Israel is the only state in the Middle East where the Christian community is growing and flourishing. This is no coincidence. Since its founding, Israel has considered Christians in the Middle East, and especially its own Christian community, to be its natural allies and partners.
By Caroline Glick, translated by Marie-Louise Weissenböck
Christians in Israel are army commanders. They are Supreme Court justices. They are diplomats and reality TV stars. And their prosperity is reflected in their numbers. In 1948, 34,000 Christians lived in the State of Israel. Today, there are 188,000. Christians are full and equal citizens of Israel. By law, they have the same rights as Israeli Jews. Their per capita income and level of education are among the highest in Israel.
Although the proportion of Christians in Israel's total population has declined, this is by no means due to persecution of Christians. Rather, it is the result of the enormous increase in the Jewish population in Israel through successive waves of Jewish immigration. In 1948, 650,000 Jews lived in Israel. The first major wave of Jewish immigration after the founding of Israel came from the Arab world. Around 800,000 Jews were expelled from their homes and communities in the Arab world in a massive ethnic cleansing that was largely ignored internationally. Similarly, more than one million Jews immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union when the Soviet Union's borders finally opened.
Today, it is Christian communities that are being driven out of many countries in the Middle East. Israel's ambassador to Azerbaijan, George Deek, a Christian Arab, declared in a speech in Oslo in 2014: "The ethnic cleansing of Christians in the Middle East is the greatest crime against humanity of the 21st century. In just two decades, the proportion of Christians like myself in the population of the Middle East has fallen from twenty percent to only four percent today."
Christian communities in the Middle East are often forced to conceal their faith. Dan Burmawi, a Jordanian convert to Christianity living in exile, recalled in a recent essay on X that last year, Christians in Fuheis, the last city in Jordan with a Christian majority, erected a statue of Jesus in the town square. “Within two hours, they were forced to remove it because it was seen as a provocation to Muslims.”
Netanyahu: We will stand up for Christians
Several months ago, the Israeli army intervened in Syria on the orders of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the massacre of Druze people there. He has also repeatedly stated that Israel will continue to work to defend threatened Christian communities from Syria to Nigeria.
Those who make false claims about the persecution of Christians by the Israeli state and paint an equally false picture of Christian life in the Muslim-Arab world are distorting reality. To believe them is to contribute to making the world less safe for Jews. Those who truly suffer from these distortions are the very people they claim to care about: the Christians in the Middle East.
To person
Caroline Glick (born 1969) is an American-Israeli columnist, journalist, and author. She immigrated to Israel in 1991 after earning her bachelor's degree in political science from Columbia University.
Would you like to learn more about the situation of Christians in Israel? In this English-language interview with the American news channel CBN, Aramaic Christian Shadi Khalloul, founder of the Israeli Christian Aramaic Organisation, explains what it means to be a Christian in Israel.
This article first appeared in our newspaper "Israelaktuell," issue 144. You can order the newspaper here . We would also be happy to send you several copies for distribution.
