JERUSALEM — While the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is known for its brutal attacks on Arab Christians and sacred Christian places throughout the Middle East, there’s another group with a much longer history of oppression against Christians: Israel and its allies. This historic reality stands in stark opposition to the Jewish state’s public image as a defender of religious and democratic freedoms in the region.
Although they’ve long been a minority there, Palestine was once a haven for Christians who historically accounted for over 10 percent of the Palestinian Arab population, according to a 1937 report presented to the League of Nations by the United Kingdom. After the 1915 genocide, many Armenians fled to the region, with Armenian Christian populations peaking at about 15,000.
All that changed after the founding of Israel in 1948, known as the Nakba to Palestinians. Arab Christians found themselves caught in the violent crossfire of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and many fled the region or were forcibly expelled. Ever since, they’ve suffered from the same consequences of occupation as all Palestinians, regardless of their faith, from demolition of their homes to violent death at the hands of Israeli soldiers and during bombing campaigns.
This creates a paradox when considered against Israel’s public stance as a protector of religious liberty of Jews and Christians in the Middle East. In a 2012 Christmas message, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed his country as a bastion of safety against increasing violence against Christians in the Middle East, and urged Christians worldwide to, “Come see our ancient land with your own eyes. Visit Nazareth and Bethlehem, wade in the Jordan River, stand on the shores of the Sea of Galilee …”
Palestinian Christians have none of the same freedoms in their own lands as privileged Christian tourists do, as Palestinian scholar and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, pointed out that same year. He reported that Palestinian Christians faced persecution for acts as simple as displaying a Christmas tree, and noted that attacks on Christian churches by illegal Israeli settlers dramatically increased during the same period.
Like all Palestinians, Christians’ movements are controlled by the military, limiting access to holy sites and preventing their return to their homeland should they ever flee their oppression to other nations. Last Christmas, Israeli forces violently dispersed a peaceful march of Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem that had been called to highlight these very issues.
In July 2014, as Israeli bombs killed thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, MintPress News’ publisher Mnar Muhawesh described what she witnessed growing up in Jerusalem to highlight what the media gets wrong about Palestine:
“At my American school in Jerusalem, half my classmates missed school most days and were essentially denied an education because they had been turned back at checkpoints because they lived in the West Bank and were Palestinian, Muslim and/or Christian. …
[T]he majority of our neighbors in Jerusalem were Palestinian Christians suffering from the same military occupation as their fellow Muslim Palestinians. This was no Muslim versus Jew fight.”
Gaza’s Arab Christian population, now numbering as few as 1,000 thanks to decades of attrition, were not spared in the 2014 Israeli attack or the massive displacement that followed. Alex Awad, a pastor at the East Jerusalem Church, criticized the ways the Western media, and Western Christians, misunderstood the conflict in an interview with the Christian Post:
“The Christians in the west, most of them, they don’t know the realities here. They don’t know who is occupying who, who is oppressing who, who is confiscating whose land, who is building walls to try and separate people from one another … In the United States and much of Europe people — they just don’t understand the realities on the ground …
We know in our hearts, we side with our Palestinian brothers and sisters, even the Muslims, because we know they are the ones under occupation, they are the ones who are under oppression, and we see that because it is very obvious for people who live here who is actually violating the other[s’] human rights.”