The Myth of Palestinian Christianity

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by Malcolm Lowe April 19, 2011 at 4:00 am

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2045/palestinian-christianity-myth

There has been much excellent academic study of the history of Christianity in the land of its birth. It could fill a whole library. In recent years, however, all that fine work has been eclipsed by the myth, created by the so-called "Palestinian narrative," of Palestinian Christianity.

It has become fashionable to talk of "narratives" and defer to them. But what is a narrative in this sense? Maybe all of us have received spurious emails in the name of a friend who desperately begs money, having allegedly been robbed while on holiday in a foreign land. That is a "narrative": often a pack of lies that demands immediate uncritical assent. Beware of those who solemnly plead with you to listen to their narrative.

Conveniently, last month the main elements of the myth of Palestinian Christianity were neatly summarized in a blog post entitled "The Vanishing Church in the Holy Land." Its author, who styles himself Sir Jeffery Abood (his knighthood comes not from Her Majesty but from Rome), already published it on December 30 last in America Magazine. So he has had ample time to become advised of its many errors, but it reappeared, unchanged, apart from insignificant stylistic touches. Myths are impervious to truth.

Sir Jeff's blog post (he prefers "Jeff" to "Jeffrey") has one great virtue: concision. It brings together in relatively few words a mass of often repeated misrepresentations about Christians in the Holy Land. It also contains one important statement that is true; we shall invoke it at the end. In all other regards, Sir Jeff has provided the opportunity to compile a handy equally concise demythologization of this myth of Palestinian Christianity.

The tone is set by an opening statement that is not merely false, it is patently and absurdly false: "For two thousand years, Christian communities there have thrived." Let us recall the destruction of Christian communities under Diocletian in the fourth century, under the Persian invasion in the seventh, under the Muslim Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim in the tenth, and under Bibars in the thirteenth. Not to mention other cruel regimes, invasions, massacres, plagues and famines.

In later centuries, there was general depopulation. Around 1800, the population of Jerusalem was a mere nine thousand, today it is three quarters of a million, and the population of the whole country was maybe three hundred thousand, where today ten million Israelis and Palestinians live. Christians often did not thrive; often nobody throve.

He continues: "Yet, over the last sixty years, their population has gone from historically around 18 percent to less than 2 percent today. Never have the Christian communities there been as close to going out, as they are now." Sir Jeff, as we shall shortly see, thinks that only Arab Christians need to be counted. But even in those terms, he is wrong. Arab Christians numbered some 150,000 or 8 (not 18) percent in 1947, whereas today, at around 180,000, they are indeed under 2 percent. So the absolute number of Arab Christians has increased over the last sixty years; only the number of Jews has increased much more, and the number of Muslims even more.

Further, the Arab Christian population of the State of Israel has nearly tripled in sixty years. There are no definitive statistics for the current Christian population in the areas of the Palestinian Authority (PA); various numbers are thrown around, even by official sources. But in 2008 Palestinian academics published carefully collected figures, which suggest that the Arab Christian population today may be less than in 1948, but that the decline took place before 1967, since when it has actually risen. In that event, the increase of Arab Christians in Israel has more than compensated for any decline in areas under Arab rule (during 1948-1967 and since 1995). According to those figures, the Arab Christians living in the State of Israel as Israeli citizens now outnumber those under the Palestinian Authority by nearly three to one.

The Palestinian academics concerned were Rania Al Qass Collings, Rifat Odeh Kassis and Mitri Raheb. The latter two are on record as not counting me among their best friends, so I cannot be accused of tendentious selection of sources, let alone of Zionist propaganda. But while I do honestly disagree with them about various things, I can respect their evidently conscientious attempt to gather reliable data.

Their figures for the number of Christians in the West Bank and Gaza in the last half century are: 48,855 (1961: Jordanian census), 42,494 (1967: Israeli census), 51,563 (1995), 48,800 (2006), 51,710 (2007/8). The last three figures are estimates of those academics, based on minute data collected in the relevant population centers. These figures completely refute Sir Jeff's talk of a "vanishing church," ascribed to the influence of Israel. On the contrary, the Christian population was falling before Israel took over in 1967, but rose markedly afterwards. Since 1995, when almost the whole Christian population came under direct PA control as part of Area A of the West Bank, the figure has been almost static. But it did recover from a dip during the second Palestinian intifada (during which some Christians may have taken refuge abroad).

Next, Sir Jeff turns to the composition of the Christian communities in the Holy Land: "Whether they live in Israel, the West Bank or Gaza, these Christians are all Palestinians (with the exception of recent immigrant worker communities) and have been living there for 2,000 years." So much nonsense in one short sentence!

The first local Christians were Jews, joined gradually by gentile converts from the Greek cities of the coast and Transjordan (the Decapolis). Over the centuries, great numbers of Christians arrived from many countries. Thus there are today Armenians and Syrian Orthodox (mostly refugees from SE Turkey), Copts, Ethiopians and Maronites. Members of Sir Jeff's own church community, the Latin Catholics, will proudly tell you that they are descended from the many Europeans who arrived during the Crusader period. Many Greek Orthodox had Greek-speaking ancestors.

The most recent influx, ignored by Sir Jeff, is the Christians among the 300,000 non-Jewish relatives of Jews who came from the former Soviet Union. Their total could match that of all the older communities; nobody knows, but a common guesstimate is 30,000. There are also now a few thousand Jewish or "Messianic" Christians in Israel, though this number is uncertain too. In short, there have been vast changes in the makeup of the Christian population over 2,000 years and to call them "all Palestinians" is merely to say that we are talking about the same geographic area.

Sir Jeff now invokes the widely propagated claim that Christians and Muslims always lived happily together under Muslim rule in the Holy Land: "Christians are not leaving Israel/Palestine because of their Muslim neighbors. After all, for 1,500 years the Christian population has been relatively stable despite living in a largely Muslim culture." To speak of a "stable population," as we saw, is nonsense. So I shall mention only two of endless examples that refute the illusion of a happy coexistence.

The Christians of Nazareth were expelled in 1517; only in 1620 did the Franciscans succeed in renewing a Christian presence there. In Bethlehem, it was the Christians who expelled the Muslims in 1831. During the last two decades, however, Christians have been encouraged to leave Bethlehem by Muslims who buy up their houses and businesses; so the Christians have gone from great majority to small minority.

"Even today, many of elected Palestinian leaders are Christians who enjoy popularity and a wide base of support." The Palestinian Legislative Council, whose ineffectual meetings ceased four years ago, has a handful of seats reserved for Christians. There is also the one-woman faction of Hanan Ashrawi. In neither case can one speak of "popularity and a wide base of support."

"Since the State of Israel has occupied these lands (partially in 1948, taking the rest in 1967) the Christians have left." Apparently, Sir Jeff is one of those who regard also the State of Israel, within any borders, as part of "Occupied Palestine." In any event, as we saw, the Christian population actually grew substantially under Israeli occupation after 1967. Nor did Christians suddenly start leaving in 1948. Back in 2000, Chile officially celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the Palestinian presence there, although the earliest known arrival dates from 1854. Some 400,000 Chileans claim Palestinian ancestry, mainly from Christians in the Bethlehem area who emigrated during 1900-1930.

"Most Christian owned lands have been and continue to be confiscated for the building of illegal settlements." Most? Sir Jeff proffers only one example: a "giant wall" built on property belonging to the "Home of Our Lady of Sorrows outside Jerusalem." Since when is a wall a settlement?

In fact, a large part of West Jerusalem, including the prestigious Rehavia quarter and the Knesset, is built on land that was leased from and continues to belong to the Greek Orthodox Church. Many of the leases ran out recently and the church received payment for their renewal. The Coptic Orthodox Church recently leased a large building for use as an Israeli health clinic. Other churches that have leased residential areas include the Armenians and the Syrian Orthodox. In none of these instances was land confiscated; church ownership remains anchored in Israeli law.

As he considers all of Israel to be occupied land, maybe Sir Jeff concurs with Palestinian references to the Jewish inhabitants of West Jerusalem as "settlers." For example, on October 31, 2010, Al-Quds had various articles about an arson attack on a church located, as the newspaper explicitly noted, in "Prophets Street" in "West Jerusalem." To this day, the perpetrators remain unknown. But the main article in Al-Quds (p. 1) termed it an attack by "settlers" in "occupied Jerusalem." There was a picture (p. 2) of "settlers" passing by the church. Also PA prime minister Salam Fayyad (p. 1), PA spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina (p. 1) and PA foreign minister Riyad Al-Maliki (p. 7) were variously quoted as using the terms "settlers" and "occupation" in reference to the incident. All those statements presupposed that West Jerusalem, too, is "occupied Palestine" inhabited by "settlers."

There is a broader issue here that needs to be clarified. Routinely, the Palestinians demand "a state with Jerusalem as its capital." They are widely assumed to mean "East Jerusalem," but they refrain from saying so. It may be a case of deliberate ambiguity: let foreigners think that only East Jerusalem is meant, while Palestinians can understand "all of Jerusalem." Whenever they use that phrase, they should be pressed to clarify: "We make no claim on West Jerusalem."

Sir Jeff, let it be clear, did not cite those allegations about the Jerusalem church. Nor did he mention arson attacks on Christian churches and other institutions in areas under PA control. For example, five churches were attacked after the Pope's controversial remark about Muslims at Regensburg in September 2006 (four churches in Nablus and one in Gaza).

"There also continue to be efforts by the government to remove the tax exempt status of the Church." Until the nineteenth century, Christians had to pay the taxes required by their dhimmi status, and churches were squeezed to pay various impositions. Under pressure from the European powers, the Ottoman government eliminated all those discriminatory taxes. Thus arose the tax exempt status of churches.