This Is How Israeli Rabbis Oppress the Christians in Palestine

The Israeli violations do not target only the Palestinian Muslims but rather everything that is not Jewish—including Christians.

The Israeli Occupation attacks on Christians have recently increased due to fatwas incited by extremist rabbis.

The Israeli government, Jewish movements, and extremist religious authorities are participating in a large and extended campaign against adherents of the Christian religion in Jerusalem, the occupied Palestinian, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

 

A History of Criminality

The most recent of these violations was the attack on the Church of the Flagellation affiliated with the Custody of the Holy Land on February 2, 2023. The settlers broke and destroyed what was inside and even tried to burn the building.

On January 12, 2023, Israelis attacked the Armenian Church in Jerusalem and wrote phrases calling for the killing of Christians. On January 4, others assaulted an evangelical Christian cemetery in the occupied city and destroyed 30 graves.

The Israeli Occupation is seeking, through its crimes, to push Christians to emigrate outside Palestine, a goal that it has started to achieve.

The percentage of Christians in the Palestinian territories does not exceed 1%, after they represented 11.2% before the Nakba in 1948, due to immigration, according to the 2022 Palestinian Authority census.

Israeli attacks against Christians started in 1948, when Jewish gangs abandoned many Christian villages during the Nakba and destroyed many churches there.

Israeli documents published in 2016 revealed that the Israeli army pursued a policy of destroying, vandalizing, and harming the sanctity of churches in Palestine, during and after the 1948 war, in addition to looting and vandalizing churches that existed in Palestinian cities, towns, and villages.

According to the statistics of the Committee of Church Affairs in Palestine, from 1948 until the end of 2015, the Israeli army and settlers attacked 100 churches and cemeteries throughout the occupied Palestinian territories by burning, destroying, desecrating, and stealing, in addition to bombing Christian churches and cemeteries in Gaza.

Since Naksa Day in 1967, Israeli attacks on Palestinian Christians in the West Bank have increased.

The settlers attacked the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the oldest church in the world, and smashed lamps over the “tomb of Jesus.”

They attacked the Coptic Monastery adjacent to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and its priests were beaten by the Israeli police, in addition to five Christian religious centers that were burned, followed by the shelling of St. George’s Church in Jerusalem.

In 1967 settlers stormed the Greek Orthodox Church of Jacob’s Well in Nablus, in the northern West Bank, and massacred the head of the church, Archimandrite Philoumenos.

In the same year, the Israelis converted the Greek Orthodox Church of Mar Jaris in the Shama’a neighborhood in Jerusalem into a residential building.

Attacks on churches and Christians continued throughout the occupied Palestinian territories. There was a wave of shootings inside churches in 1998, when settlers killed a priest in the Church of Shayyah on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and an Israeli soldier started shooting at worshipers in the Latin Gethsemane Church in the city.

In the occupied interior, Israeli soldiers stormed the Latin Church in Jaffa, in the same year, according to documentation by the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa.

During the second Intifada in 2000, settlers carried out assassination campaigns of Christian clerics in the West Bank, while the Occupation forces bombed and burned a number of churches. Daily attacks on Christians continued, even after the end of the Intifada.

Attacks against Christians in Palestine and Jewish incitement against them have recently increased.

 

Targeting Churches

Elias Khoury, an activist documenting Israeli crimes against Christians, said that these attacks are no different from those directed at Muslims. He added during his interview with Al-Estiklal: “In addition to the displacement and destruction of several Christian villages and neighborhoods in 1948, settlers always attack churches and monasteries in Palestine, such as burning a church in Tiberias in 2015, and dozens of attacks on churches in Jerusalem.”

He stressed that the beginning of this year was full of attacks, as settlers desecrated 30 Christian graves in Jerusalem, wrote anti-Christian slogans on the wall of the Armenian Patriarchate, and destroyed shops in the Christian Quarter, as well as beating Christian youths in the Armenian Quarter.

He continued: “It is also no secret that there is an attempt to leak and steal Christian property in all of Palestine, and one of the most severe attacks that affected the Palestinian Christian community in the West Bank was the construction of the separation wall that devoured the lands of dozens of Christian families in Bethlehem and Beit Jala and annexed them to Israel or built settlements on them.”

The Christian activist stressed that the Israeli Occupation wants to erase any non-Zionist and Jewish presence on Palestinian land, but targeting Christians is easier because of their numbers and the high chances of their emigration due to the presence of relatives abroad or the high percentage of young people who travel to study or work abroad and do not return.

He added: “There are religious reasons that fuel the Jewish settlers’ implementation of their crimes against Christians, the most important of which is the non-recognition and denial of the Christian religion.”

Jewish religious incitement and fatwas are among the main factors contributing to the escalation of violence against Christians in Palestine.

The Price Tag and Lehava organizations are among the ones responsible for targeting Christians and calling for the burning of their churches in all places worldwide after the Israeli government’s refusal to consider these groups as “terrorists.”

The Lehava organization publicly demanded the burning of churches and the displacement of Christians, describing them as pagans who should not exist in the Holy Land, and it is working “to plant” these ideas among the Jewish youth.

In 2015, the head of the Zionist Lehava, Bentzi Gopstein, told a symposium for religious school students that he “supports the burning of churches” and called for banning Christmas celebrations, describing Christians as vampire bats.

 

Western Silence

In light of the growing attacks and incitement against Christians in Palestine, the international community and the West in particular did nothing to discourage “Israel” and protect part of the Palestinians.

The Palestinian activist Ahmed Abu Youssef said during his interview with Al-Estiklal: “The West criminalizes any Palestinian formation that resists the Israeli Occupation and any Islamic or national movement, but in return, it ignores the armed terrorist Hebrew movements that shed blood.”

“The West is concerned with all Christians in the Arab countries, and moves and imposes sanctions in case they are targeted, but the matter is different in dealing with Israel.

“It becomes blind to what the [Israeli] Occupation and its settlers do with the Palestinians from the Christian religion.”

The activist explained that the observer of the Western media notices that any news that conveys Israeli crimes against the Palestinians is being obscured, and if it is published, it is placed in a marginal corner, even when the attack is on Christians in Palestine.

He continued: “The whole world saw Israel killing the Palestinian Christian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, and directly attacking her funeral and coffin, but no one has lifted a finger on Israel.”

Abu Youssef stressed that the West succeeded in employing anti-Semitism in order to prevent the Israeli Occupation’s accountability for its crimes and protect it from any legal and international pursuit.

During the past years, “Israel” and Western countries have been accusing anyone who criticized the violations of the Israeli Occupation and its apartheid system of “anti-Semitism” until it became a ready-made charge.