Christians Under Attack

Israel has become the only safe haven for Christians in the Middle East,

Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, wrote in a recent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.

“As 800,000 Jews were once expelled from Arab countries, so are Christians being forced from lands they've inhabited for centuries”, Ambassador Oren stated, comparing the expulsion of Jews after the establishment of the state of Israel with the Arab countries’ current treatment of their Christian minorities.

The numbers are telling. Today there is only one Middle Eastern country where the number of Christians has grown: Israel. As documented in the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, the Christian community that numbered 34,000 people in 1949 is now 163,000-strong, and will reach 187,000 in 2020.

In the rest of the Middle East, the drive for Islamic purity is going to banish all traces of pre-Islamic pasts. When the Islamists will have prevailed, the Middle East will be completely green, the colour of Islam.

Therefore, it is time for Christians to recognize Israel’s survival as critical and vital also for them. Instead, Arab Christians chose to react to Ambassador Oren by embracing Islam and demonizing the Jews.

“As Christian leaders in Palestine, we were appalled by the baseless allegations you published in the Wall Street Journal”, says one letter signed by many Arab Christian personalities published in the Palestinian media outlets. “Your attempt to blame the difficult reality that Palestinian Christians face on Palestinian Muslims is a shameful manipulation of the facts intended to mask the damage that Israel has done to our community. The Israeli occupation is the primary reason why so many members of the oldest Christian communities in the world have left the holy land, Palestine. Our reality is one of occupation, oppression and loss”.

The letter is signed by Palestinian ministries, activists, priests and mayors and members of the PLO.

Arab Christianity is near its extinction everywhere. “Christianity in Iraq could be eradicated in our lifetime, partially as a result of the US troop withdrawal”, declared Leonard Leo, chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

In Egypt, 100,000 Christians already have left the country - after Hosni Mubarak’s fall last year. The Egyptian Union of Human Rights is denouncing this “mass exodus”.

Even more dramatic is the collapse of Christian Arab society following Israel’s handing over of large parts of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Authority. Christians have suffered the most from the mafia-style rule of Yasser Arafat’s kleptocracy.

Christian sites and cemeteries were desecrated by Muslims. Slogans like “Islam will win” and “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday People” have been painted on walls, and PLO flags were draped over Jesus crosses.

Ramallah was 90% Christian before the 1948 War of Independence and Bethlehem was 80% Christian. Today Ramallah is a large Islamic city and Bethlehem’s Christians are near extinction.

Given their common status as minorities within an overwhelmingly Islamic region, you might expect Christian Arabs to find common cause with Jews and Israel. But the traditional hatred of Eastern Christianity for Judaism, combined with the futile hopes for assimilation within the Arab world, have closed off that option.

As the letter clearly shows, Arab Christians are lost to Islam. This unavoidable historical process has been explained by the pioneer Bat Ye’or, the most important historian of the “dhimmitude”.

Many Palestinian terrorists came from the Christian community. George Habash, who has been dubbed “the godfather of Middle East terrorism”, was a Greek Orthodox Christian who sang in his church choir as a boy back in the town of Lydda. His background was almost identical to that of his best friend, Wadia Haddad, the No. 2 in the PFLP and the operational genius and passionate proponent of the group’s terrorist acts.

For years after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the public face of that nation’s diplomacy was deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, who was born with the distinctly Christian name of Michael Yuhanna.

British author, William Dalrymple, suggests that by the 1990s, five out of Hafiz al Asad’s seven closest advisors were Christian. Today, the suave symbol of the Palestinian cause in the West is a Christian, Hanan Ashrawi, who signed the letter against Oren.

Coptic Christians were prominent in the pioneering nationalist anti-Israel Wafd Party of Egypt in the 1920s. From the 1930s, Arab Christians were deeply influenced by the fascist and ultra-nationalist models they could see in Europe, and they formed their own parties in this mold.

One of the first was the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, founded by the Christian Antun Saadeh, who preached the establishment of a Great Syrian empire covering not just modern-day Syria but also Judea, Samaria, Lebanon, Cyprus, and other stretches of the Near East.

In 1940, another Christian thinker launched what would be a still more influential variety of pan-Arabism, namely the Movement for Arab Renaissance (Ba’th). The key founder was Michel Aflaq, who had been educated at the Sorbonne.

The most prominent Palestinian intellectual in the world was a Christian, Edward Said (it was in Nazareth, in fact, that Said’s mother was born; his grandfather founded the city’s first Baptist church).

The use of the term “nakba” for the Israeli War of Independence was an innovation of Constantin Zureiq, the intellectual father of Arab nationalism. George

Antonious’ book “The Arab Awakening” is one of the earliest intellectual expressions of Palestinian Arab resentment about Zionism. Antonious was far from alone as a Christian Arab who saw his future with the aspirations of the Muslim majority in the Arab world.

You also have the case of Azmi Bishara, the Arab MK who betrayed the State of Israel, who comes from a middle-class Christian family from Nazareth.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, the Christian movements of General Michel Aoun and Sleiman Frangieh are allied with Hizbullah.