Israel’s Christians need all the support they can get

Pope's visit to the Middle East comes at a time when Christians in Israel feel more under threat than ever, writes Jonathan Cook

When Pope Benedict XVI visited the Holy Land five years ago, Israel heightened its security, gladly emphasising the potential threat he supposedly faced in ­Israel from Muslim extremists.

As his successor, Pope Francis, arrived in Israel yesterday, security was no less strict. Some 9,000 police had been drafted in to protect him, Christian institutions were under round-the-clock protection, and the intelligence services were working overtime. ­According to a Vatican official, ­Israel's preparations had turned "the holy sites into a military base".

On this occasion Israel has been less keen to publicise the source of its fears, because the most tangible threat comes not from Islamists but Jewish fanatics linked to Israel’s settler movement.

Last month, they issued a death threat to the Roman Catholic bishop of Nazareth and his followers, while recent weeks have seen clergy attacked, churches and monasteries defaced with offensive graffiti and cemeteries desecrated.

The building where the pope is due to meet Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu today was daubed with “Death to Arabs and Christians”. On Friday, a church in Beersheva was sprayed with an unprintable insult against Jesus Christ.

Israeli police have arrested or issued restraining orders on several dozen Jewish extremists in the past few days. Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, has warned that “acts of unrestrained vandalism are poisoning the atmosphere”.

Indeed, the mood of intolerance has spread beyond a dangerous fringe. Hundreds of Israeli Jews demonstrated angrily in Jerusalem last week against the pope, while police barred Catholic authorities from putting up banners celebrating his visit, apparently fearful it could trigger wider protests.

The local Palestinian Christian population, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself, is feeling more embattled than ever – and not just from settlers.

In Bethlehem yesterday, the pope made an unscheduled stop to pray by the monstrous concrete wall that has turned Jesus’s birthplace into a prison for its inhabitants. At a nearby refugee camp he was reminded that Israel bars many residents from returning to homes now in Israel.

Meanwhile, Mr Netanyahu has announced a plan whose barely concealed goal is to divide the large Palestinian minority inside Israel – pitting Christian against Muslim – by seeking to draft the former into the Israeli military.

Despite this pope’s popularity, there have been rumblings of dissatisfaction at his priorities on this brief, three-day trip. The official purpose is to mark the 50th anniversary of a meeting in Jerusalem between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras that ended a 1,000-year schism between Rome and the Orthodox Church.

The Vatican has emphasised that Francis’s trip is “absolutely not political”. His itinerary, which does not include time for a visit to the Galilee, where most Palestinian Christians are located, suggests the pope is not likely to offer his flock solace beyond the general hope he expressed in Bethlehem for a “stable peace” in the region.

The holy land’s Christians are an increasingly vulnerable minority.

Although Israel blames Muslim fanatics for the decades-long decline, the truth is different. In repeated surveys, only a small minority of Christians blame Muslims for the exodus. In part, the proportion of Christians has fallen over time simply because of their tendency to have smaller families than Muslims. But equally significant are Israel’s oppressive twin policies of belligerent occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem and a political system of exclusive Jewish privilege inside Israel.

All Palestinians, Muslim and Christian alike, have been harmed by Israeli rule. But Christians have been better able to exploit connections to western communities, giving them an easier passage out.

None of this fits well with Israel’s narrative of a clash between the Judeo-Christian world and Islam, or its desire to present itself as a unique haven as neighbouring Arab states sink into sectarian conflict. Yesterday, Mr Netanyahu claimed Israel was the only Middle East country to offer “absolute freedom to practise all religions”.

The reality, however, is that the settlers’ violence feeds off a religious and ethnic intolerance cultivated on many fronts by the Israeli state itself.

It starts early, with most Jewish children educated in religious schools that scorn a modern curriculum. Instead, they drill into pupils literal interpretations of the Bible that encourage Jewish chauvinism.

Israel’s programme of Holocaust education rejects universal lessons, preferring to nurture a sense of Jews as history’s eternal victims. Many Israelis believe they should be constantly on guard, and armed, against a world of antisemitic gentiles.

Hardline Orthodox rabbis, given control over large areas of Israeli life, have become sole arbiters of moral values for many Israelis. The government’s latest effort to pass legislation affirming Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people” is designed to prevent any hope of a multicultural future.

And finally, decades of rule over Palestinians have been exploited by Israel to invest ever-greater Jewish religious symbolism in contested or shared holy places, most notably the Al Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem. Slowly, a territorial conflict is gaining the attributes of a ­religious war.

Local church leaders understand this well. In the run-up to the pope’s visit, Patriarch Twal asked pointedly: “What effect is created by official discourse on Israel being a state for one group only?”

The pope noted in Jordan on Saturday that religious freedom was a “fundamental human right”. That is certainly a message Israel’s leadership needs to hear stressed when Francis meets them on Monday.

A visit that eschewed politics to focus only on religion – elevating holy sites above the people who live next to them – would betray a Christian community that needs all the help it can get as it fights for its continuing place in the holy land.

Jonathan Cook is an independent journalist based in Nazareth