Mick Hartley

In the Sunday Times at the weekend Justin Welby and Hosam Naoum, Archbishop of Canterbury and Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, penned an article on Christians in Israel – Let us pray for the Christians being driven from the Holy Land.

Christmas is a time when we think about the land of the Bible. We hear readings and sing carols that name Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem. These are places that are familiar to billions of Christians, whether they have visited them or not. But we should not romanticise them — and especially not this Christmas.

Last week church leaders in Jerusalem raised an unprecedented and urgent alarm call. In a joint statement they said Christians throughout the Holy Land had become the target of frequent and sustained attacks by fringe radical groups.

They described “countless incidents” of physical and verbal assaults against priests and other clergy, and attacks on Christian churches. They spoke of holy sites being regularly vandalised and desecrated, and the ongoing intimidation of local Christians as they go about their worship and daily lives.

The Romanian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem was vandalised during Lent in March this year, the fourth attack in a month. During Advent last December, someone lit a fire in the Church of All Nations in the Garden of Gethsemane, the place where Jesus prayed the night before he was crucified. It is usually a place of pilgrimage for Christians from around the world, and the vandals are thought to have taken advantage of the lack of visitors due to the pandemic.

These tactics are being used by such radical groups “in a systematic attempt to drive the Christian community out of Jerusalem and other parts of the Holy Land”, the Jerusalem church leaders said in their statement.

Who are these shadowy "fringe radical groups"? We're not told.

Here's the most recommended comment on the archbishops' thoughts:

This is a shameful article. Too scared to blame Hamas or the Palestinian Authority for hastening the departure of Christians from the West Bank and Gaza, the Archbishop asks you to join the dots that instead blame Israel or at least some of its Jews. What is the point of this article if you're too scared or compromised to even name the culprits? Genuinely disgusting article.

Jake Wallis Simons in the Spectator:

Mr Welby and Hosam Naoum, an Anglican bishop in Jerusalem, jointly penned an article in the Sunday Times entitled: 'Let us pray for the Christians being driven from the Holy Land'. In it, they drew readers’ attention to the 'frequent and sustained attacks by fringe radical groups' in Israel, arguing that this was behind the sharp decline in the Christian population in Jerusalem. Nowhere else in the region. Only the Jewish state.

About half way down, the clergymen did briefly say that 'in Israel, the overall number of Christians has risen'. They also acknowledged that 'Christians in Israel enjoy democratic and religious freedoms that are a beacon in the region'. But these comments — inserted, one presumes, for the sake of accuracy — were quickly pushed aside. The Archbishops took care to remind readers that the 'first Christmas' had taken place 'against the backdrop of the genocide of infants', carried out by King Herod. 'There’s not much in there about lullabies and cuddly farm animals,' they wrote. The negative parallels were hard to ignore….

The Archbishops were curiously silent on who these 'fringe radical groups' are or what motivates them. Yet in the examples they pointed to, cases of arson and vandalism against church buildings, it is hardline Jews who have been blamed. These attacks must of course be condemned. But this does not detract from the fact that overall, Christians in Israel are flourishing.

The education figures alone tell their own story. More Christian Arabs leave school with grades that will get them into university than any other group in the country (71.2 per cent). More Christian women attend higher education than from any other background, excelling particularly in medicine, engineering, architecture and law. As a case in point, the first-ever Arab to hold a permanent appointment as a Supreme Court justice in Israel was Salim Jubran, a Christian — who sat in judgment over former prime minister Ehud Olmert. Much of this is thanks to schools run by the Christian community itself. But it should be noted that Christian schooling is a rarity in the Middle East. In Israel, they operate freely and with the full support of the state.

Compare this to the routine anti-Christian carnage across the region, which the Foreign Office has described as 'coming close to genocide'. A government report stated that 'the inconvenient truth is that the overwhelming majority (80 per cent) of persecuted religious believers are Christians'. This ranges from routine discrimination in education, the workplace and wider society all the way to kidnap, assassination and mass murder against Christian communities. It might not be the Holy Land, but surely such persecution deserves at least a mention by the Archbishops.

In countries like Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Egypt, the anti-Christian oppression is carried out by Islamist terrorists; in Iran, Algeria and Qatar, it is the state that carries out systematic discrimination and persecution. The effects are depressing. The Christian population in the region has declined from 20 per cent a century ago to just 5 per cent today (echoing the almost total exodus of Jews that took place in the late 1940s and 1950s).

Islamist groups in Syria, Iraq and Egypt, as well as northeast Nigeria and the Philippines, seek to erase Christian civilisation by the sword, driving believers out and destroying churches. 'The killing and abduction of clergy represented a direct attack on the church’s structure and leadership,' the report said.

In Iran, Saudia Arabia and Egypt, arrest, detention and imprisonment are common. Christian festivals are often a target. In 2017, 99 Egyptian Christians were killed by Islamist militants, with 47 massacred on Palm Sunday in Tanta and Alexandra. A year later, in the six days leading up to Christmas, 114 Christians were arrested in Iran on trumped-up charges.

In Iraq, Iran and Turkey, anti-Christian state propaganda is commonplace. Ankara, for instance, often depicts followers of Christ as a 'threat to the stability of the nation', stereotyping them as western collaborators. In Saudi Arabia, the very school textbooks that are used to mould the minds of the next generation foster hatred of Christians and Jews.

Yet all the pious archbishops could come up with was a piece singling out Israel. Well what a surprise.