*How Flatbush’s Joseph Cohen became East Jerusalem’s Yousef Khatab is story laced with irony
By Mitch Potter
MIDDLE EAST BUREAU
JERUSALEM AT FIRST glance, the scene is everything one might expect from a family of American-born Jews living in Israel.
Dad is pouring Coca-Cola. Mom is laying out snacks, taking pains to ensure her uninvited guests feel welcome. The four children are curled around the television, enthralled by a cartoon episode of that modern stone-age family so familiar to North America.
But wait a moment. The star of this show is “Farid Flintstone” and his voice comes in dubbed Arabic. The holy verses hanging from the walls aren’t the least bit Judaic. And the tiny walkup apartment is in Palestinian East Jerusalem.
Welcome to the unlikely world of a man called Yousef Khatab - or Joseph Cohen, depending on who is calling.
At 34, Khatab still speaks English in the tangy tongue of his native Brooklyn. But that is his only connection to the life he left behind in a single, astonishing leap of faith.
Khatab has declared himself forever a man of Islam, trading sides in the midst of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict he sees very much as “us versus them.”
The fateful decision to convert came nearly two years ago, shortly after the onset of the current Palestinian uprising in September, 2000. And in the context of continuing violence, what might otherwise have been a deeply personal and private spiritual shift has blown into something far more political and public.
“All I ask is that you be fair and don’t try to turn me into a terrorist,” says Khatab, agreeing to an interview provided his location is not revealed.
He has moved his family twice in his short time in East Jerusalem, citing security concerns. He was found for this interview after a circuitous search, knocking on doors of various Muslim clerics.
“I don’t normally talk to the Western press,” Khatab says, “because they seem to work in conjunction with the Entity. They make us all look like we’re evil.”
By “Entity,” he means Israel. In even refusing to speak the word aloud, one gets a sense of how profoundly his views have changed.
Khatab’s long, strange journey began in the Flatbush area of
Brooklyn, where he was raised in a Jewish family he describes as not particularly religious.
At 17, he began looking for a deeper relationship with God “because I believed there was something greater in this life than just working and watching videos at home.”
Khatab says he dove deep into all schools of Jewish faith, visiting Israel as a Yeshiva student at 18 before marrying at 23 to Luna, a Moroccan-born immigrant to New York. Together, they lived an
Orthodox life and began a family.
But with children came financial pressure. Khatab worked 12-hour days selling used cars. Later, he switched to selling gold tooth caps in a jewelry store on Fulton St. in downtown Brooklyn.
All his money went to private schooling for his kids, whom he rarely saw because of the long hours.
For most devout Jews, moving to Israel is known as making aliya - a noble and praiseworthy act of spiritual ascension. For Khatab, whose Judaic faith was already on the wane, the move was simply for a better life.
“When you’re working downtown (Brooklyn), you’re surrounded by criminals and it just rubs off on you, wears you out,” he says. But when pictures of Israel beckoned, he saw “social medicine, palm trees, the Mediterranean. It looked pretty good.”
The family moved in 1998, aided by the right-wing Israeli party Shas and its charismatic spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef.
Initially, the immigrants were placed beneath “an asbestos roof” in the southern Gaza Israeli settlement of Gadid. It was a poor fit, says Khatab, who requested and won a transfer for the family to another settlement, Netivot, farther north.
Khatab says he soon became disenchanted with Shas politics. He began surfing the Internet in his spare time, where he discovered and joined several chatrooms on Mideast politics.
A chance encounter online brought him in contact with a Muslim cleric based in the United Arab Emirates, who in turn introduced him to religious leaders in East Jerusalem.
The transformation from Jew to Muslim, Khatab says, was gradual. By day, he worked in West Jerusalem at a software company doing a thriving business in Jewish religious titles. But in his spare moments, he would slip into the Old City to meet with his newfound Muslim friends.
“Initially, the real change for me was triggered by the humanitarian situation,” he says.
“The biggest crime was to be born Palestinian, born Arab, born not Jewish.”
But in reading the Qur’an, he says, he found an absolutism - a clear, uncomplicated delineation between right and wrong - that eluded him in his many years of complex Judaic study.
With each passing day, Khatab began to feel more Muslim than Jewish. Without conversion, he realized, he would be living a lie.
Khatab’s transformation left his wife flummoxed. Luna railed to him: “I was born a Jew and I will die a Jew.” But over time, she too reached for the Qur’an in an effort to understand the mystery tearing at her family.
Today, Luna is called Kamar and walks with her head covered, like any other religious Muslim woman.
The children, once known as Ezra, Hasida, Rachamim and Ovadiah, are now Abdel Rahman, 9, Hesibah, 7, Abdel Aziz, 6, and Abdullah, 4.
They are known by these names colloquially, but not yet officially. Thus far, the Israeli interior ministry has refused to oblige Khatab’s requests to change his family’s names and have their religion restated as Muslim on their identity cards.
“There is no legal basis for this denial, so I can only conclude the basis is political,” says Dina Shibli, a lawyer with the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights working on the family’s behalf.
“Yes, it is a strange and unusual case. But under Israel’s own democratic laws, he cannot be denied.”
Interior ministry spokesperson Tova Ellinson declined comment, other than to say that “the topic is under scrutiny.”
A greater irony, perhaps, is that while Khatab is seeking the rotection of Israeli democratic law to formalize the conversion, he has little interest in democracy itself.
Just as former smokers are prone to becoming born-again breathers, more virulently anti-tobacco than anyone else, Khatab seems inordinately harsh in his comments about his previous religion. Though he maintains he is “against Judaism, rather than Jewish people as individuals,” many of his statements smack of outright anti-Semitism.
His embrace of Islam is total, with the ultimate goal of an Islamic revolution covering the Earth. He would never allow any of his children to undertake a suicide bombing, but in adulthood, he says, the choice would be theirs alone.
Arabic culture, he allows, is another matter. Clad in the white kufi skullcap and traditional robes of a religious Muslim, he sweeps an arm toward East Jerusalem, noting the chronic tobacco habits therein betray God’s will.
“It’s really bad,” he says. “The real Marlboro Man is from here.”
Like most Israelis, Hillel Frisch, senior research fellow at Hebrew University’s Truman Institute, has heard of Khatab’s odyssey.
He is reluctant to draw lessons from the story, other than to observe humanity’s ability to produce unlikely exceptions to just about every rule.
Says Frisch: "The most famous conversion of the modern era was that of Leopold Weiss - later, Leopold Asad - who fled the persecution of the Nazis and then converted to Islam, eventually becoming Pakistan’s representative to the United Nations for many years.
"It is rare, but it happens. And Jerusalem, as the holy city for three great religions, likely serves as a draw for certain people who may be predisposed to cross boundaries.
“But the vitriol of their attitudes, I believe, has everything to do with their newness. I suspect Khatab may become more sober in his views over time.”
Khatab and Kamar maintain the opposite, saying their resolve is growing stronger as time passes. Initially, they worried about personal safety when they found themselves the target of Yad Lachim, a group that opposes the conversion of Jews to other faiths.
They moved to avoid unwanted attention, but no longer despair about the family’s well-being.
“Whatever God wants, that’s going to happen,” Khatab says.
His ties to his American family, meanwhile, are now completely severed, though Kamar maintains contact with her mother in Brooklyn.
“My family was turned against me. Very painful things were said in the press,” says Khatab. “Now, we no longer speak. I want them left alone, so I will say nothing more.”
When pressed, Khatab admits there are a few fragments of his old culture that are difficult to get by without.
"Okay, a good deodorant. The stuff you get here stops working by the time you reach your front door … and Hellmann’s mayonnaise.
“And the NFL. I was a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Now, we get soccer. I don’t have the patience to sit for two hours just to see one goal … But my kids, they love it.”