It is obvious that Palestinian Christians are slowly being forced out of their homeland, based on our observations and conversations made during a month long stay in Bethlehem, Palestine this past summer. Racist, Israeli policies that put pressure on all Palestinians, living under a brutal military occupation, are not intuitively obvious to the average, casual pilgrim to the Holy Land. In fact, here in America, Christians have been conditioned to believe that going into Palestine is dangerous. We found the opposite to be true. Jonathan Cook, a citizen of Israel, explains what’s happening to Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, in his insightful article posted below. We highly recommend contacting the Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem to go, visit and see for yourself what’s happening to our brothers and sisters-in Christ and Muslim friends in Palestine. [Ed.-TEC]
The Banksy Walled Off Hotel sits on the Bethlehem side of the Israeli Separation/Apartheid wall. Everything about it makes a political statement against the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine.
One of WHTT directors visited the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem.
Why there are few Christians left in the holy town of Bethlehem
Jonathan Cook, 25 December 2017, The National
It is another anxious Christmas for the inhabitants of Bethlehem. This is the time of year when they have a chance to break out of an isolation enforced in concrete since Israel enclosed the town with a “separation wall” more than a decade ago.
On Christmas Eve, in a centuries-old tradition, Palestinian and foreign pilgrims rub shoulders as they throng into the ancient Church of the Nativity to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Jesus at its reputed location two millennia ago.
Outside, in Manger Square, the lights and baubles on a huge Christmas tree provide some festive glitz, while hawkers assail the tourists, exploiting the chance to sell them Santa hats and stocking fillers of plastic light sabres and illuminated spinning tops.
Most of the foreign pilgrims enter Bethlehem by coach through a gate in the wall heavily policed by Israeli soldiers. They disembark at the church’s entrance and most depart for Jerusalem as soon as the event is over.
Nowadays few tourists get to meet or talk to a Palestinian in Bethlehem. Earlier this year, Israel tried to further choke off tourism revenue by warning travel agencies that their groups must not stay overnight in Bethlehem’s handful of cheap hotels.
Largely sealed off from the world, Bethlehem is today almost as well-known for its graffiti, visible from coaches on the pilgrim trail through the wall, as the nativity. Amid iconic images by Banksy, the famous British street artist, is the handiwork of local paint-sprayers. One message to the world scrawled across the eight-metre-high grey slabs announces: “Merry Christmas from Bethlehem ghetto”.
The town now has access to little more than a tenth of its original territory, with homes cut off from farmland, water sources and historic landmarks. A host of ever-expanding Jewish settlements around Bethlehem have been gorging on the rich pickings of their imprisoned neighbours.
Bethlehem’s despondency was heightened this month by the decision of US President Donald Trump to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. That declaration has sparked repeated clashes between Bethlehem’s youth and Israeli occupation forces.
Traditionally, the fates of these cities, the two primary destinations for pilgrims, were intimately tied. Before the construction of the wall, they were only a short drive apart. Now Jerusalem is almost unreachable for Bethlehem’s inhabitants, while Bethlehem itself has become an increasingly unappealing prospect for most outsiders.
Amid the gloom, however, there were two small tidings of joy this month.
Banksy, who earlier this year established a graffiti-themed hotel called the Walled Off Hotel – boasting the “worst view in the world” – put on an alternative nativity play for local children in the shadow of the wall and its armed watch-towers. A two-part BBC documentary shown last week about the planning and staging of The Alternativity gave international audiences a rare up-close view of life in the Bethlehem ghetto.
The other success was a screening this month on Capitol Hill of Leila Sansour’s documentary Open Bethlehem. Along with their invite, US Congress members were sent a “Bethlehem passport”, making them honorary citizens of the town.
Ms Sansour’s film was meant to prick consciences. It charts Bethlehem’s gradual incarceration and the decision of her own extended family to desert the town, like many other Christians, for opportunities abroad.
Today, Bethlehem’s Christians make up only 13 per cent of its population and more than three-quarters blame Israel’s blockade for the exodus. The Open Bethlehem campaign, spawned by the film, quotes James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, saying: “While every Christmas we sing of Bethlehem, most Americans know so little about the town and its people.”
In the only way they could, Bethlehem’s church leaders exacted a small revenge for Mr Trump’s Jerusalem declaration. They closed their doors to Mike Pence, the US vice-president and a pious Christian evangelical. His pre-Christmas visit to the region has now been postponed until next year.
Paradoxically, Mr Pence had originally intended to use the trip to highlight the persecution of Christians in the Middle East – though presumably not the kind of persecution represented by Israel’s wall.
Most Palestinian Christians see Mr Pence not as a potential saviour but very much at the heart of their problems. The vice-president is viewed as the latest personification of a Western evangelical tradition that has consistently betrayed Palestine’s Christian community.
Exactly a century ago, it was British government leaders like David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, men of deep Christian conviction, who prioritised the interests of European Jews over the Holy Land’s native Palestinians. The Balfour Declaration set in train a process of colonisation that dispossessed Muslims and Christians alike of their homeland.
Fast forward to today and tens of millions of evangelicals in the US, Israel’s new patron, helped to elect Mr Trump. They were the reason he selected Mr Pence as his running mate and why he cynically transformed the incendiary site of Jerusalem into a campaign vote-winner.
The priorities of Christians like Mr Pence derive not from natural justice, solidarity with fellow Christians or even cold calculation, but from supposed divine prophecy. They interpret the Bible as requiring a return of God’s chosen people, the Jews, to the Promised Land as a way to bring forward the end-time. In a cataclysmic Battle of Armageddon, Jesus will return, they believe. The truly faithful will rise to heaven to be with God while everyone else, including unrepentant Jews, will burn for eternity.
For this reason, a strong Israel – one that includes the Biblical lands on which the illegal Jewish settlements are built – is a central concern for millions of US evangelicals. In contrast, the slow erasure of Palestinian Christians, as well as the heritage and faith they have preserved in the region for 2,000 years, is of little consequence.
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gleefully exploited his ties to the powerful US evangelical lobby, happy that it dramatically increases his clout in Washington.
Anton Salman, a Palestinian Christian who recently became Bethlehem’s mayor, wrote in exasperation of these fellow Christians: “No church worthy of its name should offer a theological smokescreen for the denial of our most basic rights as Palestinians.”
In Bethlehem, there may soon be few Palestinian Christians left to protect its holy sites, preserve its rituals and liturgy or conduct the nativity celebration itself. And irony of ironies, it will have been fellow Christians who helped to harry this community to extinction.
On Christmas Eve, in a centuries-old tradition, Palestinian and foreign pilgrims rub shoulders as they throng into the ancient Church of the Nativity to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Jesus at its reputed location two millennia ago.
Outside, in Manger Square, the lights and baubles on a huge Christmas tree provide some festive glitz, while hawkers assail the tourists, exploiting the chance to sell them Santa hats and stocking fillers of plastic light sabres and illuminated spinning tops.
Most of the foreign pilgrims enter Bethlehem by coach through a gate in the wall heavily policed by Israeli soldiers. They disembark at the church’s entrance and most depart for Jerusalem as soon as the event is over.
Nowadays few tourists get to meet or talk to a Palestinian in Bethlehem. Earlier this year, Israel tried to further choke off tourism revenue by warning travel agencies that their groups must not stay overnight in Bethlehem’s handful of cheap hotels.
Largely sealed off from the world, Bethlehem is today almost as well-known for its graffiti, visible from coaches on the pilgrim trail through the wall, as the nativity. Amid iconic images by Banksy, the famous British street artist, is the handiwork of local paint-sprayers. One message to the world scrawled across the eight-metre-high grey slabs announces: “Merry Christmas from Bethlehem ghetto”.
The town now has access to little more than a tenth of its original territory, with homes cut off from farmland, water sources and historic landmarks. A host of ever-expanding Jewish settlements around Bethlehem have been gorging on the rich pickings of their imprisoned neighbours.
Bethlehem’s despondency was heightened this month by the decision of US President Donald Trump to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. That declaration has sparked repeated clashes between Bethlehem’s youth and Israeli occupation forces.
Traditionally, the fates of these cities, the two primary destinations for pilgrims, were intimately tied. Before the construction of the wall, they were only a short drive apart. Now Jerusalem is almost unreachable for Bethlehem’s inhabitants, while Bethlehem itself has become an increasingly unappealing prospect for most outsiders.
Amid the gloom, however, there were two small tidings of joy this month.
Banksy, who earlier this year established a graffiti-themed hotel called the Walled Off Hotel – boasting the “worst view in the world” – put on an alternative nativity play for local children in the shadow of the wall and its armed watch-towers. A two-part BBC documentary shown last week about the planning and staging of The Alternativity gave international audiences a rare up-close view of life in the Bethlehem ghetto.
The other success was a screening this month on Capitol Hill of Leila Sansour’s documentary Open Bethlehem. Along with their invite, US Congress members were sent a “Bethlehem passport”, making them honorary citizens of the town.
Ms Sansour’s film was meant to prick consciences. It charts Bethlehem’s gradual incarceration and the decision of her own extended family to desert the town, like many other Christians, for opportunities abroad.
Today, Bethlehem’s Christians make up only 13 per cent of its population and more than three-quarters blame Israel’s blockade for the exodus. The Open Bethlehem campaign, spawned by the film, quotes James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, saying: “While every Christmas we sing of Bethlehem, most Americans know so little about the town and its people.”
In the only way they could, Bethlehem’s church leaders exacted a small revenge for Mr Trump’s Jerusalem declaration. They closed their doors to Mike Pence, the US vice-president and a pious Christian evangelical. His pre-Christmas visit to the region has now been postponed until next year.
Paradoxically, Mr Pence had originally intended to use the trip to highlight the persecution of Christians in the Middle East – though presumably not the kind of persecution represented by Israel’s wall.
Most Palestinian Christians see Mr Pence not as a potential saviour but very much at the heart of their problems. The vice-president is viewed as the latest personification of a Western evangelical tradition that has consistently betrayed Palestine’s Christian community.
Exactly a century ago, it was British government leaders like David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, men of deep Christian conviction, who prioritised the interests of European Jews over the Holy Land’s native Palestinians. The Balfour Declaration set in train a process of colonisation that dispossessed Muslims and Christians alike of their homeland.
Fast forward to today and tens of millions of evangelicals in the US, Israel’s new patron, helped to elect Mr Trump. They were the reason he selected Mr Pence as his running mate and why he cynically transformed the incendiary site of Jerusalem into a campaign vote-winner.
The priorities of Christians like Mr Pence derive not from natural justice, solidarity with fellow Christians or even cold calculation, but from supposed divine prophecy. They interpret the Bible as requiring a return of God’s chosen people, the Jews, to the Promised Land as a way to bring forward the end-time. In a cataclysmic Battle of Armageddon, Jesus will return, they believe. The truly faithful will rise to heaven to be with God while everyone else, including unrepentant Jews, will burn for eternity.
For this reason, a strong Israel – one that includes the Biblical lands on which the illegal Jewish settlements are built – is a central concern for millions of US evangelicals. In contrast, the slow erasure of Palestinian Christians, as well as the heritage and faith they have preserved in the region for 2,000 years, is of little consequence.
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gleefully exploited his ties to the powerful US evangelical lobby, happy that it dramatically increases his clout in Washington.
Anton Salman, a Palestinian Christian who recently became Bethlehem’s mayor, wrote in exasperation of these fellow Christians: “No church worthy of its name should offer a theological smokescreen for the denial of our most basic rights as Palestinians.”
In Bethlehem, there may soon be few Palestinian Christians left to protect its holy sites, preserve its rituals and liturgy or conduct the nativity celebration itself. And irony of ironies, it will have been fellow Christians who helped to harry this community to extinction.
Shalom,
Because even as few as a couple generations lived in the land every generation after has a “right” to stay in that place? Because as few as a couple of generations built, planted & dug wells in the land every generation after has a “right” to remain in & keep those things?
Is this what the Bible says about Abraham & his generations after him? Or does it rather, speak the exact opposite. Jesus rebuked “religious” Zionism, not political Zionism. Yes, that is correct, Zionism is the feet of iron mixed with clay that began its rule over the land when the Maccabees made a covenant with Rome, both working side by side for the desires of gaining both political and religious control.
Political is the face of Zionism that represents the physical “land/territory” and Religious is the face of Zionism that represents the “spiritual” & the spirit who rules over the feet of iron mixed with clay. If we are Abraham’s children, they we have no political or religious claim to any of this “vineyard” man declared to be Palestine/Israel.
God said in the latter days this land that the flesh is fighting over is has several names, “Canaan, Sodom, Egypt & Babylon”, therefore, ought we not rather follow the example of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob as Jesus did; as Jesus taught by His example and give up this futile desire of the flesh to lay claim to that which He says we never owned in the first place because, although we are sojourners in this world, we are not of this world as was our father Abraham was also not of this world, therefore, he sought not ownership over any parcel of land he was sojourning in? Sure Abraham bought a small piece of land as a burial place for the fathers & their wives, however, the land he lived in and worked & the wells that he dug he, neither he or his children, ever claimed physical ownership title so to say others had no right to settle or stake claim to them, or even tell them they had to move because those lands & those wells now belonged to the occupiers & generations of the occupiers of the land.
I wish all would see the futility in protesting that which God & His Son said not to protest, but simply be patient and wait upon our day of deliverance, not minding the things of the flesh, but keeping our focus on the matters of His spirit as Abraham, Isaac & Jacob kept their focus on the matters of His spirit in regards to land & occupation and how those in Christ are to respond as foreigners & sojourners in this age of the occupying regime of the feet of iron mixed with clay.
May He turn your heart to have ears to hear & eyes to see what He actually said/wrote concerning this matter.
Shalom, Linda
Thank you for responding to the WHTT 12/11/18 posting from We Hold These Truths “The Dwindling Number of Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land.”
In reading your reply, my take-away is that you propose to do nothing to help our brothers and sisters in Christ in Bethlehem. You encourage us to
“simply be patient and wait upon our day of deliverance, not minding the things of the flesh, but keeping our focus on the matters of His spirit.”
I can’t help but be reminded of these scriptures: James 2:15-17 – “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food,and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?”
And our Lord in the parable of the Good Samaritan: Luke 10:36-37 – “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”
I would echo your own words to you: “May He turn your heart to have ears to hear & eyes to see what He actually said/wrote concerning this matter.”
Craig Hanson
WHTT
Tom,
I believe you misconstrued the point of my comment which is “anyone” who claims to hold title to any of His land is in error, whether they are the oppressed or the ruling elite. That was the point I was making which is prophesied in the lives of Abraham, Isaac, & Jacob. Lev 25:23 “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is Mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with Me.”
Of course we are to help all in need, especially the poor and downtrodden. I do not even comprehend how you took from my previous comment that I would think otherwise and that was not the context of my comment. The context was in giving false hope to those who have yet to receive the Mt 21:41 promise which does not take place until Messiah returns, because to Him is given all authority over the land.
Mt 21:33-46, He leases His land, He did not give title to His land to any person of the flesh, not even to Abraham. He gave Abraham a land promise, however, that promise does not say that Abraham will actually own the land now does it. This concept goes all the way back to the garden, He formed man from the dust of the earth, and THEN, He placed man in the garden to tend it, He did not say ‘own’ it. And so to give false hope of a “Palestinian state” is futile. They may be Palestinian through lineage, however, through land, this is not a biblical concept.
The fact of the matter is, Zionism is the entity that divided God’s land, therefore, that prophesy that Hegge likes to quote has already been fulfilled. The Palestinians never sought to divide up God’s land, they have always been content living with all who sojourned to the land to reside there, whether temporary or permanently. No, it was the leaders of Zionism who were at the table that divided up the land, a division of land the Palestinian leaders rejected and in doing so, they were actually the obedient ones before God.
Sojourners do not own land, they are temporary residents until time appointed for them to receive their inheritance. That time has yet to arrive. That is what I was saying. Jesus never went out protesting Rome to take back what was rightfully His because it was not His time to do so, so why push for those who are His to have that which He has yet to give us which is authority & leasing rights over the land, but to own title over it & to be supreme rulers over it, this was/is never promised, not even during the Millennial reign of Messiah.
This is a major part of the Gospel of Christ that is NOT being preached to the oppressed. So maybe if Christ’s Gospel is brought back into right teaching, even though they are still oppressed, they would have peace in their Hope to come, their Hope being Messiah. They would be at peace because they will know the truth of God’s Word that is it not for them to claim the land as theirs for they have yet to receive the promise. Hebrews 11:39-40 ( And with this, it is written that the remnant He left in His land, these are not rulers or owners of land, but have been kept there to tend & work the land, just as Adam was placed in His garden to tend & work it as a lessor, not an owner)
Shalom,
Linda
The dairy industry really got a boost with their “Got Milk?” campaign. We at We Hold These Truths think that a “Got Compassion? Not Religion” PR program is needed. If the situation in the Holy Land were reversed, where Jews were being forced from their homes and being discriminated against, WHTT would be standing up for them, too. Today, when we think of our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ and Palestinian Muslims, too, we’re reminded of what the apostle John said,”This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.” (1John 3:16-18) “Got Compassion?” and pity, Linda?