In response, he obtained his first copy of the Bible to demonstrate to his wife the lies and corruptions for which the Jews were responsible. It was then that he saw the light and realized that it was he who had been fed a pack of lies, and the land was the G-d given inheritance of the Jewish people.
Shoebat expressed deep regret over his past which caused him to be branded a traitor among his own people and compelled him to go into hiding. Nevertheless, he is on a mission, determined not only to warn the Jewish people against the dangers of negotiating with Arabs, but he also feels the urgency of speaking out among his own people. "My dream is to go to the prisons where I used to be - Ramallah prison, Muskavit prison - whatever prison - to go there and say ‘hey, there is a different way you can live from the way Yassir Arafat and Ahmed Yassin are brainwashing you to believe. I want to debate them and tell them why there are not 72 virgins waiting for them in the heavens, or any of the other garbage that is being taught in their schools."
Shoebat urges his Jewish audiences to take back the Land. "You are G-d’s people. It belongs to you."

How sad it is that it is strangers who have to remind us of that - alas, poverty of the soul.
Esther Jungreis
Poverty of the(Jewish) Soul