The
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinian Christians That Nobody Is Talking About
Palestine’s Christian
population is dwindling at an alarming rate. The world’s most ancient Christian
community is moving elsewhere. And the reason for this is Israel.
Christian leaders from
Palestine and South Africa sounded the alarm at a conference in Johannesburg on
October 15. Their gathering was titled: "The Holy Land: A Palestinian
Christian Perspective".
One major issue that
highlighted itself at the meetings is the rapidly declining number of
Palestinian Christians in Palestine.
There are varied estimates
on how many Palestinian Christians are still living in Palestine today,
compared with the period before 1948 when the state of Israel was established
atop Palestinian towns and villages. Regardless of the source of the various
studies, there is near consensus that the number of Christian inhabitants of
Palestine has dropped by nearly tenfold in the last 70 years.
A population census carried
out by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in 2017 concluded that there are 47,000
Palestinian Christians living in Palestine – with reference to the Occupied
West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. 98 percent of Palestine’s
Christians live in the West Bank – concentrated mostly in the cities of
Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem – while the remainder, a tiny Christian
community of merely 1,100 people, lives in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The demographic crisis that
had afflicted the Christian community decades ago is now brewing.
For example, 70 years ago,
Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, was 86 percent Christian. The
demographics of the city, however, have fundamentally shifted, especially after
the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in June 1967, and the construction of
the illegal Israeli apartheid wall, starting in 2002. Parts of the wall were
meant to cut off Bethlehem from Jerusalem and to isolate the former from the
rest of the West Bank.
"The Wall encircles
Bethlehem by continuing south of East Jerusalem in both the east and
west," the "Open Bethlehem" organization said, describing the devastating
impact of the wall on the Palestinian city. "With the land isolated by the
Wall, annexed for settlements and closed under various pretexts, only 13% of
the Bethlehem district is available for Palestinian use."
Increasingly beleaguered,
Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem have been driven out from their historic
city in large numbers. According to the city’s mayor, Vera Baboun, as of 2016, the Christian
population of Bethlehem has dropped to 12 percent, merely 11,000 people.
The most optimistic estimates place the overall
number of Palestinian Christians in the whole of Occupied Palestine at less
than two percent.
The correlation between the
shrinking Christian population in Palestine, and the Israeli occupation and
apartheid should be unmistakable, as it is obvious to Palestine’s Christian and
Muslim population alike.
A study conducted by Dar
al-Kalima University in the West Bank town of Beit Jala and published in
December 2017, interviewed nearly 1,000
Palestinians, half of them Christian and the other half Muslim. One of the main
goals of the research were to understand the reason behind the depleting
Christian population in Palestine.
The study concluded that
"the pressure of Israeli occupation, ongoing constraints, discriminatory
policies, arbitrary arrests, confiscation of lands added to the general sense
of hopelessness among Palestinian Christians," who are finding themselves
in “a despairing situation where they can no longer perceive a future for their
offspring or for themselves".
Unfounded claims that
Palestinian Christians are leaving because of religious tensions between them
and their Muslim brethren are, therefore, irrelevant.
Gaza is another case in
point. Only 2 percent of Palestine’s Christians live in the impoverished
and besieged Gaza Strip. When Israel occupied Gaza along with the rest of
historic Palestine in 1967, an estimated 2,300 Christians lived in the Strip.
However, merely 1,100 Christians still live in Gaza today. Years of occupation,
horrific wars and an unforgiving siege can do that to a community, whose
historic roots date back to two millennia.
Like Gaza’s Muslims, these
Christians are cut off from the rest of the world, including the holy sites in
the West Bank. Every year, Gaza’s Christians apply for permits from the Israeli
military to join Easter services in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Last April, only
200 Christians were granted permits, but on the condition that
they must be 55 years of age or older and that they are not allowed to visit
Jerusalem.
The Israeli rights group,
Gisha described the Israeli army
decision as "a further violation of Palestinians’ fundamental rights to
freedom of movement, religious freedom, and family life", and, rightly,
accused Israel of attempting to "deepen the separation" between Gaza
and the West Bank.
In fact, Israel aims at
doing more than that. Separating Palestinian Christians from one another, and
from their holy sites (as is the case for Muslims, as well), the Israeli
government hopes to weaken the socio-cultural and spiritual connections that
give Palestinians their collective identity.
Israel’s strategy is
predicated on the idea that a combination of factors – immense economic
hardships, permanent siege, and apartheid, the severing of communal and
spiritual bonds – will eventually drive all Christians out of their Palestinian
homeland.
Israel is keen to present
the "conflict" in Palestine as a religious one so that it could, in
turn, brand itself as a beleaguered Jewish state in the midst of a massive
Muslim population in the Middle East. The continued existence of Palestinian
Christians do not factor nicely into this Israeli agenda.
Sadly, however, Israel has
succeeded in misrepresenting the struggle in Palestine – from that of political
and human rights struggle against settler colonialism – into a religious one.
Equally disturbing, Israel’s most ardent supporters in the United States and
elsewhere are religious Christians.
It must be understood that
Palestinian Christians are neither aliens nor bystanders in Palestine. They
have been victimized equally as their Muslim brethren, and have also played a
major role in defining the modern Palestinian identity, through their
resistance, spirituality, deep connection to the land, artistic contributions
and burgeoning scholarship.
Israel must not be allowed
to ostracize the world’s most ancient Christian community from their ancestral
land so that it may score a few points in its deeply disturbing drive for
racial supremacy.
Equally important, our
understanding of the legendary Palestinian "soumoud" –
steadfastness – and of solidarity cannot be complete without fully appreciating
the centrality of Palestinian Christians to the modern Palestinian narrative
and identity.
Ramzy Baroud is a
journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A
Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London). Baroud has a Ph.D.
in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident
Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of
California Santa Barbara. His
website is www.ramzybaroud.net.
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