Christians, who were also expelled from what became Israel in 1948, have been integral to the Palestinian resistance movement, partly explaining why Pope John Paul II prioritized Palestinians who have stood united against oppression exemplifying timeless fraternity
When Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) took over as the Catholic Church head in 1978, he made Palestine a priority of his papacy. A series of letters exchanged a year later with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chief Yasir Arafat was the first direct contact between the two sides. The same year, the pontiff met with PLO representative Abu Faras in Turkey.
In an evocative letter delivered through his Catholic aide Afif Sufieh in 1980, Arafat quoted the Bible and invited Paul to lead the first Palestinian procession back to their homeland. Arafat wrote of a dream of seeing the Pope going to Palestine and Jerusalem, surrounded by returning Palestinian refugees, carrying olive branches and spreading them at the pontiff’s feet.
Over three decades earlier, Palestinian Christians were among an estimated 750,000 people forced out of their homes during the Nakba when Jewish militias attacked their villages and towns. Christians would play a leading role in Palestine’s resistance movement that followed the expulsion of Palestinians with Israel’s creation in 1948.
In an Aljazeera.com on December 25, Palestinian-American Christian journalist Daoud Kuttab wrote about his family’s ordeal during the Nakba. A Jewish sniper shot and killed his uncle, a father of seven young children, in Musrara after the family of nine sought refuge near the Notre Dame Catholic Chapel thinking they would be safe there. The rest of Kuttab’s family, including his father, and grandmother, managed to flee for their lives.
Kuttab wrote the terror and dispossession continued following Israel’s creation. He added residents of the two predominantly Palestinian Christian villages of Iqrit and Biram, which fell within northern Israel, were forced out in November 1948. They were told they could return within weeks but were never allowed to do so.
Common Lived Experience
The Palestinian Christians, who remained within the Israeli territory, faced the same apartheid regime that Muslims did. Haifa-based Adalah NGO’s research found about 65 racist laws deprive them of the rights the Jewish citizens of Israel are entitled to. In 2018, the Israeli parliament approved a law formally declaring Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, solidifying supremacy.
Kuttab blamed the law for emboldening the extremist Jewish elements further and encouraging more anti-Palestinian violence. Harassment and intimidation of Palestinian Christians, including spitting on them and attacks on churches and cemeteries, had spiked before Israel launched a relentless bombardment of Gaza in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack.
Israel bombed the Christian-run Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds seeking shelter there from Israeli bombardment. Israel tried to blame the attack on the Palestinians but subsequent probe confirmed that the ‘evidence’ it produced was fabricated.
At least 18 people, including women and children, were killed when the Church of St Porphyrius, the world’s third oldest, was bombed on October 19. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said an Israeli sniper shot dead two Palestinian women sheltered at Gaza’s Holy Family Catholic Church on December 16 in cold blood. Pope Francis was among those who condemned the attack as terrorism.
Ancient Christian Communities
Many Christians and Muslims in Gaza today are the descendants of those expelled in 1948. The 1922 British census found around 9% or around 73,000 Palestinians were Christians, who lived there since Christianity began, while Muslims were 78% and Jews 11%.
Christine Shepardson, a University of Tennessee historian of Roman Christianity focused on the Eastern Mediterranean, wrote early Christianity flourished in the port city of Maiuma before spreading to the main Gaza city. Bishop Asclepas in 325 represented Gaza at Emperor Constantine’s Council of Nicaea, which established the Nicene Creed defining the central tenets of belief for most Christians today.
Shepardson wrote the 21st-century Arab Christians of Palestine include a variety of communities with ties to this early history. She added medieval Christian Crusaders found not only the Muslims they had come to attack but also these ancient local Christian communities when reached Jerusalem from Western Europe in 1099. Christians of the Near East, including Palestinians, fought the Crusaders alongside Muslims.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Christians, mostly part of the Eastern Orthodox Church under the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, live in Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon. Smaller populations of Christians are in Gaza and other countries in the region.
Suffering Together
Shepardson wrote Christian and Muslim communities, who have been neighbors in this land for over 1,300 years, were sheltered and suffered together in Gaza’s St Porphyrius Church when it was bombed. A Palestinian Catholic mother wrote to US President Joe Biden, calling upon him to stop this genocide. Palestinian Christian leaders sent an open letter to Western church leaders and theologians criticizing their uncritical support for Israel while asking them to repent.
Kuttab wrote Biden and other leaders of Western Christian-majority nations, which have offered unconditional support to Israel, have demonstrated remarkable disregard for both Palestinian Muslim and Christian lives. He added the Biden administration has treated them, Palestinian Christians, as the children of a lesser God while blaming Western leaders backing Israel for the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, were cancelled as Christians mourned fellow Palestinians slaughtered in Gaza. A church in Bethlehem put up its crèche with baby Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh, the checkered black-and-white scarf symbolizing Palestinian identity, lying in the rubble representing Gaza’s destruction, and not in a makeshift hay and wood cradle.
World’s Moral Compass
Rev Munther Isaac, the pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church who created the crèche, said they had been glued to their screens, seeing children pulled from under the rubble daily. He added they have been broken and that God is under the rubble in Gaza.
Reporting from Bethlehem, Yara Bayoumy and Samar Hazboun wrote in The New York Times that Palestinians in the city, where the symbolism of Christmas is part of its soul, fret about family and friends in Gaza. The residents found their lives restricted including through more draconian Israeli limits on movement.
Bayoumy and Hazboun wrote a giant Christmas tree is typically erected in Bethlehem’s center on a stage named for the manger where Jesus’ parents are said to have sought shelter. A tree-lighting ceremony takes place with great fanfare. Bayoumy and Hazboun wrote this year there was none. The church steeples that dot the city’s skyline and streets and are normally adorned with Christmas decorations were bare.
Jesus Under Gaza Rubble
‘If Jesus were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza,’ Isaac said in his address on December 23 in the West Bank. Isaac, a Palestinian Christian theologian, said the Christmas message is not about Santa, trees, gifts, lights, etc. ‘My goodness, how we twisted the meaning of Christmas. How we have commercialized Christmas.’
He said instead the Christmas message is that Jesus, who miraculously survived a massacre, was born among the occupied and marginalized. ‘He is in solidarity with us in our pain and brokenness.’ Isaac called out the West for its complicity in Israel’s genocide, the displacement of two million people, and the killing of 20,000, mostly women and children, in Gaza:
‘Silence is complicity and empty calls for peace without a ceasefire and end to the occupation, and the shallow words of empathy without direct action—are all under the banner of complicity. The true Christmas message is that this genocide must stop now.’
Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church pastor Rev Munther Isaac
He referred to Israel’s claims of acting in self-defense and asked how is the killing of 9,000 children self-defense. ‘We are angry. We are broken. This should have been a time of joy; instead, we are mourning. We are fearful. Gaza as we know it no longer exists. Palestinians in the West Bank were now also asking could this be our fate in Bethlehem?’
Isaac said the Western world does not see them as equal and added its hypocrisy and racism are transparent and appalling. He said he never wanted to get a lecture on human rights from the West again. Issac said it appeared the rights did not apply to non-white Palestinians. ‘To those who are not appalled by what is happening, there is something wrong with your humanity…Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world.’
Isaac said that the Christ in the rubble manger was about resilience exemplified in Jesus’s meekness, weakness, and vulnerability. ‘Resilience because this very same child, rose from the midst of pain, destruction, darkness, and death to challenge Empires, to speak truth to power, and deliver an everlasting victory over death and darkness.’
Issac’s moving address underlined the failure of Israel’s divide-and-rule tactic. Kuttab wrote Palestinians have demonstrated that their unity is stronger than ever in the face of Israeli colonial violence and racism. He added that Muslim and Christian Palestinians standing as a united front gives many hope despite Israeli brutality and Western silence.
Kuttab wrote those instinctively equating Palestinians with Muslims have indeed fallen for a false narrative. He added Israel has massacred Palestinian Muslims as well as Christians. Kuttab wrote the massacres threatened to eliminate the Christian presence in the Gaza Strip for the first time in almost 2,000 years. He added proportionally the death rate of Palestinian Christians is double that of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza.
Ashrawi has been among the leading voices of Palestinians amid the fresh Israeli onslaught. Palestinian academic Hanna Issa, a Christian, perhaps summed up the Palestinian national unity the best when he told Al Jazeera in 2003: ‘We are one people; it is a timeless fraternity that has proved itself throughout history.’ He said Palestinians have always acted as one community and it is taboo even to ask Palestinians if they are Muslim or Christian.
Kuttab said the Christian-majority West has remained shockingly silent on the plight of Palestinian Christians. He wrote decades of unwavering Western Christian support for the racist Israeli state has threatened the Christian presence in the holy lands.
Important Link
Over 40 years earlier, Robin Wright wrote in The Washington Post in January 1982 that should there be another Palestine, the friendship between the Pope and PLO could grow into the Vatican’s closest in the region. Wright added the Palestinians could potentially provide an important link between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East.
The exchange of holiday greetings would become an important marker of this friendship. Arafat, who married Palestinian Christian Suha Tawil in the 1990s, would send the pope a Christmas card annually and the pontiff included the Palestinian leader in his annual cabled greetings to Muslim leaders.
In October 1980, the Pope publicly criticised Israel for the ‘conspicuous exclusion of many Palestinians from their homeland in an endorsement of Palestinian rights. In March 1981, the Vatican, which did not technically recognize Israel because of its uncertain boundaries, expressed solidarity with Palestinians fighting for their homeland.
A month earlier Paul called for ‘closer collaboration and cooperation’ between the Catholic and Islamic worlds in solving problems of mutual concern during a meeting with President Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan.
Father Ibrahim Ayad, who began his day celebrating mass at Beirut Dominican Sisters’ convent before working as a PLO official, would become an expectation to the church’s calls on priests and nuns to sever political connections. He became a key link between the both sides.
Wright in 1982 reported Ayad undertakes extensive missions on Arafat’s behalf to Latin America, Europe, and the US. Wright noted Ayad, the Latin Ecclesiastical Court of Lebanon president with important connections at the Vatican, saw no conflict in his two jobs—one a mission of brotherly love, the other promoting struggle. ‘When you work for a just cause you comply with Christian principle, which commands, orders you to fight,’ Ayad told Wright.
Ayad quoted the Book of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) from the Catholic Bible in support of his PLO activity: ‘Deliver the oppressed from the hand of the oppressor; let not justice be repugnant to you.’ And: ‘Even to the death fight for truth, and the Lord your God will battle for you.’
Wright wrote Father Ayad, who was born in Bethlehem in 1914, mentioned Arafat and Pope John Paul in the same sentence and with the same admiration. Ayad was among those trying to bring together the Roman Catholic Church and PLO for their goal to return to Palestine.
Wright wrote his move received quiet encouragement from the Vatican and the PLO. It was a relationship, Wright added, that budded under Pope Paul and accelerated under the more political and aggressive John Paul II. Wright wrote its foundation is a crucial and often overlooked fact that one-quarter of the Palestinians are Christian. Wright quoted Arafat saying that 35% of the PLO was Christian. Christians were in leadership positions in all eight PLO factions.
In February 2021, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas guaranteed an outsized representation—at least seven seats of a new legislative council—to Christians ahead of the elections in the occupied territories in May of that year.
Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian and former member of PLO’s executive committee, expressed uneasy over the move arguing she did not see Christians as excluded or marginalized as they have been active in political, social, cultural, and economic life. Palestinian Christians had a quota of six members, or 7% of the seats, in the 1996 elections. Their percentage on the council has been as high as 31%.
Israel has sought to create mistrust between the two communities to end Palestinian unity and crush their aspirations for liberation. Christians became a key part of the national struggle against the Israeli occupation after the Nakba. Christians such as George Habash, Nayif Hawatmah, and Edward Said would emerge as leading figures in the struggle for the Palestinian right to self-determination.
