[News] How Zionist evangelicals seek to erase centuries of Palestinian Christianity

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Comments <https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/>
How Zionist evangelicals seek to erase centuries of Palestinian Christianity
Soumaya Ghannoushi <https://english.palinfo.com/authors/soumaya-ghannoushi>

Monday 22-December-2025

Last week, more than one thousand American evangelical pastors and
Christian “influencers” descended upon Israel in what organizers hailed as
a historic pilgrimage, the largest such delegation since the state’s
founding.

Arranged by the Friends of Zion initiative and blessed by Israel’s Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, the mission was greeted with presidential ceremony by
Isaac Herzog. It was marketed as a spiritual awakening.

In reality, it was a political crusade cloaked in the language of
revelation.

>From Jerusalem’s stages came the predictable liturgy.

US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, urged attendees to return home with
“the fire of God burning in your bones”, so that they might be “pro-Bible”
and therefore “pro-Israel”. Mike Evans – founder of the Friends of Zion
Museum, self-styled kingmaker behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and, by his own account, Donald Trump’s first presidential
victory – warned against giving “Bible land to radical Islam Jew-haters”.

The message was unmistakable: Israel is presented as the embodiment of
biblical truth; its enemy is “radical Islam”; the conflict is framed as a
cosmic duel between Judeo-Christian virtue and Muslim darkness.

It is a script long rehearsed by Netanyahu and his allies, faithfully
echoed by Christian Zionists who imagine themselves guardians of a besieged
Holy Land.

Yet, beneath this theatrical certainty lies an astonishing erasure. The
entire spectacle rests on a deception: that Palestine’s story is a binary
struggle between Jews and Muslims, and that Christians – by faith, by
identity, by history – naturally belong on Israel’s side.

It is a distortion so sweeping that only ideology can sustain it.


*A shared civilization*Christians are not outsiders in Palestine. They are
not visitors, observers, or decorative minorities. They are an indigenous,
ancient, constitutive part of the Palestinian people, older than Zionism,
older than Europe’s nation-states, older than the very political theologies
now mobilized in Israel’s defense.

For more than 14 centuries, Muslims and Christians in Palestine lived not
in grudging coexistence but within a shared civilization. Few places on
earth can claim a record of religious harmony so deep, sustained, and
organically lived.

That history begins with an episode the evangelical pilgrims rarely
mention. When Jerusalem surrendered to the Muslim army in 637 CE, Greek
Orthodox Patriarch Sophronius agreed to hand over the city’s keys only to
Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab himself. Umar travelled from Medina with one
servant and a single camel, taking turns walking beside it.

As they approached Jerusalem, the servant happened to be riding while Umar
walked, leading those awaiting them to mistake the servant for the caliph.
The ruler of a vast empire entered the city in coarse clothes,
indistinguishable from ordinary people, rejecting spectacle as a measure of
authority.

Umar signed the Aelia Covenant, guaranteeing Christian lives, churches,
property, and worship.

Not one church was destroyed. Not one Christian was forced to convert.
There was no massacre, no looting -nothing resembling the carnage the
Crusaders would unleash in 1099, when Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians
alike were slaughtered in an orgy of sanctified violence.

A moment of moral clarity followed. When it was time for prayer, Sophronius
invited Umar to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Umar refused.
If he prayed there, he explained, future Muslims might seize the building,
claiming: “Umar prayed here.”

Instead, he humbly prayed on the steps outside and issued a decree
forbidding Muslims from turning the church into a mosque. It was not merely
tolerance but principled restraint, a philosophy of power grounded in the
protection of the Other.

That ethic endured.


*A strong Christian presence*When Muslim leader Salahuddin al-Ayyubi
liberated Jerusalem centuries later, the arrangement governing the Church
of the Holy Sepulcher was not imposed upon its Christian custodians but
accepted by them as a stabilizing solution.

To prevent conflict among rival Christian denominations, the the keys of
the church were entrusted to two Muslim families, the Joudeh al-Husseini
and the Nuseibeh, whose neutral stewardship was recognized as a guarantor
of peace.

Palestine is a society in which Muslim and Christian life has long been
intertwined long before settler colonialism arrived to tear that shared
world apart

Some 850 years later, those families still unlock the doors at dawn and
close them at night. This is not domination but stewardship: a daily ritual
of shared guardianship over the sacred.

This shared life carried into modern Palestinian history.

During the Great Revolt of 1936–39, Christians were not peripheral to the
national struggle – they were among its leaders. Fouad Saba served as
secretary of the Arab Higher Committee before being exiled by the British
to the Seychelles, alongside other members of the leadership, including
Alfred Roch, the prominent Christian Palestinian from Jaffa.

The Palestinian flag of the revolt bore the crescent and the cross
intertwined, symbols of a national movement sustained by both faiths.

Later generations produced an extraordinary constellation of Palestinian
Christian figures whose influence shaped not only Palestinian national life
but global intellectual and cultural discourse.

George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, and Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of the Democratic Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, were among the most prominent political architects
of modern Palestinian resistance.

Hanan Ashrawi emerged as one of the most articulate diplomatic voices of
the Palestinian cause on the world stage. Emile Habiby, novelist, satirist,
and political leader, gave literary form to the lived absurdities of
Palestinian life under settler-colonial rule.

Palestinian Christian contribution extended far beyond politics. Edward
Said, one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century,
reshaped entire disciplines – literature, cultural studies, postcolonial
theory – while remaining unwaveringly rooted in the Palestinian experience.

His insistence that Palestine was not merely a geopolitical problem but a
human and cultural catastrophe transformed how the world understood
colonialism, exile, and power.

Said was not a peripheral Palestinian voice; he was among its most globally
resonant, a legacy that endures at Columbia University, where Palestinian
Christian intellectuals Wael Hallaq and Joseph Massad continue to challenge
colonial orthodoxies and defend Palestinian historical truth.

Decades earlier, Khalil Sakakini, the Jerusalemite Christian educator,
diarist, and reformer, laid the foundations of modern Palestinian pedagogy
and civic thought.

A fierce opponent of sectarianism and colonial domination alike, Sakakini
championed Arabic language, cultural self-confidence, and intellectual
independence at a time when Palestine was being reshaped by imperial
designs.

The Nasir family, Palestinian Christians from Birzeit, founded what would
become Birzeit University, the intellectual heart of Palestinian national
life. The institution began in 1924 as an elementary school for girls,
co-founded by Nabiha Nasir, educator, feminist, and political activist.


*After colonialism*In culture and the arts, Palestinian Christians have
been no less central. The Trio Joubran – Samir, Wissam and Adnan, three
brothers from Nazareth – transformed the oud into a global instrument of
Palestinian memory, carrying to world stages the words of Mahmoud Darwish,
Palestine’s greatest modern poet – a Muslim, as his name suggests – whose
voice became inseparable from their music.

Their partnership distils something essential about Palestine itself: a
society in which Muslim and Christian life has long been intertwined,
intellectually, artistically, emotionally, long before settler colonialism
arrived to tear that shared world apart.

A few weeks ago, I attended the Joubran Trio’s concert at the Barbican in
London, marking the 20th anniversary of their extraordinary collaboration
with Mahmoud Darwish.

The evening was deeply moving throughout: the ache of the oud intertwined
with Darwish’s voice, while images of Palestine were projected behind them,
folding sound, memory, and land into a single experience.

Before performing The Trees We Wear, Samir paused to explain its origins.
The piece, he said, had been composed deliberately as a love song, with no
political insinuation, an insistence on something often denied to
Palestinians: the right to be seen as romantic, tender, fully human.

When the trio performed the piece in Ramallah in 2019, Shireen Abu Akleh
had attended the concert and later noted that it was her favorite of the
evening. Three years later, Shireen, the Palestinian-American Christian
journalist whose reporting carried Palestine’s daily reality to the world,
was shot dead by an Israeli soldier while covering a military incursion in
Jenin.

Her body was found near a tree, an image Samir recalled with quiet gravity,
as though she had worn it, a tragic echo of the song’s title. The Trio
later dedicated The Trees We Wear to her memory.

When mourners insisted on carrying Shireen’s coffin on foot during her
funeral procession in East Jerusalem, Muslims and Christians stood together
to shield it as Israeli soldiers attacked the pallbearers, turning grief
itself into an act of resistance.


*Palestinian music band*Palestinian music band “Le Trio Joubran” performs
on stage during the “Together for Palestine” benefit concert at the Zenith
Paris event venue, in Paris on 9 December 2025 (AFP)

Together, these figures expose the fiction at the heart of the Christian
Zionist narrative. Palestinian Christianity is not marginal, residual, or
fading by historical accident. It has been central to Palestine’s political
imagination, cultural production, educational institutions, and moral
vocabulary.

It is precisely this reality that Israel and its Christian Zionist patrons
seek to obscure.

In 1948, Zionist militias bombed the Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem, killing
25 Palestinian Christians. That same year, Israeli forces executed 12
Christian villagers in Eilabun.

The Nakba displaced some 90,000 Palestinian Christians and saw the forced
closure of around 30 churches, hollowing out centuries-old communities.

During Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, churches that once offered
sanctuary have themselves been struck: the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint
Porphyrius, among the oldest Christian sites in the world, was bombed,
killing families sheltering inside; the Holy Family Catholic Church was
also hit, leaving civilians dead and wounded.

This was not without precedent. In 2002, Israeli forces subjected the
Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to a 39-day armed siege -the only time
in its fourth-century history such an assault occurred.

Beyond Gaza, Christian life across Palestine has come under sustained
pressure. Homes, monasteries, hospitals, schools, and cultural institutions
have been damaged or destroyed. Settler militias have repeatedly attacked
the Christian town of Taybeh, vandalizing property and threatening
residents.


*Ideological zeal*Before the Nakba, Palestinian Christians made up 12.5
percent of the population; today they are roughly 1 percent. Clergy and
community leaders, including Pastor Munther Isaac, have warned that if
current conditions persist, there may be no indigenous Christian presence
left in Palestine by 2050.

Meanwhile, Israeli extremists routinely spit on priests and harass clergy
in Jerusalem, behavior dismissed by Israel’s minister of national security,
Itamar Ben-Gvir, as “an old Jewish tradition”. Christian Zionists, who
speak endlessly of “biblical values”, respond with silence.

That silence is not accidental. It is inherited. The Crusaders, too,
cloaked ambition in scripture, sanctifying violence while discarding
inconvenient lives, including those of Eastern Christians.

Today’s Christian Zionists revive the same posture: not faith, but fervor;
not devotion, but ideological zeal wrapped in biblical language.

Christianity and Judaism are being stripped of their depth and bent to the
needs of a colonial project that crushes the very Christians whose
ancestors first sanctified this land

They defend a state that bombs churches, kills Christian civilians, and
drives Christian families from their ancestral land. They pledge to train
tens of thousands of evangelists to serve Israel’s cause, while remaining
willfully blind to the erasure of the very Christian communities whose
presence gives the Holy Land its meaning.

They cheer politicians and commentators who treat Christianity not as a
living faith but as a useful relic. British commentator Melanie Phillips
captured this contempt with startling frankness when she described
Christianity as a “Jewish sect that got slightly out of hand”.

Zionism, born of secular nationalism and often deeply suspicious of
religion, discovered that religion could be pressed into service. Christian
Zionists supply the passion, the theatre, the vocabulary of destiny,
baptizing military campaigns and sanctifying domination.

For this performance to succeed, Palestinian Christians must be written out
of the script. Their existence punctures the myth of a “Judeo-Christian
West” confronting a Muslim enemy.

Christianity and Judaism are being stripped of their depth and bent to the
needs of a colonial project that crushes the very Christians whose
ancestors first sanctified this land. No amount of biblical verse can
disguise that reality.

The pastors came searching for prophecy. They walked among a living
Christian people and did not see them. They claimed to defend Christianity
while turning their backs on its oldest communities.

And beneath it all lies the starkest truth: they mistook political
allegiance for faith, idolatry for devotion, and forgot that Christ’s
fiercest words were reserved for those who cloaked tyranny in piety.

*-Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer and expert in Middle East
politics. Her journalistic work has appeared in The Guardian, The
Independent, Corriere della Sera, aljazeera.net <http://aljazeera.net> and
Al Quds. Her article appeared in the Middle East eye.*
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