Islam, the Holy Land, and Christians

Sermons to stem exodus

By Khalil Assali
Special to Weekend Review
Published: December 18, 2008, 23:45

There are true fears that there will be no Christians in the Holy Land within 50 years”, said Metry Al Raheb, the Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, about the continuous immigration of Christians from Bethlehem, Bet-sahoor and particularly Bet-jala.

Al Raheb said the immigration has been going on for a century due to wars and crises.Bernard Sabella, a professor of sociology in Bethlehem University, also emphasised that when he told Weekend Review that “between 50 to 70 Christian families leave occupied Jerusalem or the West Bank every year to start a new life abroad.

However, this number is considered low compared with the level the immigration reached in 2002-2003, when the number of the families that left Palestine was between 200 to 250 a year.”

Sabella said the reasons behind the immigration were similar to those that prompted Muslims to immigrate. These include political conditions, unemployment and lawlessness. Some have also expressed their unease over the rise of the militancy in Palestinian society.

However, Sabella said that “as Christians, we want to be part of this society, especially because we have deep historical and cultural roots that go back to the days of Jesus Christ”.

According to statistics, including those presented by Manoul Muslam, the pastor of a monastery in Gaza and the head of Christians in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, about 65,000 Christians live in the West Bank, Gaza strip and occupied Jerusalem.

About 51,000 live in the West Bank, 10,000 in occupied Jerusalem and 3,500 live in the Gaza strip.

They represent 1.1 per cent to 2.4 per cent of the Palestinians living in Palestine.

The majority of Palestinian Christians have left Palestine to live abroad and represent about 20 per cent of Palestinians living abroad.The Christians insist they are Palestinians first and Christians later. Atta-Allah Hanna, an official of the Orthodox church — considered the largest church in Palestine — told Weekend Review: “Our Arabic and Eastern identity didn’t come as a result of the Crusade wars but is a daughter of the East, where Jesus Christ was born in the Church of Nativity, whose age is more than 2,000 years.Atta-Allah Hanna pointed to the agreement between Omar Ibn Al Khataab, the second of four Caliphs for Sunnis, and the Patriach of Elya Al Quds (Jerusalem) in 637.

The agreement, known as Treaty of Omar, gave Christians in Jerusalem protection and security for themselves, families, properties and churches.

Their churches will not be harmed or degraded in any way, and Christians will not be harmed, the agreement states.“So we think that we and our brothers — the Muslims and the Arabs — have the same cause and share the same pain. And we refuse that our church be considered a leftover of the Crusade wars because it is original and consistent with its reality and cause. And so the church fought against the Crusaders who killed over 6,000 Orthodox monks in one day in an attempt to uproot the Arab Christians and to erase their Eastern and Arabic identity.”

Recently Archbishop Hanna issued a statement in the local media, asking Palestinian Christian youth to stay in the country, participate in work at local and national institutions and to move away from sectarianism, isolationism and insularity.“I am sorry to hear some Christians speak in a sectarian and isolationist way, as if we were a targeted and oppressed group. ... Palestinian Christians are Christians 100 per cent and before that, they are Arabic and Palestinian.

So the immigration of Christians is a bleeding [wound] of the Palestinian people that bleeds everyday.

The Christians are not the only losers, so are all the Palestinians,” he said.Khalil Assalli is a Jerusalem-based journalist.

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Interesting perspective. The problem I have, as one person states, and it obliges itself to what seems to be the condition: they are Arab first, Christian second. Omar's treaty did do what the article states. What the article and the speaker do not make known, is that what Omar said and what Uthman did ... can be quite different. Very subjective what constitutes protection. If you pay a tax Muslims do not - imagine if we imposed a tax on ONLY Muslims in the US. What would be the response. if you cannot speak to others about your faith and tell them about Jesus and the tenets of the Christian faith, or violate the laws of Islam and be imprisoned or killed. If you cannot build new churches. In what paradigm do you live that that behavior is not oppressive, and done for only religious reasons.