My rewrite of the famous quote by Lord Palmerston regarding “interests” to have it reflect the reality of Israel and its powerful friends would go something like this: “I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that Israel is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual friend of the United States and of enlightened western values. By design, Israel has no eternal allies. Its interests are indeed perpetual but center on its own success at aggressively portraying itself always as the victim while also advancing its own tribal interests.” I admittedly tend to think often about the enemy we of the western Christian tradition have been nurturing at our breast for decades in a spirit of tolerance, a viper that is only setting out to corrupt and then destroy us, manifest particularly at this time of year, when the life and death of Jesus Christ ought to be rightly celebrated. Alas, in today’s Israel what is truly remarkable is the government’s open suppression of Christian identity and worship without any complaint coming from Washington or from the other nominally Christian nations of Europe.
Indeed, Christianity in the Middle East is generally dying due the pressure exerted by Israel to make Palestinian life and religious practice as difficult as possible as well as broader regional issues including Israeli and US punishment and replacement of regimes in places like Syria and Lebanon which up until recently harbored substantial Christian minorities. Christians, generally speaking, find it easier to emigrate to friendlier countries worldwide than local Muslims as they often have established family overseas to help in the process.
The marginalization of Christians in Israel, recently driven by apartheid legislation and parliamentary declaration of Israel to be a Jewish state, has been around for a long time but it is particularly bad this year for both Christmas and Easter with refusal by the Israeli authorities to permit gatherings for church services and other celebrations. Only 6,000 security “passes” were issued by the Israelis to West Bank Palestinian Christians to celebrate Palm Sunday and Easter in Jerusalem this year unlike in the past when there would be 50,000 attendees. As a result, many celebrations and the usual parades have been canceled.
Father Ibrahim Faltas OFM, the Vicar of the Custody of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, described how “Despite several high-level meetings, we haven’t been able to obtain more permits,” recalling that West Bank Christians face many restrictions on their freedom of movement during the year and wait for the Easter season to travel to Jerusalem to pray at the Holy Sites. Also, ancient churches in Gaza have been bombed and destroyed over the past year, probably deliberately, creating a sense of depression among the worshippers who are also very aware of their fellow Palestinians, many of whom are Christian, being slaughtered by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). On April 13, Palm Sunday, an early morning air strike destroyed the outpatient and laboratory wards in the Anglican church run Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. The debris from the airstrike reached the neighboring St Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church which was preparing for the Palm Sunday celebration along with the homeless remnants of the local community residing in the church compound. The incident heightened the despair of the entire Christian community. The head of a Catholic aid agency described how “Christians are suffocating and are trapped in their own governorates (provinces) and towns unable to travel freely without harassment because they need special permits…” That is in spite of the fact that there has never been any violence or political unrest associated with the movement of the pilgrims, so it is widely regarded as little more than pure harassment by the Israeli authorities.
To be sure, Christian community and religious leaders have been aware of what exactly is going on and have protested to what would appear to be the appropriate Israeli government authorities, but generally to no avail. Their cause would be helped if majority Christian nations like the US and in Europe would speak up and put pressure on Israel for fair treatment for Christians, but they are generally silent due to their having been corrupted and intimidated by the various manifestations of the Israel Lobby active in their countries. Likewise, the media in those countries is very careful about what it prints or says about Israel or Jews as such criticism is a crime in many jurisdictions, something which is becoming increasingly the case in the United States and tied to evidence free deportations of those who object to what is occurring in Gaza.
The annual report by the Rossing Center, a Jerusalem-based organization dedicated to interfaith coexistence, documented 111 cases of harassment and violence against the Christian community in Israel and East Jerusalem in 2024. The report revealed a climate of hostility that, according to one of the study’s authors, Federica Sasso, only represents “the tip of the iceberg of a much larger phenomenon.” Of the 111 reported cases of assault, 47 were physical assaults primarily through “spitting,” a behavior that has evolved from subtle acts to openly aggressive displays. In several areas, especially in the Old City of Jerusalem, priests, nuns, friars, and monks “being easily identified are exposed to these attacks on a daily basis” with only rare intervention by the Israeli authorities.
Several years ago, the head of the Roman Catholic church in Israel, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, said that Christians have faced difficult challenges most particularly since the formation of Netanyahu’s latest far right-wing government in December 2022. According to Pizzaballa, his government has emboldened ultra-nationalist religious activists, many of whom are armed settlers, and some of whom have harassed male and female members of the clergy and vandalized religious property. Pizzaballa observed how “The frequency of these attacks, the aggressions, has become something new. These people feel they are protected …the cultural and political atmosphere can now justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians.”
A colleague, Francesco Patton, the Custodian of the Holy Land, elaborated how “We are horrified and hurt in the wake of the many incidents of violence and hatred that have taken place recently against the Catholic community in Israel.” He described the desecration of a Lutheran cemetery, the vandalizing of a Maronite prayer room, urination on holy sites, destruction of sacred images and the spraying of “death to Christians” on church property, all taking place shortly after the new Netanyahu government was installed. He also noted “the responsibility of the leaders, of those who have power,” adding that the Israeli police routinely failed to investigate such incidents after the churches reported them.
To determine if the claims of increased violence and hate crimes directed against Christians were true, on June 26th the liberal leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz sent one of its journalists dressed as a priest into downtown Jerusalem. Within five minutes, the journalist Yossi Eli “was derided and spat at, including by a child and a soldier… A bit later a man mocked [him] in Hebrew, saying, ‘Forgive me father for I have sinned.’ Then an 8-year-old spat at [him], as did [another] soldier when a group of troops passed by later.”
Given what is going on on-the-ground, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has called for an investigation into the role that Israeli-US dual national settlers are currently playing in the recent wave of violence directed against both Christian and Muslim Palestinian towns and villages. ADC Executive Director Abed Ayoub has said that “We have strong reason to believe that American citizens are among the key perpetrators of the most recent brutal and violent attacks.” Since June 21st, armed Israeli settler mobs have been terrorizing Palestinian villages in the West Bank on a nearly daily basis. They have destroyed homes, burned vehicles, and killed at least one Palestinian. For decades US Citizens have moved to Israeli settlements, which they use as bases for regularly engaging in violence against Palestinians, all with impunity, as the Israeli police and army provide the Arabs with no protection and instead often protect the settlers. Many of these US Citizens also take advantage of American charitable and non-profit tax laws to fund illegal settlements and initiate violence against Palestinians.
In another major incident, dozens of Israeli extremists, primarily Orthodox Jews, disrupted a Christian prayer event for pilgrims near the Western Wall. The deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Aryeh King and leading Rabbi Avi Thau led the protesters. Denouncing the Christians as “missionaries” trying to convert Jews, the extremists spat at and cursed the pilgrims, many of whom were ironically normally strongly pro-Israel evangelical Christians from the US. Deputy Mayor King said that Christians should enjoy freedom of worship “only inside their churches.”
According to Protecting Holy Land Christians, an organization established by Christian groups to raise awareness of threats their religion, there have been other accounts of how Christians have been subjected to increasing persecution. A recent report details how Palestinians have been targeted by what it calls settler-colonialism, which is a series of measures intended to destroy their communities and drive them from their land. It identifies seven policies that Israel uses against Palestinians throughout the whole of Mandatory Palestine (1948 Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank including East Jerusalem) and also to punish those in exile: “denial of residency; land confiscation and denial of use; discriminatory planning; denial of access to natural resources and services; imposition of a permit regime; fragmentation, segregation and isolation; denial of reparations; and suppression of resistance.” The report concludes “Whether these policies are considered separately or taken together, they amount to forced population transfer, a grave breach of international humanitarian law (IHL).”
Recently, these essentially genocidal measures have included the outright theft of their historic buildings and land by the government, and denial of other rights, including the increasing refusal to permit gatherings of the faithful at the existing churches on major holidays like Christmas and Easter. There have also been many physical attacks on individual Christians carried out by extremist Jews as well as desecration of Christian religious sites and destruction or defacement of Christian relics and statuary. A June 2023 conference held in Jerusalem to address the issue of increased violence against Christians attracted a number of diplomats, scholars and representatives of religious groups, but it was boycotted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The US Embassy also did not send a representative or observer, indicating clearly that it was not interested in the plight of Christians in Israel, or rather that it did not even want to admit that there was a problem.
Interestingly enough, Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right wing extremist and a leader of the settler movement, is about to arrive in Washington and will be receiving red carpet treatment from the usual suspects. He has been open about his desire to remove all Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, from historic Palestine and was behind legislation making it perfectly legal and without consequence for any soldier or policeman, or armed settler, to kill a Palestinian. The trip will include stops in Florida and Washington, DC, where he’s slated to meet with US officials, conservative influencers, and Jewish community leaders. The most high-profile meeting on his schedule is with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Ben Gvir, who runs Israel’s prison system, has advocated a straightforward solution for dealing with his country’s unwanted detainees. “It is unfortunate that I have had to deal in recent days with whether Palestinian prisoners should receive fruit baskets,” he said last year. “They should be killed with a shot to the head.” Self described Zionist Joe Biden had actually blocked his entry into the US as “too extremist” but as we have seen Donald Trump is not so fastidious.
So there you have it. The Netanyahu Israeli government is not very interested in human rights for anyone who is not a Conservative or Orthodox Jew. It is, in fact, essentially hostile to all Palestinians and foreigners, be they Muslim, Christian or even irreligious. They regularly denigrate such people as what Germans in the 1930s would have referred to as “untermenschen” meaning subhumans, a word then used to describe Jews, ironically enough. That the United States ignores all of Israel’s war crimes and human rights violations is disgraceful, but par for the course as American Jews who are advocates for Israel have corrupted and taken firm control of the political process. And do not think for a second that Israel’s leaders give one damn about the United States and its people, a majority of whom are at least nominally Christian. Recall for a moment how former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to Americans in a discussion with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres: “Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” And more recently Netanyahu said “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” That is what they really think of us.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.