[News] The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinian Christians that Nobody is Talking about

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-ethnic-cleansing-of-palestinian-christians-that-nobody-is-talking-about/ 



  The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinian Christians that Nobody is Talking
  about

October 30, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

*By Ramzy Baroud <http://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/ramzy-baroud>*

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 <http://holylandconference.co.za/> 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 various 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 a near 
consensus that the number of Christian inhabitants of Palestine has 
dropped by nearly ten-fold in the last 70 years.

A population census carried out by the Palestinian Central Bureau of 
Statistics in 2017 concluded 
<https://www.refworld.org/docid/49749cd12.html> that 47,000 Palestinian 
Christians are living in Palestine – with reference to the Occupied West 
Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Ninety-eight 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 <https://www.openbethlehem.org/the-wall.html> 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 
<https://www.ncronline.org/news/world/bethlehems-declining-christian-population-casts-shadow-over-christmas>, 
as of 2016, the Christian population of Bethlehem has dropped to 12 
percent, merely 11,000 people.

The most optimistic estimates 
<https://www.ncronline.org/news/world/bethlehems-declining-christian-population-casts-shadow-over-christmas> 
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 evident to Palestine’s Christian and Muslim community alike.

A study conducted by Dar al-Kalima University in the West Bank town of 
Beit Jala and published in December 2017, interviewed 
<https://www.premier.org.uk/News/World/Israel-responsible-for-Christian-exodus-from-Palestine-study-finds> nearly 
1,000 Palestinians, half of them Christian and the other half Muslim. 
One of the main goals of the research was 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 <https://www.refworld.org/docid/49749cd12.html> 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 historical 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 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/20/gaza-christians-wait-easter-travel-permits-jerusalem>, 
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 
<https://gisha.org/updates/9934> 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.

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 
amid a massive Muslim population in the Middle East. The continued 
existence of Palestinian Christians does 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 devout 
Christians.

It must be understood that Palestinian Christians are neither aliens nor 
bystanders in Palestine. They have been victimized equally as their 
Muslim brethren. They have also played a significant 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 fierce drive for racial supremacy.

Equally important, our understanding of the legendary Palestinian 
‘/soumoud’/ – steadfastness – and 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 The Palestine 
Chronicle. His last book is ‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’, and 
his forthcoming book is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian 
Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud has a Ph.D. 
in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a non-resident 
research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at 
Zaim University in Istanbul. His website is//www.ramzybaroud.net/ 
<http://www.ramzybaroud.net/>/./

-- 
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