Palestinian Christians
22 Jan 2024, 2:44 am
In 2018, Bethlehem Bible College's "Christ at the Checkpoint" conference, in Bethlehem, Palestine, was followed up by a conference here in the U.S.A., called "Christ at the Checkpoint USA" (CATCUSA).
Some 2018 news stories about it here:
- Bethlehem Bible College informs US Christians about Palestinian believers by Beth Stolicker, Mission Network News, October 18, 2018.
- Christ at the Checkpoint USA touts peace for Palestinian Christians. Critics call it anti-Semitic: Sharply contrasting narratives emerged as the group's four-day conference drew roughly 150 evangelical Christians to this Oklahoma City suburb last week, by Tamie Ross, Religion News Service, October 23, 2018.
- Christ at the Checkpoint USA, Peacemakers Trust, October 20, 2018.
One of the presentations at this conference:
CATCUSA | Day 1 | Palestinian Israeli Conflict 101 -- Rev Alex Awad & Jonathan Kuttab
Another one of the presentations at this conference:
CATCUSA | Day 4 | What Can American Churches Do to Promote Peace -- Dr Mae Cannon
Dr Mae Cannon represents an American organization called Churches for Middle East Peace. Alas, that organization's church partners are only a tiny fraction of the churches here in the U.S.A., and still vastly outnumbered, here in the U.S.A., by churches with strong Christian Zionist leanings.
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
24 Jan 2024, 8:22 pm
On the website of the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), an American pro-Palestinian organization, there is a page about Palestinian Christians, with the following intro paragraph:
This is followed by a collection of links to news stories. However, this page does not appear to have been updated since 2018.
The IMEU website also includes a copy of the Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism, a statement against Christian Zionism by the following Palestinian Christian leaders back on August 22, 2006:
- His Beatitude Patriarch Michel Sabbah, Latin Patriarchate (Roman Catholic), Jerusalem
- Archbishop Swerios Malki Mourad, Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate, Jerusalem
- Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal, Episcopal Church of Jerusalem and the Middle East
- Bishop Munib Younan, Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land
The declaration says:
Christian Zionism is a modern theological and political movement that embraces the most extreme ideological positions of Zionism, thereby becoming detrimental to a just peace within Palestine and Israel. The Christian Zionist programme provides a worldview where the Gospel is identified with the ideology of empire, colonialism and militarism. In its extreme form, it places an emphasis on apocalyptic events leading to the end of history rather than living Christ's love and justice today.
We categorically reject Christian Zionist doctrines as false teaching that corrupts the biblical message of love, justice and reconciliation.
We further reject the contemporary alliance of Christian Zionist leaders and organizations with elements in the governments of Israel and the United States that are presently imposing their unilateral pre-emptive borders and domination over Palestine. This inevitably leads to unending cycles of violence that undermine the security of all peoples of the Middle East and the rest of the world.
We reject the teachings of Christian Zionism that facilitate and support these policies as they advance racial exclusivity and perpetual war rather than the gospel of universal love, redemption and reconciliation taught by Jesus Christ. Rather than condemn the world to the doom of Armageddon we call upon everyone to liberate themselves from the ideologies of militarism and occupation. Instead, let them pursue the healing of the nations!
We call upon Christians in Churches on every continent to pray for the Palestinian and Israeli people, both of whom are suffering as victims of occupation and militarism. These discriminative actions are turning Palestine into impoverished ghettos surrounded by exclusive Israeli settlements. The establishment of the illegal settlements and the construction of the Separation Wall on confiscated Palestinian land undermines the viability of a Palestinian state as well as peace and security in the entire region.
We call upon all Churches that remain silent, to break their silence and speak for reconciliation with justice in the Holy Land.
Therefore, we commit ourselves to the following principles as an alternative way:
We affirm that all people are created in the image of God. In turn they are called to honor the dignity of every human being and to respect their inalienable rights.
We affirm that Israelis and Palestinians are capable of living together within peace, justice and security.
We affirm that Palestinians are one people, both Muslim and Christian. We reject all attempts to subvert and fragment their unity.
We call upon all people to reject the narrow world view of Christian Zionism and other ideologies that privilege one people at the expense of others.
We are committed to non-violent resistance as the most effective means to end the illegal occupation in order to attain a just and lasting peace.
With urgency we warn that Christian Zionism and its alliances are justifying colonization, apartheid and empire-building.
God demands that justice be done. No enduring peace, security or reconciliation is possible without the foundation of justice. The demands of justice will not disappear. The struggle for justice must be pursued diligently and persistently but non-violently.
"What does the Lord require of you, to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6:8)
This is where we take our stand. We stand for justice. We can do no other. Justice alone guarantees a peace that will lead to reconciliation with a life of security and prosperity for all the peoples of our Land. By standing on the side of justice, we open ourselves to the work of peace - and working for peace makes us children of God.
"God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation." (2 Cor 5:19)
See also Wikipedia's page about the Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism.
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
28 Jan 2024, 11:25 pm
Kairos Palestine is a group of Palestinian Christians who, in December 2009, published the Kairos Document: A moment of truth: A word of faith, hope and love from the heart of Palestinian suffering.
Some responses to them, both favorable and unfavorable, are described in the Wikipedia article about Kairos Palestine.
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
18 Aug 2024, 1:18 pm
Palestinian Reverend Munther Isaac to U.S. Faith Leaders: If You Are Silent, You Approve of Genocide on the Democracy Now YouTube channel, August 14, 2024:
As mentioned earlier in this thread, Munther Isaac is pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem and the Lutheran Church in Beit Sahour., in the occupied West Bank. He is also the academic dean of Bethlehem Bible College, and is the director of the Christ at the Checkpoint conference, held every 2 years in Bethlehem.
Judging by the above video, apparently he visited NYC recently.
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
08 Oct 2024, 4:52 pm
Some Palestinian Protestant Christian churches and their pastors here in NYC:
- Rev. Khader El-Yateem is pastor of Salam Arabic Lutheran Church, which rents space on the second floor of the predominantly Norwegian-American Our Saviour’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge, in Brooklyn. In 2017 he ran for NYC City Council. (See Palestinian Lutheran Minister Runs for New York City Council to Speak 'Absent Voice', by Chris Fuchs, NBC News, April 13, 2017.)
- Rev. Khader Khalilia is pastor of Redeemer-St. John’s Lutheran Church in NY. (See Grieving and often overlooked, Palestinian Christians prepare for a somber Christmas amid war, Associated Press, via NY1, December 22, 2023. This article also has some info about Christians in Palestine, including Gaza.)
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
28 Oct 2024, 1:57 am
Every two years, in Bethlehem (the town where Jesus was born), in the occupied territory of Palestine on the West Bank, Bethlehem Bible College hosts its Christ at the Checkpoint conference for evangelical Christians from all over the world.
Attendees from abroad get the opportunity both to interact with Palestinian evangelical Christians and to see, for themselves, the conditions under which West Bank Palestinians are forced to live.
Here is a YouTube playlist of videos from the 2024 conference earlier this year. The first two videos are announcements/invitations from before the conference, and the remaining videos are of speakers and events at the conference itself.
If you are an evangelical Christian, your fellow Christians in Palestine need your help. Please relay the above info (and the words of other Palestinian Christians quoted or referred to in this thread) to your fellow evangelical Christians, as a counterweight to Christian Zionism. Ditto the words of other Palestinian Christians quoted elsewhere in this thread.
(I'm not an evangelical Christian myself, but I am from an evangelical Christian background.)
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
01 Nov 2024, 3:39 am
Rev. Munther Isaac, pastor of the Lutheran church in Bethlehem, Palestine, talks about his life there, during the past few decades, and the current situation: Munther Isaac: Palestinian pastor speaks on Gaza, Christian Zionism and the future | UNAPOLOGETIC, Middle East Eye, Mar 7, 2024:
From the description on YouTube:
In an extended interview, Reverend Dr Munther Isaac, the Lutheran pastor of Bethlehem, speaks about growing up under occupation, how Palestinian Christians have often been failed by the international Church, how the war in Gaza in an extension of colonialism and the world’s inaction to stop what he says is a clear case of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Hosted by Ashfaaq Carim
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
01 Nov 2024, 10:48 pm
Mel Gibson with Mari Mari emmanuel, what a message. I'm sure some Arabs would like chance to test free world but surely not under USA Christianity......it's Sodom and gamorrah and tests acceptance of self decency under free will.
I think zelensky being through enough, so not to upset Ukraine that I'm against Israel's attack on civilians BUT countries need to wake up to USA agenda, and Ukraine profited on farms whilst Bulgaria was poorest country in Europe, Roma and orphans in Romania are not uplifted in least. I'm tired of criticism towards us Hungarians, so Cuban improvements are most welcome.
I'm glad Cuba joined Georgia and hungry to improve life, USA has and will always exploit situation for own benefit. India will barely see kickbacks from George Soros, like Africa vastly starved and as long as USA dominated after Africa freed of colonial slavery, well tough life.
Perhaps one day in future people will look back and like many Jews in Israel don't care about Germany's actions in holocaust, I can at least have a perspective as Hungarian who too decided to move on from iron fence Nd start new prosperous future outside German Reich alliance with America.
03 Nov 2024, 5:21 pm
Once USA is less powerful the whole world will be free 
Try to drop food parcels in Palestine, if it's enough. Try send un help kids in Lebanon, it's not enough, the un is known to be a failure effort.
Utopia
I look at the EU immigrants of Muslim descent and I think they are divided, some accept christians. But it's to remember to be ethical and not rape or such scandals place one in a bad light, but easy to be influenced by corrupt people when you don't have work or can't figure out your way of survival in life.
I'm influenced by politics of my country but I do have PTSD and autism, so I try to figure myself out. I think need to fix tents and displacement, create work in Africa Nd I think that's best outcome for everyone, deport in polite, sweet way, with meal at end of rainbow.
Love. Hope. Peace. Tolerance.
03 Nov 2024, 9:06 pm
Everyone, please note:
I started this thread specifically on the topic of Palestinian Christians. My aim in this thread is to amplify the voices of Palestinian Christians (and to encourage American and other Western Christians to amplify Palestinian Christians' voices too).
I would appreciate it very much if people here could use other threads (not this one) to discuss other aspects of the Israel/Palestine situation. There are many such threads here on Wrong Planet, such as the following threads of mine:
- What life is like for Palestinians
- Evidence of Israel's genocidal intentions toward Gaza?
- Christian Zionism
- Israel/Palestine and settler-colonialism
- Israeli settler support infrastructure here in the U.S.A.
- Critiques of Zionism by Jews
- Changes in how Palestinians/Arabs talk about Jews
- Traditional anti-Jewish tropes and debunkings thereof
- Palestine/Israel: 2-state solution vs. 1 binational state?
- Israel/Palestine -- how could a one-state solution work?
and lots of other threads started by other people.
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
20 Dec 2024, 12:34 am
Here, in my thread on Christian Zionism, ASPartOfMe posted the following Times of Israel article: Toward an Israeli Christian Zionism, about the recent growth of a form of Christian Zionism among some Christians in Israel, including some indigenous Christians as well as immigrants.
I followed up with a post here about the Israeli Christian minority flag, and about a Bible reference that appeared in the Times of Israel article.
I'll now do some web research on indigenous Christians in Israel and share some of what I find here.
As far as I can tell so far, most of the indigenous Christians in Israel live in the Galilee region, in the northern part of the country, near Lebanon and Syria. Many of them live in the city of Nazareth, which was the town where Jesus grew up.
During the 1948 Nakba, most Palestinians/Arabs were expelled and their towns and villages destroyed by the Israelis. But Nazareth was one of the very few lucky places that was not destroyed, and whose inhabitants were allowed to stay. Apparently this was because Nazareth was predominantly Christian and contains some major Christian holy sites. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, feared that expelling all the Christians from Nazareth would result in lots of very bad press in the West.
Nazareth, though traditionally a Christian-majority city, ended up becoming predominantly Muslim, because Muslims from some nearby villages that did get destroyed fled to Nazareth. But there are still a lot of Christians in Nazareth.
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
Last edited by Mona Pereth on 20 Dec 2024, 2:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
20 Dec 2024, 1:51 am
On the website of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), I found Nazareth Dispatch by Jonathan Cook (Summer 2013), about the cities of Nazareth and Natzrat Illit (Upper Nazareth):
Outside Israel, few have heard of Upper Nazareth. But for millions of Christians, Nazareth is identified with one of the most important stories of the New Testament: the Annunciation, the moment when the Angel Gabriel revealed to Mary that she was carrying the son of God in her womb. Nazareth is where Jesus is said to have spent most of his life. Each year, its churches attract hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors, mostly Christian pilgrims.
Nazareth also enjoys a doubly unique status among the 1.4 million-strong Palestinian minority in Israel. It is the only Palestinian city to have survived the nakba, the great dispossession of 1948, with most of its inhabitants in situ. And, though today a majority of its 80,000 residents are Muslim — many of them descended from refugees who sought sanctuary in the city from those same events — Nazareth is still home to the largest Christian Palestinian community in the country.
A 2012 survey showed that, of the 125,000 Palestinian Christians in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, about a fifth were to be found in Nazareth — nearly twice the number living in any other community. Christians comprise slightly less than 2 percent of Israel’s population, down from 8 percent of Palestine’s population in 1946, under the British Mandate.
The need for Upper Nazareth — Illit in Hebrew means both “above” and “superior” — was born of a last-minute failure of nerve by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. The inhabitants of hundreds of Palestinian communities were expelled or fled during the nakba. But when the Israeli army massed against Nazareth in mid-July 1948, Ben-Gurion stayed the hand of his commanders, fearful that the flight of local Christians and Israel’s takeover of the holy sites would incur the wrath of the Vatican and alienate his key international allies. Instead, Nazareth was allowed to surrender.
A few years later, in 1956, Ben-Gurion ordered construction of Upper Nazareth’s first neighborhoods after vast swathes of Nazareth’s farmland had been confiscated in the “public interest.” Upper Nazareth was the flagship of the Judaization of the Galilee program, establishing the blueprint for the later settlement project in the Occupied Territories. Its role was to corral its Palestinian neighbor to prevent it from realizing its potential as the political and cultural capital of the Palestinians inside Israel.
Upper Nazareth was supposed to diminish Nazareth in several ways. After 1948, Nazareth was surrounded by seven surviving Palestinian villages. Without the state’s intervention, it would have merged with them, becoming the core of a conurbation today comprising a quarter-million inhabitants. Aerial views of Upper Nazareth show how its land-hungry tentacles of housing estates and industrial zones served to isolate Nazareth and separate it from its hinterland.
Under British rule, Nazareth had been the administrative capital of the Galilee, home to government offices and local courts. But these services were soon relocated to the new Jewish city. Extensive industrial zones were created there, as was a shopping mall to serve both communities. Upper Nazareth, unlike Nazareth, was even made a tourism priority zone, encouraging the building of the first chain hotel in either city (Nazareth would have to wait until the 1990s for an upgrade in status). The transparent goal was to starve Nazareth of funds, redirecting resources to its Jewish twin.
Upper Nazareth’s first homes and its administrative buildings, including the municipality, were located on a bluff above Nazareth. Just as with the settlements of the West Bank, its role was to stand watch over the Palestinian community below. Doubtless the choice of site was partly an act of psychological warfare, intended to convey a sense of Upper Nazareth’s superiority and invulnerability. But it also allowed Israeli officials to monitor developments in Nazareth, reporting violations of repressive and discriminatory planning rules designed to limit the Palestinian city’s growth.
In the state’s early years, a military governor of the Galilee, Col. Mikhael Mikhael, confided that the rationale for establishing Upper Nazareth was to “swallow up” Nazareth and transfer “the center of gravity of life” to the Jewish city. [1] The Biblical city’s fate was supposed to align with that of other post-1948 Palestinian cities: Labeled “mixed cities,” they were in truth Judaized cities with a ghetto-like suburb of deprived Palestinians attached.
Note that the "Palestinians" mentioned here are Palestinian/Arab citizens of Israel, i.e. the relatively few Palestinians who were not expelled from Israel during the Nakba.
The vast majority of those Palestinians who were expelled were never allowed to return. Nor are Palestinians who live in the occupied territories allowed to move into Israel.
Back to the article:
More than five decades on, Upper Nazareth has clearly failed to achieve its goals; its Palestinian twin enjoys too many historical privileges to be easily defeated.
True, Upper Nazareth drastically limited Nazareth’s room for expansion, forcing hundreds of families to build houses illegally and live with the consequent fines and threat of home demolition. Meanwhile, Israel successfully starved Nazareth of the economic benefits rightfully due it from tourism: Most visitors, shipped in on buses, spend less than an hour wandering its main church before being shepherded on to the many hotels and restaurants in the nearby Jewish city of Tiberias.
But Nazareth enjoyed the fruits of its other Christian institutions, ensuring its emergence as the Palestinian economic hub of the Galilee. Three hospitals, founded by religious charities more than a century ago, mean that patients from across the region head to Nazareth for treatment. More importantly, Nazareth’s success has been underpinned by a dozen private schools, set up by religious orders before Israel’s creation. Catering to Christian and Muslim pupils, these schools bypass the hugely disadvantaged and intellectually restrictive separate education system for Palestinian children, and are largely responsible for the emergence of Nazareth’s middle class. They educate the doctors and nurses, lawyers, hi-tech engineers and entrepreneurs who populate the city and have thrived in the face of state-sponsored adversity.
By contrast, Upper Nazareth, despite being endlessly pampered, has struggled in its Judaization mission. Rather than becoming the Galilee’s metropolis, it still counts a population of no more than 55,000, a majority of them recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union directed to the city by Zionist agencies. These immigrants soon understand that they have been deposited in the “periphery,” next to Israel’s largest concentration of Palestinians, who, in Israeli culture, stand for all that is alien, primitive and menacing. Once acculturated, these immigrants seek to move south toward Tel Aviv and its sprawling suburbs. Since the late 1990s, no new sources of immigration have emerged to replace them.
The gradual exodus from Upper Nazareth, combined with Nazareth’s growing middle class and stifling overcrowding, has created a unique problem for the Judaization program. Rather than swallowing Nazareth, Upper Nazareth is being slowly swallowed by its Palestinian neighbor. Wealthy Nazarenes, often Christians unable to build a home in their city legally, are paying above-market prices to buy the homes of Upper Nazareth’s departing Jews.
“Code 20
ince 2005, the Israeli government has quietly classified Upper Nazareth under “code 20,” the designation for an ethnically mixed city. [2] Its mayor, Shimon Gapso, a far-right ally of former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, has conceded that his city is only 82 percent Jewish; others suggest that as many as one in four residents may now be Palestinian.
The migration of Palestinians into Upper Nazareth has been underway for more than a decade now. Gapso was elected four years ago on an unashamedly anti-Arab platform, including a plan — later abandoned after legal advice — to set up a municipal fund to buy “Jewish homes” to prevent their “takeover” by Palestinian buyers.
In the spring of 2013, as Upper Nazareth heads toward a local election in November, he has set about erecting a dozen outsize Israeli flags at every road intersection between the two cities. Nazareth residents understand the message: “Keep out!”
Late in 2012, after Nazareth staged a protest against Israel’s attack on Gaza, Operation Pillar of Cloud, Gapso made headlines calling the city “a nest of terror” and demanding that the government declare it “a city hostile to the state of Israel.” Ideally, its residents should be expelled to Gaza, he added, but if that was not possible the government should instead cut off all funding. [3] State prosecutors rejected demands to investigate Gapso for racist incitement.
A rumor circulating in Nazareth holds that Gapso has become so unhinged in his hatred of his Palestinian neighbors that he assumed the display of flags would provoke attempts to burn them down, thereby proving his point about the threat posed by Nazareth to the state and his own city. He was to be disappointed.
More concretely, Gapso has repudiated the designation of his city as ethnically and religiously mixed. He has refused to allow a mosque or church to be built, or to allot a section of the municipal cemetery for non-Jews. In the winter of 2010 he went public with his ban on Christmas trees in public buildings, backed by the city’s rabbi, Isaiah Herzl, who said any such tree would be “offensive to Jewish eyes.” [4] His officials have also failed to implement a 2002 court ruling to erect road signs in Arabic as well as Hebrew, leading the Supreme Court in 2011 to hold the city in contempt.
The latest row concerns Gapso’s refusal to approve an Arabic-language school in Upper Nazareth. The city’s Palestinian children, now said to number nearly 2,000, are forced to scramble for places in Nazareth’s heavily oversubscribed private schools. When Israel’s largest human rights group, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, protested in January that Palestinian residents were entitled to equal educational provision, Gapso called the demand “a provocative nationalist statement.” [5] The Education Ministry has so far declined to intervene.
I'll omit the last section, titled "Unsettled State of Affairs," about Mayor Gapso's plan to Judaize the city of Upper Nazareth by bringing in Haredim, who are known for having lots of babies.
The author, Jonathan Cook, is "a freelance writer based in Nazareth and winner of the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism," according to this page listing articles by him on the MERIP site.
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
20 Dec 2024, 2:44 am
Looking now at Nazareth in the War for Palestine: The Arab City that Survived the 1948 Nakba by Mustafa Abbasi, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, Nov 2010.
Here is the abstract:
The complete article can be found here.
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
20 Dec 2024, 3:51 am
Jonathan Cook, author of the article I quoted in the next-to-last post in this thread, has also written the following (briefer) article for Al Jazeera:
Letter from Nazareth: The forgotten Palestinians: "The city’s Christians and Muslims continue to struggle against Israel’s divide-and-rule policies," 24 Dec 2015:
Despite the festive mood, friends and neighbours in what is Israel’s largest Palestinian city struggle to sound hopeful about the future. Even the inflatable Father Christmases hanging from shop awnings look forlorn.
Tourism has crashed since Israel’s attack on Gaza nearly 18 months ago. The unrest seething close by in the occupied West Bank brings unrelenting reports of Palestinian casualties.
Note: The above is a reference to Israel's 2015 Gaza war, not the current one.
Back to the article:
Equally unsettling are signs that Israeli society’s hostility towards its Palestinian minority is turning ever uglier. Chants of “Deaths to the Arabs!” have moved from the football stands to the high street.
My Nazareth-born wife no longer dares take along a knife to peel fruit on outings with our two young daughters, fearful that in the new mood of vigilantism she might be shot as a so-called “lone-wolf” attacker.
In Jewish areas, friends and relatives admit to growing more anxious about speaking Arabic in public or on their phones.
Historian Ilan Pappe calls the 1.6 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship the “forgotten Palestinians”. During the Nakba, the mass dispossession of Palestinians in 1948, they managed to avoid being expelled from the new state. Today, they are one in five of Israel’s population.
It is their strange status, as a “trapped minority” in the words of one Israeli sociologist, that first drew me to Nazareth as a journalist more than a decade ago, at the start of the second Intifada.
Over the years, I have come to appreciate the difficulties Palestinian citizens of Israel face as they live with the status of a permanent “enemy within”.
They have had to develop a complex and supple identity to cope, and a sixth sense attuned to the constant intrigues, mounted by their own state, to weaken them and set them one against the other.
Nazareth has the largest concentration of Christians in the Holy Land but also a two-thirds Muslim majority after the city became a place of sanctuary for many refugees in 1948.
That has made it especially vulnerable to Israel’s divide-and-rule strategies.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s malign efforts to foment discord here in the late 1990s, during his first term as prime minister, have not been forgotten.
He triggered sectarian riots by backing a provocative plan to build a huge mosque overshadowing the city’s main holy site. The Basilica of the Annunciation marks the spot where an angel is believed to have told Mary she was carrying Jesus.
The fires stoked, Netanyahu then quietly dropped the mosque project.
Back in power since 2009, he has been aggressively playing the divide-and-rule card again, this time trying to take advantage of Christian fears about ISIL’s growing power in the region.
According to local media, a recent Israeli poll claimed 17 percent of Muslims in Israel “support” the Islamic State group [ISIL].
Closer inspection, however, reveals that respondents were asked not whether they supported ISIL, but if they were “ashamed as Arabs” of it. On that reckoning, even my Palestinian Christian wife might be classified an ISIL supporter.
Nonetheless, the publicity given to such polls, as well as the arrest this month of five men from Nazareth accused of setting up an ISIL cell, is unnerving some Christians. They wonder whether, or how soon, the fallout from Syria will reach them.
Netanyahu is only too happy to fuel their fears.
He has recruited a Nazareth priest to his side, arguing that it is time for Christians, though not Muslims, to break their decades-old opposition to serving in the Israeli army. Young Christians, Netanyahu says, should learn how to defend themselves as Israeli soldiers, even if it means oppressing their kin in the occupied territories.
The idea is unappealing to most, but Netanyahu has carrots and sticks to entice them.
One inducement lies next to my home – land on a ridge above the Basilica. For decades the area was waste-ground, strangely empty in a city choked by chronic overcrowding, the legacy of discriminatory land allocations.
A city official tells me the plot was confiscated by the state after its owners fled in 1948. Allowed to run wild, the government has now decided to offer the land for housing, but only to Palestinians who serve in the security services.
Netanyahu hopes to exploit Nazareth’s severe land shortages, combined with the traditional obligation on Palestinian men to build a home before they marry, to arm-twist Christian school-leavers into the army.
The meddling goes deeper. His government has also approved a new nationality, Aramaean, supplementing the existing main classifications on Israeli ID cards of Jewish, Arab and Druze.
The goal is to persuade young Christians to deny their Arab heritage, language and culture, and identify instead as Aramaeans.
Shadi Halul, a former spokesman for the small group of Christians who volunteer in the Israeli army, recently won approval for the country’s first Aramaic school in his village of Jish, north of Nazareth.
When I meet him at his home, he angrily denies that he is an Arab, saying Muslim conquerors ruthlessly imposed an Arab identity on the region in the seventh century.
“We are Aramaic, but most of us have forgotten our true identity because it was denied us for hundreds of years,” he says. “The first battle is to educate Christians to regain an understanding of their history and language.”
In his view, Christians can win back influence in the region only by siding with Israel – and, given that both Jews and the first Christians spoke Aramaic, revival of the language is the key to cementing their alliance.
“You need to be a wolf to live in this region,” he says. “We must be able to defend ourselves.”
In Nazareth, such thinking has attracted a small but increasingly vocal following. The first-ever Palestinian Christian Zionist political party is soon to launch in the city. Its main goal, aside from recruiting Christians to the army, is to build a huge statue of Jesus, modelled on Rio de Janiero’s, guarding the city’s entrance.
Khalil Haddad, a Christian tour guide and restaurant owner who is a prominent critic of Halul and his followers, fears that given time such ideas may gain ground.
He points to the paradox that these Christians are calling for loyalty to Israel at a time when they are living under communal assault – not from ISIL, or their Muslim neighbours, but from their own government and from Jewish extremists supported by the right.
This summer Israel effectively declared war on some 50 church schools, withdrawing most of their funding and forcing the teachers and pupils, my own children included, to go on strike.
And at the same time Jewish fanatics fore-bombed a famous church on the Sea of Galilee, in the gravest of a wave of “price-tag” attacks on Muslim and Christian holy sites over the past two years.
Netanyahu, Haddad says, will use the new Aramaic nationality to offer Christians privileges denied to Muslims, further sowing the seeds of mistrust.
Even Israel’s outlawing of the northern Islamic Movement last month, he believes, may have been intended in part as a way to reinforce a sense of “good” Christians and “bad” Muslims.
“Christians and Muslims have lived in shared communities in harmony for centuries,” he says. “The kind of sectarian conflict Netanyahu is cultivating will benefit Israel, and damage us.”
I also found another Al Jazeera article by Jonathan Cook on the same general topic: Israel: Divide-and-conquer in Nazareth?: "Christian and Muslim communities accuse government of trying to divide them along sectarian lines," 17 Jan 2014.
See also, for a longer and more detailed account of the Israeli military service issue, as it affects Palestinian Christian citizens of Israel: Onward, Christian Soldiers by Jonathan Cook, 05/13/2014, on the website of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP).
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
Last edited by Mona Pereth on 20 Dec 2024, 6:42 am, edited 2 times in total.
20 Dec 2024, 11:53 am
Reminder to all: Please limit this thread to the topic of Palestinian Christians (and indigenous Christians in Israel, whether or not they personally identify as "Palestinian"). Please discuss other aspects of the Israel/Palestine situation in other threads. I'll be asking Cornflake to move off-topic posts (i.e., any post not specifically about the indigenous Christian minority) to other threads.
(Someone just now posted something I would love to reply to, but I will wait until it gets moved.)
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
20 Dec 2024, 12:52 pm
| ! | Cornflake wrote: |
| A post has been split off to start a new thread, here: Another possible Jewish homeland, if Israel fails? |
_________________
Giraffe: a ruminant with a view.
