Pastor Saleem Shalash once believed the Old Testament was “rubbish.” One encounter with God changed everything.
Pastor Saleem Shalash was raised to see Israel as the enemy. Today, he feeds Holocaust survivors, celebrates Hanukkah with Orthodox Jewish children, and calls a Jewish mayor one of his closest friends. His transformation didn’t come from a peace summit or a diplomatic accord — it came from one long night wrestling with God.
In a recent episode of One For Israel’s Why Israel podcast, Dr. Erez Soref sat down with Pastor Shalash — senior pastor and founder of Home of Jesus the King Church in Nazareth — to talk about what happened that night, and why it still matters for Arabs, Jews, and Christians across the Middle East today.
In a region where decades of politics, treaties, and armed conflicts have not been able to reconcile Arab and Jewish communities, Pastor Shalash’s story is a reminder of what can unite them. His journey from hatred to love is a testimony to what happens when the Gospel takes hold of a human heart. It’s the same conviction driving One For Israel’s mission this year: real peace in Israel and the Middle East starts not with policy, but with the Gospel of Yeshua.
Born into a Catholic Arab family in Nazareth, Shalash grew up immersed in a culture of hostility toward Israel and the Jewish people. Steady media coverage of war and conflict, paired with a theology that taught the Old Testament didn’t belong to Arab Christians, left him filled with resentment. “I’ve been taught the Old Testament is a rubbish book,” he recalls. “It belongs to the infidel Jews who crucified my Savior.”
Everything changed when Shalash enrolled at a Bible college in Israel, sitting in a classroom alongside twelve Jewish pastors. Guarded at first, he soon discovered they, too, believed in Yeshua as their Messiah. That encounter sent him home to wrestle with God — and led him to the story of the Prodigal Son. God asked him a piercing question: which son was he? Shalash assumed the answer was easy — surely he was the faithful elder brother, not the wayward one. But God revealed something he hadn’t expected: the elder son’s resentment, distance, and judgment mirrored his own heart toward the Jewish people.
“When God chooses somebody, He doesn’t choose the perfect. He chooses the willing.”
That night, he says, God broke something loose. “God set me free from this hatred,” he recalls. “I was in prison, not them. I was the one that was suffering, not them.”
The change didn’t stay private. In 2009, Shalash founded Home of Jesus the King Church in Nazareth, now serving 156 families — Arab, Jewish, Ukrainian and Russian refugees, and Holocaust survivors alike. In the nearby city of Nof HaGalil, he built a friendship with the mayor that has lasted for years, through COVID and beyond. He’s since partnered with an Orthodox rabbi to bless 200 Jewish children with Hanukkah gifts — a relationship he says he’s sharing publicly for the first time.
For Shalash, none of this is optional. “It’s not an option,” he says. “It’s a command — ‘Comfort, comfort my people,’ the Lord said.”
One encounter stands out above the rest, however. While delivering food aid labeled in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, Shalash met an elderly Jewish widow, a Holocaust survivor. Surprised to see an Arab bringing her food, she asked why. “Because of your Messiah,” he told her. When she replied that her Messiah hadn’t come yet, Pastor Shalash responded, “Oh my … they didn’t tell you He already came?”
Opening her own Bible, he read her Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Proverbs 30, and Jeremiah. By the end, she said she felt she’d been “deceived for 80 years” — and prayed to receive Yeshua as her Savior.
“It’s not time to win discussions. It’s time to win souls to Jesus.”
Shalash’s story is proof that the walls dividing Israel and the Middle East — the ones that seem too old, too painful, too political to ever come down — are not immune to the Gospel. This is the work One For Israel is committed to: reaching Arabs, Jews, and Christians alike with the love of Yeshua.
