Christians, who have historically played significant roles in the Palestinian resistance and faced violence and discrimination like Muslims, have stood by their fellow Palestinians united by shared suffering and called out Western complicity in their dispossession
When President Mahmoud Abbas guaranteed an outsized representation to Christians ahead of the 2021 polls in the Palestinian territories, Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian and former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee member, expressed unease over the move. Ashrawi argued Palestinian Christians were not marginalized to warrant at least seven seats of a new legislative council, citing their active role in Palestine’s political, social, cultural, and economic life.
In The Washington Post, Robin Wright quoted Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat saying in January 1982 that 25% of the PLO was Christian. Christians held leadership positions in all eight PLO factions. The Christian representation in the Palestinian council has been as high as 31% despite Israel’s attempts to draw a wedge between Palestinians. Christians such as George Habash, Nayif Hawatmah, and Edward Said have been leading figures in the Palestinian struggle for the right to self-determination.
1948 Nakba and Christian Displacement
Christians, who accounted for around 9% of Palestine’s population in 1922, were among an estimated 750,000 Palestinians forced out of their homes for Israel’s creation in 1948. Palestinian-American Christian journalist Daoud Kuttab, whose family was among those driven out, wrote in an Aljazeera.com piece that a Jewish sniper killed his uncle, a father of seven, in Musrara after the family of nine sought refuge near the Notre Dame Catholic Chapel. Kuttab’s father and grandmother survived the massacre.
The dispossession of Palestinian Christians and Muslims continued after Israel’s creation. Residents of predominantly Palestinian Christian villages Iqrit and Biram in what became northern Israel were forced out of their homes in November 1948 with the false promise that they could return within weeks. They were never allowed to return, like tens of thousands of other Palestinians.
The Palestinian Christians within the Israeli territory face apartheid like Muslims. About 65 laws deprive them of the rights Israel’s Jewish citizens enjoy. The Israeli parliament solidified Jewish supremacy in 2018 by approving a law that formally declared Israel as the Jewish nation-state. The law emboldened extremist Jews and encouraged more anti-Palestinian violence.
Apartheid Laws and Religious Intimidation
Harassment and intimidation, including spitting on Palestinian Christians and attacks on churches and cemeteries, spiked after the passage of the law. In April 2023, Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holy Land, warned that the rise of the far-right government in Israel made life worse for Christians in Christianity’s birthplace. He said the region’s Christian community was under increasing attack.
The most right-wing government in Israel’s history emboldened extremists to harass clergy and vandalize religious property and to expand the Israeli settler movement amid an uptick in anti-Christian incidents. Pizzaballa said Jewish extremists felt protected and that the cultural and political atmosphere justified and tolerated actions against Christians.
The far-right government included settler leaders such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who were convicted in 2007 for incitement of anti-Arab racism and support for a Jewish militant group. They emboldened the Judaization of Jerusalem’s Old City with nothing holding them back. Jewish extremists have seen churches as the major stumbling block to the Judaization.
Sacred Spaces and Systematic Vandalism
In 2023, the Inter-Church Center, a group coordinating between the denominations, said physical assaults and harassment of clergy often went unreported. The center documented at least seven serious cases of vandalism of church properties from January to mid-March that year. Six anti-Christian cases were recorded in 2022. In March 2023, two Israelis pounced on a priest with a metal rod at the basilica beside the Garden of Gethsemane, where the Virgin Mary is said to have been buried.
In February that year, an American Jew shouting ‘no idols in the holy city of Jerusalem’ pulled a Christ rendering and smashed it. He struck the face of the 10-foot rendering with a hammer at the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, where Jesus is believed to have hauled his cross toward his crucifixion.
Associated Press (AP) quoted priests of all denominations saying they were stalked, spat on, and beaten during their walks to church. In January 2023, Jews vandalized 30 graves marked with stone crosses at a Christian cemetery in Jerusalem. A mob of Jewish settlers scaled an Armenian Christian convent to tear down its flag in 2023.
AP reported most top Israeli officials stayed quiet on the vandalism while the Israeli government introduced a law criminalizing Christian proselytizing and promoted plans to turn the Mount of Olives, where Jesus frequently retreated to, into a national park. Mount of Olives is a holy pilgrimage site with a dozen historic churches.
Hundreds sheltered at Gaza’s Christian-run Ahli Arab Hospital were killed when Israel bombed it in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. Over a dozen women, children, and men were killed when the Israelis targeted the world’s third oldest Church of St Porphyrius on October 19, 2023. An Israeli sniper shot dead two Palestinian women sheltered at Gaza’s Holy Family Catholic Church on December 16, 2023, in cold blood.
Ancient Roots of Faith and Coexistence
Christians have lived in Palestine since the beginning of Christianity. Early Christianity flourished in Maiuma before spreading to Gaza. In 325, Bishop Asclepas represented Gaza at Emperor Constantine’s Council of Nicaea, where the Nicene Creed, defining the central tenets of belief for most Christians today, was established. Local Christian communities participated in the resistance against crusaders when they arrived in Jerusalem from Western Europe in 1099 to attack Muslims. Near East Christians joined Muslims in fighting the Crusaders. Palestinian Christians are mostly part of the Eastern Orthodox Church under the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem.
Palestinian Christians, who have coexisted with Muslims in the region for over 1,300 years, have repeatedly urged Western church leaders and theologians to end their uncritical support for Israel and repent. The West has treated Palestinian Christians as the children of a lesser God by backing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians.
Christians in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, cancelled Christmas celebrations in 2023 as they mourned the slaughter of fellow Palestinians in Gaza. A Bethlehem church put up its crèche with baby Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh, the black-and-white scarf symbolizing Palestine, in the rubble representing Gaza’s destruction rather than a makeshift hay and wood cradle.
Rev Munther Isaac: The Voice of Conscience
Rev Munther Isaac, the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church pastor who created the crèche, has been among the most articulate voices against the Israeli assault on Gaza. He cited images of slaughtered Palestinian children and said they have been broken and that God was under the rubble in Gaza. ‘If Jesus were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza,’ Isaac said in his 2023 Christmas Eve address in the West Bank.
He said 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 women and children in Gaza
Isaac said the true Christmas message is that this genocide must stop now. He questioned whether the killing of children was self-defense. Isaac rued that the Western world does not see them as equal, calling its hypocrisy and racism transparent and appalling. He said he never wanted to get a lecture on human rights from the West again. Isaac said it appeared the rights did not apply to non-white Palestinians.
One People, One Struggle
Isaac called Gaza the world’s moral compass. Isaac said that the Christ in the rubble manger was about resilience exemplified in Jesus’s meekness, weakness, and vulnerability. He added resilience because this child rose from pain, destruction, darkness, and death to challenge Empires, 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 years after Palestinian academic Hanna Issa, a Christian, told Al Jazeera in 2003 that they are one people with a timeless fraternity that has proved itself throughout history. Issa said Palestinians have always acted as one community, and it is taboo even to ask Palestinians if they are Muslim or Christian.
Palestinian unity has emerged strong in the face of increased Israeli violence, disproving the mechanical equating of Palestinians with Muslims. Israel has massacred Palestinians irrespective of their faith, threatening to eliminate the Christian presence in Gaza for the first time in almost 2,000 years. The death rate proportionally of Palestinian Christians was double that of Gaza’s Palestinian population.
