Harassment, Islamic Radicalism Drive Flight of Palestinian Christians

ICC Note

“Our life has become so sensitive, so precarious, no wonder the Christians are leaving the country.”

By Patrick Goodenough

05/15/2009 Palestine (CNSNews.com)-Standing alongside Pope Benedict XVI in Bethlehem this week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas blamed Israel for the emigration of Palestinian Christians, but researchers say the reasons for the declining numbers of Christians in the place of Jesus’ birth are considerably more complex.

Religious intolerance, expanding Islamic radicalism and P.A. harassment are cited as “push” factors, along with economic hardship and unemployment attributed in part to security closures that affect the important tourism industry. “Pull” factors include the existence of flourishing communities in the diaspora, easing assimilation.

In his comments, however, Abbas blamed only Israeli policies, including the security barrier standing between P.A.-controlled Bethlehem and nearby Jerusalem .

But the decline of Christian numbers in Bethlehem long pre-dated the building of the security barrier. Scholars note that it even pre-dated Israel ’s capture of the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War.

Greater Bethlehem , which includes the linked towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, was part of the British mandate of Palestine until 1948, then fell under Jordanian control until June 1967. Israel administered the area until it handed authority to Yasser Arafat’s P.A. in 1995 as a result of the Oslo peace accords.

Israeli political analyst Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli government liaison to the U.S. Congress, revealed several years ago that in the run-up to the handover to Arafat, former Bethlehem mayor Elias Freij, an Orthodox Christian, lobbied the Israeli government not to transfer Bethlehem , saying it would become a town with churches but empty of Christians. Freij later became a P.A. minister, and died in 1998.

Justus Reid Weiner, a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs who has been tracking the persecution of Palestinian Christians for more than a decade, says the Christian population of Bethlehem dropped from 80 percent of the total in 1950 to 60 percent in 1990 and to some 40 percent in 2000. It is today estimated at somewhere around 15 percent.

Other incidents adding to Christian anxieties included the rape and murder of two Christian sisters by gunmen allied with Arafat’s and Abbas’ Fatah faction in 2002 and the kidnapping by a Muslim of a 16-year-old Christian girl in 2005.

Her family lodged a complaint with P.A. police, but the girl, who has U.S. citizenship, was only released after the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem intervened. The family then moved to the U.S.

‘Precarious’

The decline of Christianity in Bethlehem mirrors that elsewhere in the P.A. areas, where Christian denominations include Catholic, Armenian, Syrian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox and Protestant.

“Jews say we’re Arabs, and Arab Muslims say we are Israelis,” he said. “Our life has become so sensitive, so precarious, no wonder the Christians are leaving the country.”