The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinian Christians that nobody is talking about
By 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 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 ten-fold 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 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 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 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 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 The Palestine Chronicle. His last book is The Last Earth: A
Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of
Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the
University of Exeter. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.
ends