What a Breslover chassid discovered in the Arab mosques

Photos: Pinchas Emanuel

T

he turning point in the life of Tzvi Yechezkeli, head of the Arab desk at Channel 13 and a leading Arabist and documentarian known for his research on ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood, was a gunshot fired at him at close range by a senior terrorist. Only by a miracle did the bullet whistle over his head.

At the time, he was the Arab-affairs reporter for Israel News 10, and before that, even as a rookie correspondent for Galei Zahal Army Radio, he’d already made a name for up-close-and-personal talks with wanted terrorists. He was so comfortably embedded within the Arab world that he decided to attend the hysteria-laced funeral of the assassinated deputy of Zakaria Zubeidi. But Yechezeli didn’t know that Zubeidi, the Jenin chief of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and an arch-terrorist with the blood of dozens of Israelis on his hands (he was eventually included in an amnesty deal with Israel and turned in his gun), had decided that the first Israeli journalist who came to cover the funeral would get a bullet.

“Zubeidi grabbed his gun, took aim… and fired right over my head,” Yechezkeli remembers. “I was stunned, but I decided to try and bluster my way out. I grabbed his arm and asked, ‘Hey, what’s the big idea?’ And he tells me, ‘Enough, there’s no more peace, no more cease-fire, and you’re here on borrowed time too. Who are you anyway?’ I told him that I’m an Israeli, a Hebrew, and a human. But Zubeidi wouldn’t let me off: ‘You don’t consider yourself a Jew? One thing’s for sure, you’re a total idiot. Because if I killed you now, I wouldn’t say that I killed a human or a citizen of the world, I would say that I killed a Jew.’

“Life went on for several more years, but something within me had been shaken, and eventually, it took me far, far from Jenin.”

Today, Yechezkeli is still as familiar a face as ever to Israeli television viewers, but not only to news aficionados. He also hosts the long-running Jewish-values-and-spirituality program Nekudah Tovah on Channel 20. And while he’s fearless and pointed in his news reports, our conversation in his spacious living room in the Gush Etzion town of Bat Ayin, surrounded by seven little children (his boys go to cheder in the nearby chareidi city of Beitar), reveals a deep and abiding faith.

Happily, he says, the spiritual transformation he underwent over a decade ago is still alive and well.

“People told me that many baalei teshuvah find that after ten years the fire burns out, the spark is extinguished,” he says. “But baruch Hashem it’s still blazing in my heart. Now I’m trying to pass it on, to instill it in my children, my colleagues, and in any Jew who’s willing to listen.”

He’s still as popular a journalist as ever, as well as a university lecturer, but now, as a baal teshuvah, a husband and father and still one of Israel’s leading Arabists, he says he puts Hashem front and center.