'You’ll see chaos': Gazan-born Jewish convert warns West of Islamist ideology
TEL AVIV — With his slick black ponytail and confident stride, Dor Shachar emanates a kind of Israeli Jewish cool in the lobby of a luxe Tel Aviv hotel. But Shachar was born Ayman Abu Soobuch, a Muslim from Khan Younis in Gaza, where he was taught to hate Jews.
Born in 1977, he grew up in the alleys and markets where Hamas and other terror factions were local fixtures, long before the January 2006 elections that vaulted the Islamist group into power 20 years ago.
He watched the movement’s rise from the inside; he says the ideology represented not just the gunmen in balaclavas, but the culture that elected them.
“Who chose Hamas? The majority chose Hamas,” he told the Post.
As a boy in Khan Younis, Shachar’s earliest lessons about Jews came from his own grandfather. The older man would invite Jewish visitors for coffee and bread, yet in a different breath urged his grandson to “free the land” one day, by killing Jews.
“I said to myself, ‘how can it be? On one side he invites them for food and drink, and on the other he says to kill them.’ From a young age I understood something is wrong.”
His neighbours included names that would later become synonymous with terror: Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and bombmaker Yahya Ayyash. “I knew them well,” he recalled, describing them as “community faces” alongside others from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and the PLO. He knew that some neighbours — and his own brothers — had killed Israelis.
In the open market, he says he once saw Sinwar sever the head of a Palestinian accused of collaborating with Israel, amid cheering onlookers. Another time, he and his mother found a head in the market street. “They said he was suspected of cooperating with Israel,” he noted. Bystanders were nonchalant, as he remembers it.
He recalled children’s television shows that preached “‘go and kill the Jews.’” In mosques, he recalled sheikhs shouting that killing Jews was “the greatest commandment” and “Allah’s will.”
Schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) were little different: Jews were “pigs, dogs and infidels” who did not deserve to live, and children were told Israelis had one eye in the forehead, or three legs.
“But I knew the soldiers, and they’d given me candy sometimes. They don’t have one eye in the forehead — they aren’t like that. The Jews who came to the market in Khan Yunis to give us food aid didn’t have one eye in the forehead. The Jews who came to the weddings of our neighbours didn’t have three legs or an eye in the forehead.”
Inculcating violence was part of the curriculum. “Every child learned how to throw stones at Jews because they teach it. The teacher would tell us to go out and throw stones; then come back and open books as though we were studying. When the soldiers came, they saw little children studying. After the soldiers left, the teachers laughed — ‘these pigs, these dogs, these betrayers, these Jews, we will slaughter them like Hitler did.’”
Children’s plays, he recalled, featured classmates dressed as Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, acting out the killing of Jews.
Discontented with the extremism surrounding him, he slipped into Israel in his teens, where for a time he served as an Israeli security informant tipping off terror activity, and eventually, a dilettante in construction work and home repair.
A Jewish Israeli took him under his wing, even when other Israelis doubted his loyalties – which was often. He faced widespread suspicions, frequent roadside arbitrary arrests, and a years-long wild goose chase of bureaucracy to follow his dream of converting to Judaism – something he longed for since childhood.
“Yes, it would have been easier not to be Jewish,” he said, searching for language to describe what he called a “soulful spark.”
“Sometimes you feel hungry and you want to eat or you are thirsty and you feel thirsty and you want to drink — it’s what you feel. That I am different; I am connected to the Jewish people,” he said. “I wanted to be a Jew because I chose life, I chose love and not hatred. I chose love, not darkness.”
That decision would mean severing ties with his birthplace, his radicalized family, his community, and the dominant narrative he had been raised on — that violence against Jews was a religious duty.
Still, for a time he was a de facto illegal, living under the radar in Israel with little more than the clothes on his back, at a time when Palestinians required special permits to come and go.
Israeli authorities discovered his whereabouts, took him in front of a judge, and deported him back to Gaza. He spent seven months in Gazan prison, legs bound, beaten, shocked with electricity, mentally abused, cut on the hands, and starved. His captors knew of his interest in Judaism, and his penchant for Israel, and tortured him correspondingly, he says.
He returned to Israel by escaping Gaza through Egypt, and then Turkey, then secretly re‑entering Israel using a Palestinian Authority passport.
In the mid‑1990s, as the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO were being signed, Shachar was deeply skeptical. To his Jewish friends, he bluntly called Oslo “Israel’s greatest mistake.” He was convinced that the ideology from the madrassas, mosques, and members of the political class had not shifted toward compromise, but metastasized into opportunistic Jihad, “decades in the making.” Strings of terror attacks over a decade vindicated his belief.
He watched with mounting unease as Israel’s 2005 unilateral Disengagement from Gaza uprooted roughly 10,000 Israelis and feared the vacuum would be filled not by progress, but by terror. He said he again foresaw how the Islamist indoctrination that permeated the Strip would invariably culminate in bloodshed. He warned senior officials but “no one listened.”
In the years leading up to Hamas’s electoral victory, he added, he repeatedly cautioned Israeli officers about what was happening underground as well. Cement and iron, ostensibly for construction, were waved through the border by naive Israeli guards, while an extensive tunnel network for terrorists and weapons storage grew beneath the strip. The phrase “digging for water,” was decades-old code to anyone poking around asking questions.
For Shachar, the Hamas win at the ballot box simply confirmed what he believed he had seen since childhood.
“Between Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Qassam Brigades, and any other terror group, and most Palestinians in Gaza, they share the same ideas about Jews,” he said. “And they say, ‘Hamas will raise our head, and they will rebuild Gaza again.’”
The events of Oct. 7, 2023, only reinforced his conviction that a poisonous ideology had overtaken Gaza – as he saw when civilians joined the rampage and celebrated in the street. No Gazan helped a single Jew, and hospitals were used as military outposts.
As Israel’s army moved toward Rafah months later, and some residents protested against Hamas, he dismissed that as theatre: “The demonstration they did was to protect Yahya Sinwar so the army would not enter Rafah to kill him.”
He wants Westerners to understand that “Allahu Akbar” is not a cry of war, but to honour Islam. “The West doesn’t want to believe it’s a war of faith. People in the West are afraid, and they’re nice about it, because they are afraid, or they don’t want to accept reality.”
His proposed solution is stark: “The Israeli army must control” Gaza to prevent further losses of life.
Eventually, Ayman Abu Soobuch changed his name to a Jewish one, Dor (“generation”) Shachar (“dawn”), and has turned his story into a platform for warnings for Western governments, including Canada, where he last spoke in 2024.
In September 2025, the English edition of his memoir was released – From Gaza to Tel Aviv: The Unbelievable True Story of a Muslim Palestinian Who Escaped to Israel and Became a Jew – and he has since taken to lectures and social media, to argue, among many things, that importing large numbers of Gazans into Western countries would be disastrous.
“I will tell you what will happen in the West: the worst. Look what’s happening in Europe. It will happen in Canada and America,” he told the Post. “You’ll see chaos.”
He urges Canadians to speak out: “In Canada, you can cry out in the streets — and say to the prime minister, ‘they go, or you go!’” He views Ottawa’s recent recognition of a Palestinian state as a reward to Hamas, rather than a path to peace.
Shachar insists his message is not born of revenge, but of a mission to inform about global Jihad. “I walked in my truth in order to raise our children in shalom — in peace — to live,” he said.
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