STORIES: “Love Replaces Hatred”

Former Israeli soldier and an ex-PLO fighter prove peace is possible—but only with Jesus

Taysir Abu Saada (“Tass”) was a Fatah fighter trained to kill Jews. His hatred was so strong he dreamed of poisoning Jews who frequented the restaurant where he worked. Moran Rosenblit was a soldier for Israel who became embittered after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed seven of his friends. Improbably, these former enemies now talk to each other almost every day, sharing a profound friendship and love only possible because of Jesus Christ.

“Do you want a picture of the solution for the Middle East?” asks Moran. “If God changed my heart and Tass’s heart he can change anyone’s heart,” he says. “God delivered me from this hatefulness toward Arabs and he’s been teaching me to love my enemies.”

Both men left the cauldron of the Middle East in search of a better life in America, which Moran once imagined lightheartedly as a “dreamland, where you pick money off the trees.” While they each found a measure of success after emigrating, their views of reality were unalterably changed when they each had powerful encounters with the risen Savior.

Tass was born in the Gaza Strip and grew up in Saudi Arabia under Muslim teachings. Trained as a sniper by Fatah to kill Jews, he even instructed children about their duty to fight and kill Israelis. After he arrived in the U.S., he worked in the hotel and restaurant industries in Kansas City, Missouri, where he met an American named Charlie Sharpe.

One day Sharpe spoke to Tass about a “spiritual connection” he enjoyed, which brought miraculous blessings and peace. Weeks went by as Tass pondered what this connection might be. He begged Sharpe to give him the secret.

Sharpe told him, “Tass, to have the peace that I have you must love a Jew.”

Tass was taken aback by this remark. “I hate these people—you know how I feel about them,” he said.

“What do you know about Jesus Christ?” Sharpe asked.

“I know Jesus—he’s a prophet,” Tass replied.

“Well, he’s more than that. He’s the Son of God—He is God,” Sharpe said.

Sharpe got a Bible and placed it between the two men. “The minute he put the Bible between the two of us I started shaking and jumped away from it,” Tass recalls.

“Let me tell you what the Word of God says about Jesus Christ,” Sharpe said, as he began to read from the first chapter of the Book of John.

“When he started reading,” Tass says, “I started shaking and I lost consciousness and the next I know I’m on my knees on the floor with my hands lifted up, inviting Christ to be my Lord and Savior,” he says. “I felt like a mountain lifted off my shoulder and a joy and peace came into my heart I never experienced before.”

Tears were flowing from Charlie’s eyes. “Man, I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” he said, as he hugged Tass. “Do you know what happened?”

“No.”

“You’ve become a Christian,” Sharpe told him.

“Well, if the reason I’m feeling the way I’m feeling in my heart is because he is the Son of God, then I want him to be my Lord and Savior.”

The next morning, Tass couldn’t wait to tell his 18-year old son, Benali, who was shaving at the time. “Yesterday, I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior.”

“Oh, Dad!” Benali exclaimed. Benali started crying, hugging his father, as shaving cream slopped all over their faces.

“Wait a minute,” Tass said. “Why are you happy for me?” he asked, knowing his son was a Muslim.

“Dad, I accepted Christ three months ago too and I didn’t tell anybody,” he said. Benali then explained how he asked his pastor what he should do, knowing that his father would “kill me when he finds out.”

The pastor told him, “Go back to your father’s house and love him more.” Then the pastor called a special meeting at the church asked that a prayer chain be established 24-hours a day for Benali’s family.

“That was three months before I got saved,” Tass says. “They prayed for me until they made my life so miserable that I had to look up for answers,” he says.

During the same time period, God was working in the heart of an ex-Israeli soldier named Moran Rosenblit. His outlook about life changed dramatically after a suicide bomber demolished his unit near Netanya, Israel.

“That night would be a night I would never forget,” Moran says. “About 22 soldiers died on that day, and seven were friends of mine,” he says. “They were brothers-we ate from the same plate and drank from the same cup.”

More bad news followed. “Two weeks later another friend died in Lebanon and I didn’t go to the funeral because I’d had enough of feeling the pain,” Moran says. Months later, two helicopters collided killing 86 Israeli soldiers. None were friends of Moran, but the mounting death toll left him feeling depressed, “like something was missing.”

Moran also served four months in Lebanon. “I didn’t know if I was going to come back,” he says. One week after he left Lebanon, “seven soldiers died driving the same road we drove.”

Shaken, Moran’s depression mounted, and he tried to drown his sorrows with alcohol at local nightclubs. A Swedish girlfriend inspired Moran to leave Israel, and he traveled first to England, then the United States. Leaving loved ones behind, he found himself in California, rooming with a Christian family in Manhattan Beach. As he watched them exercise their faith, his own questions about God began to surface.

“Driving in the car, the mother turned on a worship tape,” Moran says. “I saw her teaching her kids about God and I wondered, ‘Is there a God?’”

When a friend invited Moran to church, the pastor was teaching from the Book of Hebrews about the blindness of the Jewish people. “I was angry,” Moran says, and his friend suggested he question the pastor directly. The pastor told Moran he was not speaking against the Jewish peoples, and encouraged him to read the Bible.

Later, as he read from the Bible and another Christian book that belonged to his roommate, something unusual happened. “The Holy Spirit just fell down on me, just filled me up,” Moran says. “The light switch went on and from darkness I saw the light, and I accepted Jesus into my life.”

“I wanted to hide in the beginning,” Moran says, admitting that boldness was not part of his newfound faith. “I didn’t tell my friends, but God did something” to change this, exercising sovereign “humor.”

Moran was baptized two months after he received Jesus as Messiah. “The next day I was freaking out because I didn’t want my friends to know I’m baptized,” he says. Then a friend called him.

“Have you read the Daily Breeze?” he asked.

“What?” Moran was quizzical.

“They put a big picture of you on the front page with a caption that read, ‘A Jew getting baptized.’”

But there was a small typographical error. “The Daily Breeze spelled my name M-O-R-O-N,” he says. “But I have a saying about it—I don’t mind being a moron for Jesus Christ.”

As Moran grew in his faith, a friend invited him to a conference for Arab and Jewish believers.

“I had friends who were Arabs but I always watched my back to make sure they wouldn’t stab me in the back,” he says. “Israelis can not trust Arabs and Arabs can not trust Israelis—that’s a reality.”

Moran says he “smiled” outwardly at the conference, “but there was nothing behind the smile.” One year later, he was invited to another conference of Arab and Jewish believers, and this time the organizers asked him to share his testimony.

“It was hard for me to share in front of Arab people,” he says, “because some of those people might have been people who killed my friends.”

As Moran finished his testimony, a Palestinian man approached him.

“I was a Fatah fighter,” said Taysir Abu Saada, the 51-year old ex-PLO man also known as “Tass.”

“I was in shock,” Moran recalls, as he took a half step backward, and stared into Tass’s eyes, trying to read his heart.

Moran says Tass “looked me in the eyes and he said, ‘I love you.’ I can’t explain what that did to my heart when he said that.”

Then Tass did something even more radical.

“He asked me to forgive him in the name of his people for my friends who died from suicide bombers,” Moran says. “It was God’s grace that allowed me to forgive him,” he says. “It was not my strength that I was able to forgive him.”

Then Moran also sought forgiveness.

“I asked him to forgive me for not being able to love him and trust him and for my anger,” he says. “And he did.”

Soon small groups were forming of Arab and Jewish believers praying together.

“Here I was praying with an ex-enemy in the name of Jesus—the one and only true God,” Moran says.

Since that conference in March 2001, Moran and Tass speak to one another almost daily, as their bond of friendship grows without measure.

“Jesus touched my heart,” Tass says. “It goes to show the world there is hope in Jesus,” he says.

With the Middle East caught in a repetitive cycle of violent revenge, many are losing hope.

“I don’t think there is a political solution,” Moran says. “I believe there needs to be a change of heart to love,” he says. “People can only live in peace together through Jesus Christ-but that’s the only way to bring peace.”

Author: Mark Ellis, Senior Correspondent, ASSIST News Service. Used by permission.

• For a follower of Christ, what is LOVE—a feeling, an emotion, or an action?

• What does God say about FORGIVENESS OF SIN? Answer

• FORGIVEN?—How can I be and feel forgiven? Answer

• GUILT—If God forgives me every time I ask, why do I still feel so guilty? Answer

Importance of granting forgiveness to others

In God’s sight, it is totally unacceptable for a Christian to refuse to forgive others. Remember the parable of the master who forgave a guilty man who owed him an amount so enormous that he could never hope to pay it back? The master completely forgave him. But, afterward, that forgiven man roughly grabbed another who owed him a very small amount, and allowed him no time to repay—showed him no mercy—and threw him into prison. When the master heard of this, he was FURIOUS and his punishment was swift.

In that parable, the Master represents God. And the forgiven man represents you—if you have similarly FAILED to forgive another, when Christ’s blood has paid your unpayable debt to God, and He has forgiven you for everything you have ever done wrong—and for your continuing failures to do everything that is truly right and good.

Therefore, we have a responsibility to be humble, forgiving, loving servants of God.

“In a word, live together in the forgiveness of your sins, for without it no human fellowship…can survive. Don’t insist on your rights, don’t blame each other, don’t judge or condemn each other, don’t find fault with each other, but accept each other as you are, and forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts…” —Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison