Christians Suffer Under the Palestinian Authority

The American government refuses to acknowledge the medieval abuses of Christians at the hands of the Palestinian Authority.

By Joseph Puder

11/18/2009 Palestinian Territory (Pajamas Media) – Rev. Bill Harter is a charismatic and well-respected Presbyterian Church (USA) pastor who has taken forty church missions to Israel and the Palestinian Authority territories. On various occasions at meetings with State Department officials, Rev. Harter revealed to them that Christian Palestinians say one thing in public and the opposite in private.

He requested that the State Department appoint a human rights officer and station him at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem in order to monitor, record, and redress the abuses that Christian Palestinians are undergoing at the hands of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas-sponsored gangs.

Palestinian Christians, according to researcher Justus Reid Weiner of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, have faced uninterrupted persecution since the Oslo Accords were implemented and Israel handed over the territories to the PA. Weiner asserts that the “very existence of the 2000 year-old Christian community” is in doubt. As a minority in a society governed by strict adherence to Islamic religious law, their leadership has also been intimidated and has abandoned them — choosing to curry favor with the PA leadership rather than acknowledge and speak out against the ever-increasing suffering of Christians under the Palestinian Authority and the more militant Muslim-led Hamas in Gaza.

Christian Palestinians have also been abandoned by the international community — by NGOs and human rights organizations. On their own, this educated Christian community has had to endure anarchy and lawlessness, widespread corruption in the PA security and police forces, and a xenophobic and intolerant Muslim majority.

Article 5 of the draft constitution of the Palestinian Authority unequivocally declares: “In the State of Palestine Islam will be the official religion. Sharia Islamic law will be the primary source of legislation.” Although that same article also “guarantees that monotheistic religions (Christianity and Judaism) will be respected and that the state will provide for freedom of worship,” the best that Christians (Jews do not live under PA control) can expect from the PA is dhimmitude — the discriminatory social and legal status “provided” to the Peoples of the Book.

Attempts by both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations to prop up the Palestinian Authority in general and Mahmud Abbas in particular have resulted in greater human rights abuses which have been grossly overlooked purely for political reasons. The U.S. State Department’s annual report on International Religious Freedom regularly ignores the abuses by the PA for political expediency as well. All of this has contributed to the further endangerment of the future of the Christian community in the Palestinian territories.