JERUSALEM — In the land of Christ's birth, life, ministries, and crucifixion, his followers — the Christians — are fading away. They are mostly a forgotten group, caught between two larger, more powerful groups in a long struggle. As Christians are commanded, they are — for the most part — meek and peaceful. But they have not been fruitful or multiplied. On the contrary, their numbers continue to diminish to the point where they are now a tiny minority with a bleak future for survival as a people.I travelled to the Holy Land, comprising Israel proper and the West Bank at the invitation of the Israeli government. They were generous and introduced us to a variety of perspectives from both the Jewish and Arab Israeli side, and showed us the sites that witnessed the massacre of innocent people at the Nova music festival and kibbutzes that were attacked by Hamas from Gaza. Even the hard-hearted could not help but be moved by both the makeshift and permanent memorials of the murdered and kidnapped.Standing in the burned-out ruins of Kibbutz Nir Oz, I look westward at the Gaza Strip just two to three kilometres away. I can make out little but rubble with my eyes, as Israeli artillery casually shelled it every two to three minutes. I’m told it was being done to keep terrorists from getting too close. It’s entirely possible, but I imagine that it also helped to remind those Palestinians inside Gaza that the IDF was very much still there and had its guns trained on them.Kibbutz Nir Oz was devastated by the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas. The burned out small homes host yellow flags for each person murdered or kidnapped from each dwelling. The doors (if there were still any) all host a poster with the name and face of the person killed or kidnapped from there. A survivor of the attack tell me about the people who used to live there. She knew them all, personally. It was an extremely tight-knit community that will probably not feel safe again this generation..Just down the road I visit the site of the Nova music festival massacre. The scale of death there was unimaginable. Young kids just there to have a good time were butchered. I spoke with one of the survivors — a young man, probably in his late 20s or early 30s — who barely made it out alive. Just days later, he was mobilized by the IDF to go into Gaza. I thought about how I would feel in similar circumstances, seeing my friends butchered before my eyes, and then being handed a weapon to go in and do justice to those who had done it. I can’t help but suspect that I would not conduct myself according to the civilized rules of warfare. Wouldn’t I want to seek revenge? Wouldn’t I want to hurt them just the way they hurt me?.Israel has levelled Gaza. It’s gone. It looks like Dresden. It doesn’t take an expert looking at the endless fields of rubble that were once cities to understand that more than mere targeted strikes took place there.Israelis who have been living with endless attacks for decades could be forgiven for the very human desire for revenge. And a brutal revenge they have taken.For their part, many Palestinians see the attacks against Israel as revenge for being killed, brutalized, and dispossessed of their own land. For Palestinians of the Hamas variety, this takes the form of an exterminationist Islamist ideology. But for Christian and moderate Muslim Palestinians I spoke with in the West Bank, it takes a more secular and nationalist form that we in the West could relate to better.Many in the West understand this conflict through very two-dimensional lenses: westernized Jewish Israelis versus radical Islamic Palestinians.Western conservatives have generally seen in Israel an outpost of our civilization fighting back the barbarian hordes of radical Islam, as Constantinople held out against the Ottoman Turks. For evangelical ‘Judeo-Christians’ in particular, they see modern Israel as a continuation of biblical Israel, with all the lands therein promised eternally to the Jewish people. It’s essentially how I understood the conflict from my own upbringing in evangelical Christian churches as a teenager until relatively recently.Western leftists tend to view the struggle through the lens of modern post-colonial and ‘intersectional’ identity politics: dark-skinned, poor Arab Muslims oppressed by lighter-skinned, wealthy Jews who are Christian-adjacent. In their worldview, one side has more identity points than the other and is therefore more deserving of their support.With time, and now some limited on-the-ground experience, I’ve come to see the Western cheerleaders on both sides as dangerously incorrect.They’re both wrong.The very real plight of and injustice done to the Palestinian people tends to make Western leftists look past the medieval and exterminationist ideology of the Islamists within the Palestinian camp. This Islamism makes it very easy for people like me to dismiss the Palestinians entirely.Conversely, the romantic struggle of the Jewish people to reestablish their indigenous home in the land given to them by God, and their fight against the forces of radical Islam, makes it too easy for Western rightists to overlook the oppression of the people there and the intentional dispossession of their land.Completely overlooked by both are the last Christians of the Holy Land. While broadly considered to be Arabs today, many of them are the descendants of intermarriage with Arabs and those predating the Islamic invasion of the 5th Century. They have lived there since Jesus began his ministry two millennia ago. They have as much right as anyone to be there. It is hard to dismiss these people as radical Islamist Hamasniks.The Christian population in the West Bank has declined only slightly since the UN partition and the Israeli War of Independence in 1947-48, from an estimate of 70,000 to a current estimate of 47,000. Still, their proportion of the population has declined from approximately 11% to 1% today. This is driven in considerable measure by the huge influx of Palestinian refugees from what is now Israel proper into the West Bank, and the significantly lower fertility rate of Christians vis-à-vis Muslims.The Christians there have an obviously close connection to the land that goes beyond its utility: it is holy to them. Before the Israeli War of Independence, Bethlehem had a total population of 8,000-10,000, of which 85% were Christian. Bethlehem is much larger today, with approximately 30,000 people, of whom just 10% are Christian.Many Christians have emigrated to Western countries through their connections abroad and the advantages of their own, superior, missionary-run educational institutions.And they are being driven to leave..Rony owns a shop near the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, producing and selling hand-carved nativity scenes and other Christian imagery to pilgrims. The Franciscan Church can trace his family here back a thousand years..He says business has been dead for the last two years during the war, which has accelerated their exodus. Because the Christian population in Bethlehem and other parts of the West Bank have declined and become so outnumbered by Muslims, their sense of community is collapsing, leading still more to leave.But Rony says it’s not Muslims driving Christians out, as many of us believe.'Security Walls' are not just built around Israel’s internationally recognized borders; they are built directly through communities and around towns, like Bethlehem. These walls are not designed to keep terrorists out of Israel proper, but to effectively annex land to illegal Israeli settlements.The people of Bethlehem are often subject to random gate closings, which seal them off from the town or lock them inside. Rony says it makes Bethlehem into a large open air prison. Seeing the walls and guard towers for myself, it’s hard not to see his point. It makes economic life extremely difficult, and it is easier just to leave..Rony was the victim of one such land grab. His family owned land between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, dating back to the days of the Ottoman Empire. For ten generations, his family grew olives there. In 2002, Israel built a 'security wall' around an illegal settlement on his land, cutting him off from 70% of it. He says he was never paid for his confiscated land.“And now, Jewish [people] living in New Zealand can buy an apartment on the internet. I am the owner of the land, but I cannot even walk in that land anymore.”Rony doesn’t place the blame squarely on Israel or Israeli settlers though. He blames Christians in the West.“It’s not that the Israelis are criminals. European governments and American governments are part of this crime. Everybody is crying for the Christians of the Holy Land, and we are killed by the money of the American and some European countries that support Israel. Most of the settlements are supported by Anglicans and these crazy new Christian’s religion in America.”By “crazy new Christian’s religion in America,” I presume he means Zionist Christians, mostly in the evangelical churches.“This money is sent to kill us and kick us from our land, from our property. My family has lived here for hundreds of years; we cannot move, we cannot live. And who is supporting Israel? It is the Christian community. And this is more dangerous. The knife Israel uses to kill us is made by the American Christians and the European communities.”It’s not the enemy I expected to be named.Not that it’s intentional. Rony believes that Western Christians who back the settlements on his land “do not know who they are supporting.”Many Israelis I spoke with have little time for the settlers, often describing them as ‘radicals’ and ‘religious fanatics’.But men like Rony see little to differentiate Israelis in Israel proper from the Israeli settlers on his family’s olive orchards. Now, Rony buys his olive oil from Israel. It’s possible that some of it was produced from his family’s orchards.“Our land was stolen by the Israeli government. The settlers work for the Israeli government. Israel is working on one line: to empty the land, and to bring people to live on that land.”That would not fit the definition of ‘genocide’ as is alleged by some of Israel’s critics, but it would fit the definition of ethnic cleansing..Taybeh (also spelled Taibeh) doesn’t sit on quite the same holy ground as Bethlehem, but it is the last Christian village in the West Bank. And it’s under siege.Taybeh is surrounded by five Israeli settlements deemed illegal under international law, one of which is directly on their land.In 2019 and 2020, its people reported that settlers set fire to their crops, stole farm equipment, and restricted them from entering their own lands.Things have escalated sharply since June 2025, when settlers firebombed structures and vehicles, set fires near the ruins of the old Church of St. George and a Byzantine cemetery, desecrated the church itself, slashed tires, and spray-painted threatening graffiti in Hebrew. One such graffiti incident told the villagers, “There is no future for you here.”.In the last Christian village in this region, churches aren’t the only things that stand out. It has a winery, a distillery, and a brewery. It even hosts the region’s only Oktoberfest, which has been cancelled for several years due to the war and COVID-19 before that. The thought of Arab-speaking Palestinians drinking large steins of beer in lederhosen was a bit too much for my imagination to process..It is a curious scene as I enter the village. Here in the West Bank was a village with a very Western-looking, English sign reading “WE [heart emoji] TAYBEH”. There are Christmas trees and Christmas lights on shops and homes as if I were back in Alberta. I can hear “Jingle Bells” playing from a speaker — in Arabic — as I walk up the steps to the Greek Melkite Catholic Church of St. George. The doors to its social gathering room are wide open, occupied only by a little girl and her mother. The mother is preparing for the Christmas toy sale. The fare on display is pretty poor compared to what I’m used to seeing. The little girl — probably around five years old — greets me without any sense of shyness, almost as if she expected me to visit. She didn’t speak a word of English, but her mother knows just enough to introduce me to Father Jack, the parish priest of the last 35 years..Father Jack is about the closest thing I’ve come to meeting the real St. Nick. He is preparing for evening mass, wearing a long dark blue getup, a crucifix around his neck, and sporting a long white beard that would make him unmistakable if he were dressed in red and white. He’s a bit ‘jolly’, but not too jolly. After some gentle ribbing about it, he admits that he has played Santa Claus for the kids before..I grew up in more Spartan evangelical churches, so even in this relatively poor village, the Catholic Church is more ornate than I’m used to.Surprisingly, speaking in German, Father Jack tells me that he received the German foreign minister following the attacks several months earlier. We speak in broken German for a minute before I realize he has me outclassed and I’m too embarrassed to continue, and so we switch back to English.Following attacks by settlers over the summer, two Taybeh families emigrated; one to the United States, the other to Guatemala.“We are sad because we are encouraging people to stay here, because as a Christian in this Holy Land, we have a message from Jesus to be a witness. As he says in the [Gospel of St. John], ‘You will be my witnesses from Jerusalem to all over the world.’”He implies in quoting scripture that they are willing to die here.“We will testify to the faith, even if we are going to be martyred.”“We are proud to maintain our faith. Our traditions. Our customs. We are surrounded by 15 quiet Muslim villages. We have good relations with them. We work together. We eat the same bread. We drink the same water. And we have the same problem with the Palestinian issue. We have all in common.”.Local Muslim families send their children to Christian schools in Taybeh, which many consider to be better.Taybeh is surrounded not just by Muslim villages, but also by five Israeli settlements, one of which is situated on Taybeh’s land. Father Jack goes on proudly about the high quality of their olive oil, before lamenting the olive orchard’s confiscation by the settlers.Other portions of their land has been closed to them by settlers for two years, preventing them from harvesting and processing the olives. He describes how the “Kids of the Hills” attacked the villagers trying to reach their land with sticks and automobiles. An elderly couple had their arms broken.During this summer’s attacks, people in surrounding Muslim communities were killed. Taybeh saw no casualties, but several were injured.The Israeli government has done nothing about the attacks. Father Jack has requested to give testimony against extremist settler attacks 15 times, but has not been interviewed by police once.Faith binds this small community, with the priests of the Greek Orthodox, Catholic and Melkite churches playing leading roles spiritually, pastorally, politically, and in education and medicine. When they issued a plea for help, their senior patriarchs in Jerusalem took up the call.They attracted some limited international condemnation from US Ambassador Mike Huckabee and the Vatican, but media coverage was not widespread.Father Jack is no “River to the Sea” jihadist. He takes no issue with Israel’s borders as defined by 1948 “Green Line”. But he seems to have a deep understanding of what is driving radical Israeli settlers beyond Israel’s borders onto their land in the West Bank..Many Israelis — and Zionists more broadly — do not accept Israel’s borders as defined by the 1947 UN partition that created two states: one dominantly Jewish and the other dominantly Arab, with Jerusalem as an international zone. Some moderate Israelis are willing to settle on their borders following the 1967 war, but more hardline Zionists see the entirety of biblical Israel as granted to them by God. For them, the lands granted to them in the Old Testament remain divinely promised to them today..Hardline Zionism manifests itself in several ways, one of which is the settler movement. That movement’s two most prominent leaders are National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Yoel Smotric. They are members of small but extremist parties in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and are vital coalition members in keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in power. Both men live on illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, have unabashedly defended many cases of settler violence (including murder) of civilians, and support ethnically cleansing Arabs. Most Westerners have no idea how truly extreme these men and their parties are. Their parties are relatively small in Israel’s Knesset, but many consider them the tail that wags the dog in Netanyahu’s fragile coalition government..Even many Israelis I meet — proud Zionists all — spoke the names of these two men with undisguised disgust. These Israelis know that the extreme settler movement represented by these coalition partners makes peace impossible — if the Palestinians wanted it — and has done immense damage to Israel’s image abroad.But they remain key players in the government and exert considerable influence. .Father Jack understands the Old Testament theology of the settler movement. The West Bank — which some Israelis prefer to call Judea and Samaria — is the real prize.“For them it [the West Bank] is the Promised Land. Abraham wasn’t in Tel Aviv…or in Haifa, or in Gaza.”He adds, I think a bit tongue in cheek, “We are ready to give them the Promised Land, and they have to give us the rest of the land of Palestine.”He says he wants peace and a two-state solution, and it’s hard not to believe him. He disavows violence.He does not see Hamas as his friend, but also not as his enemy.“He [Hamas] is fighting in his way. We are fighting in our way. Nonviolence. Hamas is using armed resistance. We are using peaceful resistance. Talking…as a Christian, we have to fight with love, with dialogue. We have to forgive.”Father Jack says Western belief that Hamas intends to eradicate all Christians is Zionist propaganda, and not the truth on the ground.I find it difficult to believe, but I’m not living there. Perhaps he is correct. Or perhaps he is speaking softly for fear of reprisal from Hamas. I’m not in a position to judge what’s in his heart, but he struck me as a genuinely authentic man.He holds up Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance to British rule in India as his template.“I can forgive my enemy. We have nothing against Jews. We are against the Israeli, Zionist policy that wants to chase all Palestinians from this land.”“We cannot live without them, and they cannot live without us.”But for peace to happen, he says, the illegal settlements in the West Bank must go. However much many Israelis stand against settler attacks, there seems to be little appetite for dismantling the settlements themselves. Like many moderate Israelis, Father Jack points to cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Yoel Smotric, and Prime Minister Netanyahu as implacable obstacles to peace.Would Father Jack forgive the settlers attacking his village?“To forgive, you have to forget. We try to forget, by they won’t let us forget because every day there is something new from the settlers against us.”It’s a sad Christmas in Taybeh, with its economy depressed by the war and the long string of settler attacks that escalated in June 2025. Like the vanishing Christians of Bethlehem, they desperately want the support of the West and the broader Christian world. If Father Jack speaks for the Palestinian Christians, they feel utterly abandoned.“American Christians are not Christians. In fact, in act, they are not acting like Christians, supporting a regime that is [using] apartheid against Palestinians.”Palestinian Christians feel abandoned and their existence ignored by Christian Zionists, who tend to view the conflict through the two-dimensional lens of biblical Israel versus radical Islam..While large numbers of Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists see this land as a perpetual grant in the Old Testament given the Jewish people by God, Father Jack believes the New Testament opens it to all: Jews, Christians and Muslims.“The Holy Land belongs to God. To anybody.”“Who gave them [Israelis] the right to proclaim…we are the elected people of God? That would mean God is a racist. He prefers some people over others.”Support for Israel among much of the political left in the West collapsed some time ago and has cratered further as left-progressive political parties have built Muslim diasporas into their voter coalitions. Until recently, the Western right has been almost unanimous in its unqualified support for Israel’s side in this protracted conflict. This is reinforced by evangelical Christian Zionists who make up a critical part of the US Republican voter coalition and play a still important part in Canadian and other Western conservative parties.There are signs that this rock-solid support is beginning to crack, manifesting itself in heated schisms among American Republicans.I’m far less optimistic than Father Jack that any mutually satisfactory compromise can be reached that would bring peace to the Holy Land. Witnessing the kibbutz and Nova music festival sites that saw massacres by Hamas, I can understand the need for revenge and security in the hearts of many Jewish Israelis. But their brutal military actions will only radicalize reasonable and moderate Muslims. It’s a catch-22.And forgotten in all this are the Christians. There isn’t a terrorist among them. They are an ancient people and have a claim to their own land. They are quiet and meek.In the Gospel of Matthew 5:5, Christ told those gathered for the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”But the Christians of Bethlehem and Taybeh are being dispossessed of their tiny patch of it.In Matthew 5:9, Christ tells them, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”God may not forget the last Christians of the Holy Land, but they have been forsaken by their fellow Christians here in the West.
