Every day brings a new propaganda tactic by Israel and its partisans designed to distract from the still ongoing genocide in Gaza, and Israeli plans to steal more than half of Gaza’s land.
In the spirit of the holidays, Zionists have been trying to market Israel as a safe haven for Christians and the celebration of Christmas. In fact, they are ridiculously insisting that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where, say, Christmas trees are lit up, and Christians can openly and proudly commemorate their most sacred day. This tactic is probably geared toward the American Right more than anyone else, where support for Israel has been slipping, especially amongst young Republicans and conservatives. Even amongst Evangelical Christians, the most Zionist faction in the country (significantly more extreme than mainstream American Jewry), support is dropping.
Christianity is a touchy subject for Israel. Recognizing that while the West is mainly inured to the suffering of Muslims, and Islamophobia remains potent, the distress of Christians is much harder to ignore. Consider that Nazareth was the only Arab city within Zionist hands that avoided mass expulsions in the 1948 Nakba: “when the Israeli army massed against Nazareth in mid-July 1948, Ben-Gurion stayed the hand of his commanders, fearful that the flight of local Christians and Israel’s takeover of the holy sites would incur the wrath of the Vatican and alienate his key international allies.”
But Nazareth is an exception to the rule. Palestinian Christians in the Galilee, Jerusalem, Jaffa, and plenty of other places were expelled. Nazareth was merely too high-profile for mass expulsion, but not for its subjugation:
A few years later, in 1956, Ben-Gurion ordered construction of Upper Nazareth’s first neighborhoods after vast swathes of Nazareth’s farmland had been confiscated in the “public interest.” Upper Nazareth was the flagship of the Judaization of the Galilee program, establishing the blueprint for the later settlement project in the Occupied Territories. Its role was to corral its Palestinian neighbor to prevent it from realizing its potential as the political and cultural capital of the Palestinians inside Israel.
Aware that they depend on the Christian West for support, Zionists have always sought to 1) hide their oppression of Christians and 2) attempt to even co-opt them or at least cleave them from their Muslim Arab brethren; the old colonial tactic of divide and conquer.
Consider that as early as 1920, Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel, and other Zionists promoted such divisive politics, as related by Israeli historian Yonatan Mendel:
In 1920 Chaim Weizmann, then president of the Zionist Movement, called for the ‘provocation of dissension between Christians and Muslims’. Chaim Margaliot Kalvarisky, head of the Zionist Executive’s Arab Department, created the Muslim National Association with the purpose of widening divisions between Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians. These were the early seeds of a Zionist divide and rule strategy that prevailed after 1929.
Palestinians were not so easily divided. In fact, the very first manifestations of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to both British rule and Zionist colonial-settlerism were the Muslim-Christian Associations that popped up all over Palestine. From Issa al Issa, who started the newspaper Falastin in 1911, to activist Hanan Ashrawi, and too many to mention in between, Palestinian Christians have recognized the common threat Zionism poses to all Palestinians and have struggled to secure the inherent rights and liberties of their long-oppressed people.
Zionists have sought to silence these voices from daring to express themselves. Back in 2012, for instance, the then-Israeli ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, called the head of CBS’s former parent company (Viacom) to try to get a story on Israel’s abuses against Palestinian Christian blocked from airing. Oren’s request was rebuffed. (Alas, CBS News is now firmly in the hands of the fanatical pro-Israel Bari Weiss).
When the current defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, was working at Fox News, he reported from occupied Bethlehem for the special “Battle for Bethlehem.” Hegseth is a committed hard-core Zionist, but the remarkable thing about his broadcast is that one can detect a sense of solidarity emerging in Hegseth toward Palestinians.
In the end, however, his Zionist sponsors prevent him from spending too much time with Palestinian Christians and, instead, compel him to listen to their take on Christians under occupation mainly. Spoiler Alert: Palestinian Christians, Zionists insist, actually love Israeli occupation, and one Zionist settler even mendaciously insists that they enjoy living in Israeli settlements, which, of course, are Jewish-only settlements where even Palestinian citizens of Israel, Muslim or Christian, are barred, let alone Christians in the occupied West Bank. Hegseth was easily fooled.
Equally mendacious are the claims flying on social media by Zionists that Israel is welcoming to Christian celebrations and traditions. This is not a flippant tweet. It is a coordinated campaign to portray Israel as a saviour of Christians in the region. This tactic is part of the larger strategy of portraying Israel as a bulwark of Western Civilization against the alleged menace of Islam.
Some Zionists have even shared photos or videos of the Christmas tree in occupied Bethlehem and claimed it was in Israel. (To be fair, Zionists consider all of the West Bank and, for some, even beyond that, to be Israel.) And in typical Zionist fashion, where every accusation is a confession, they have oddly accused us at ADC of appropriating Christmas:
There are two obvious rebuttals to this Zionist propaganda, a reflection of their desperation that few people on social media are actually buying.
First, of course, Christmas is openly celebrated throughout the Middle East, from Cairo, Egypt, to Beirut, Lebanon, Amman, Jordan, and Dubai, UAE.
But, most importantly, Israel is not and has never been welcoming to Christians or any person who is not Jewish. For starters, Israel is a self-defined nation-state of the Jewish people. Zionists often claim that Israel is Jewish the way Finland is Finnish, but this is false. Israel is not the nation-state of Israelis — it rejects being a state for all its citizens — Israel is merely the nation-state of Jews. One can be a Jewish Finn or a Muslim Israeli, but one cannot be a Jewish Christian.
As the Israeli scholar Omri Boehm, in this book Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel, has observed on this false claim that Israel is a Jewish nation no different from any other democracy with an ethnic majority:
Quite simply, it is possible to be a Finnish or a Norwegian Jew, just as it is possible to be a German Jew or a Palestinian Christian. But for logical rather than merely political reasons it is impossible to become a Christian or a Muslim Jew.
Neither is it possible to be a Muslim or a Christian Israeli, and not merely because Israel’s Supreme Court has rejected the existence of an Israeli nation or the adjective “Israeli” as a civil identification.
As long as Israel is essentially a Jewish state, being Jewish is essential to being Israeli. A non-Jew can be an Israeli citizen, of course, and carry a blue identification card and passport, but she or he would not for all that be Israeli; the state would not for all that belong to him or her.
Of course, Israel could easily choose to be a majority Jewish nation that, like France or Germany, still provides equal rights to minorities. But Zionism is based on an ideology of Jewish supremacy. It is not enough to be the majority; one must also run up the score in privilege and subject the minority.
So Christians are not equal even when they are citizens, let alone when they live in the occupied West Bank and Gaza and have no pretense of rights under Israeli rule. Christians, on the other hand, are equal citizens of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and any other country where they reside. And the Palestinian Authority similarly classifies Muslims and Christians as equal.
Additionally, Palestinian Christians have disproportionately borne the brunt of Israeli land theft, given that many of their villages are close to the nominal Israeli border where settlement construction is most heavily concentrated. Bethlehem and its sister villages are being strangled by Israeli land theft and ethnic cleansing:
Even before the latest war [Gaza Genocide] the fortunes of Christians in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, were fast declining. Gaining permits from the Israeli authorities to travel in and out of Bethlehem and Jerusalem is unpredictable, even for the clergy. Moreover, say Christians, a violent Jewish settler movement is bullying them more and more—with impunity. Cut off from Jerusalem by Israel’s separation wall and by a string of settlements, Bethlehem is isolated.
Jewish settlers in the Arab eastern side of the old city of Jerusalem are only about a thousand strong. But they have become more aggressive and are implanting themselves more strategically to isolate both Christian and Muslim Palestinians in the city and its vicinity.
Meanwhile the Armenian community is fighting what it says is an “existential battle” to keep part of its domain in the old city. A land deal with an Israeli developer “puts the Armenian presence and Christian presence in Jerusalem in danger”, says the Armenian patriarchate. Bulldozers have already moved in.
Yousef Daher of the World Council of Churches in Jerusalem explains that if a Palestinian Christian in Jerusalem marries a West Banker, the spouse cannot live in the city without a permit that can take a decade to get. But if the couple move to the West Bank, any residency rights in Jerusalem may be forfeited. Before the war in 1967 [when Israeli occupation started], some 24,000 Christians lived in the city. Now there are only 9,000.
Moreover, when it comes to the issue of Christmas trees, they are not always permitted in Israel:
The mayor of Nazareth Illit, an Israeli town with an Arab Christian minority, has declared a ban on the public display of Christmas trees. “Nazareth Illit is a Jewish city and it will not happen–not this year and not next year, so long as I am a mayor,” Mayor Shimon Gapso said.
Many hotel owners have taken the warning to heart, fearful that the rabbis may carry out previous threats to damage their businesses by denying them certificates declaring their premises to be “kosher”.
In the coastal city of Haifa, in northern Israel, the rabbi of Israel’s premier technology university has taken a similarly strict line. Elad Dokow, the Technion’s rabbi, ordered that Jewish students boycott their students’ union, after it installed for the first time a modest Christmas tree.
He called the tree “idolatry”, warning that it was a “pagan” symbol that violated the kosher status of the building, including its food hall.
Of course, the Palestinian Christians who have suffered the most in recent years have been those in Gaza, where Israel has killed numerous Christians and destroyed an ancient church. And Israel bombed another church as recently as this summer:
Lastly, if one wants to know how Palestinian Christians feel about Israel, they should ask Palestinian Christians and not Zionists in America or Israeli Jews who care only about exploiting the issue for their own nationalist purposes. There’s a reason why Zionists want to talk over and silence the oldest Christian community in the world: Because the verdict of Palestinian Christians, like the verdict of all decent people, exposes Zionism.
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