“And I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curseth thee will I curse.” — Genesis 12:3 (verse commonly invoked by Evangelicals in support of Israel)
In 1917, General Edmund Allenby was given both command over British forces in the Middle East and an order to lead them to victory over the Ottoman Empire. But as the year was nearing its end, Allenby was given a more specific, time-sensitive instruction: Conquer Jerusalem as “a Christmas present for the British nation.” The general came through, and Christmas came early for his countrymen that year. Just two weeks before the holiday, Jerusalem was in British hands.
British leaders weren’t the only people rejoicing. Many Jews, seeing the British victory as a Jewish victory, were even more elated. A little more than a month earlier, Britain had proclaimed itself Zionism’s official state sponsor by issuing the Balfour Declaration, and it was against this backdrop that Allenby, on the second day of Hanukkah in December 1917, entered Jerusalem as its conqueror. To toast the occasion, a local Jewish musicologist wrote a song of celebration called “Let Us Rejoice.” Better known by its Hebrew title, “Hava Nagila,” it remains a mainstay in Jewish musicians’ repertoire for festive events.
The Zionist-British relationship was intended, first and foremost, as a strategic partnership, but it was also conceived — at least by the seven Evangelicals then in the British Cabinet — as a Judeo-Christian union. True, this marriage, then in its honeymoon phase, would end in divorce some two decades later, but to the British policymakers who initiated it in 1917, this was not just any marriage; it was a marriage made in heaven. They were among the many British Christians who, since the 17th century, had revered the Jews as the Chosen People and who, since the 19th century, had labored to restore them to their homeland.
Christians, the People of Israel and the Land of Israel
Today, millions of Christians throughout the world, in the spirit of the British Cabinet in 1917, have proved themselves to be great friends of the Jewish people and, by extension, of the Jewish state. Perhaps it is fitting then that the visionary who founded the movement that led to Jewish statehood, Theodor Herzl, was the same person who coined the term by which such friends would become known: “Christian Zionists.”
While the State of Israel may not be universally supported by the Christian faithful, the Land of Israel, for its part, is cherished by just about all of the world’s 2.5 billion Christians. Indeed, for the one-third of the global population that’s Christian, this infinitesimal territory — a mere particle on the earth’s surface — is as vast spiritually as it is small geographically. Christian cosmology had long placed the Holy Land at the center of the world, and Christian cartography, in turn, depicted its central location for centuries. The best-known of these Holy Land-centric maps is that designed by German pastor Heinrich Bunting, whose 16th-century map “The World in Cloverleaf” is preserved in Israel’s National Library and reproduced in a mosaic model at Jerusalem’s City Hall.
So large did the Holy Land loom in the Christian consciousness that many Christians throughout the world, particularly before the 20th century, when the majority were illiterate, knew the landscape of Palestine almost as intimately as — or even more intimately than — they knew their home turf. “The history and geography of Palestine,” wrote British writer and anti-slavery champion Henry Nevinson, “were far more familiar to us all than our own.” For his part, David Lloyd George, the British prime minister whose government issued the Balfour Declaration, expressed a similar sentiment: “I was brought up in a school where I was taught far more history of the Jews than about my own land.”
Christians sanctify the Holy Land for the same reasons believers in general hold a certain space sacred. What converts a patch of dirt into hallowed ground are the people who tread on it and the events that take place on it. Concerning the Holy Land in particular, if “Christianity was a great drama,” as it was described by Malcolm Muggeridge (the Christian philosopher who brought Mother Teresa out of obscurity and to the attention of the world), the Land of Israel was the stage on which this drama was enacted. Christians believe that the Land of Israel was the circuit of Christ’s ministry and the scene of his Ascension, that it was in Bethlehem that he was born, in Nazareth that he was reared, and in Jerusalem that he was crucified, entombed, and resurrected. The specific places associated with Christ thus became landmarks, and since the fourth century, Christians have been flocking to the Land of Israel to visit these holy sites. Already in that century, the Roman senator-turned-monk Paulinus observed, “The principal motive which draws people to Jerusalem is the desire to see and touch the places where Christ is present in the body.” A Christian tradition even developed of describing these holy sites as collectively comprising a “Fifth Gospel.”
Christians in Israel
Among the 2.5 billion Christians throughout the world for whom the Land of Israel is the Holy Land are the 190,000 Christian residents of the State of Israel, for whom it is also a homeland.
The 2% of Israeli citizens who are Christian are principally Arabic-speaking, and they belong to a multiplicity of denominations. Catholics of various kinds — Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics and Maronite Catholics being the largest sects under this umbrella — make up a majority of Israeli Christians. The most numerous after them are the Greek Orthodox. In Israel proper Greek Orthodox are the second most numerous sect, but in Gaza and the West Bank, they predominate among the Christians. Then there are the four Oriental Orthodox communities — Armenians, Syriacs, Copts, and Ethiopians — whose importance is belied by their small numbers. Thanks to these communities’ ancient roots in the Holy Land, their churches’ holdings include some of the choicest “Christian real estate” in the country.” The four Oriental Orthodox communities, for instance, number among the six Christian denominations — the two other being Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox — who own sections of Christianity’s most sacred site, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Protestants in Israel, as elsewhere in the Middle East, are few, Anglicans/Episcopalians making up the largest Protestant sect.
For the most part, Israeli Christians descend either from indigenous Christians whose ancestors lived in pre-Islamic Palestine or from Christians who have been in the country so long (Armenians, for example) that they may as well be considered indigenous. It’s notable, however, that there has never been a time in the history of Palestine when Christians formed a majority. Even on the eve of the Arab conquest, before Palestine underwent Islamization and Arabization, Jews and Samaritans still constituted a slight majority in the Land of Israel. Nor has there ever been a time of native Christian rule. Palestine has known three periods of Christian rule — that of the Byzantines (324-642), the Crusaders (1099-1291) and the British (1917-1948) — but in each era, power was exercised by foreign Christians, either locally by Crusader kings or remotely in faraway imperial capitals.
The communal profile of Christians in the Holy Land has always marked them off from their Muslim neighbors. In late Ottoman Palestine, for example, Muslims were mostly impoverished, unlettered villagers, whereas Christians were primarily townsmen markedly better educated and more prosperous. Christians were also much less conservative–much less leery of outsiders, in particular–and almost universally open to the West. Christian receptivity to Western influence was reflected in their high enrollment in missionary schools and their frequent employment by Western officials and traders. It was Palestinian Christian exposure to Western ideas — nationalism most significantly — and Palestinian Christian educational attainment that made them the earliest Palestinian spokesmen to articulate a Palestine national identity.
Palestinian Christians prospered during the British mandate, with most belonging to the middle class and some to the moneyed elite. Ironically, though, for all their contributions to forging a Palestinian national identity, Palestinian Christians were targeted by the Palestinian rebels during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt, denounced as “collaborators,” a charge that has been regularly renewed against them ever since. Bullied, terrorized, sometimes boycotted, and in a few cases, even murdered, Palestinian Christians were not participants in the “Great Arab Revolt” but rather victims of it.
The First Arab-Israeli War affected Palestinian Christians adversely, particularly in the coastal cities and in a handful of villages in the Galilee. Yet the war was not as ruinous for them as it was for Muslims. Their displacement, in other words, was not as significant. Nazareth, for example, Palestine’s largest Arab city, which then had a Christian majority, was little touched by the war. The lower proportion of Christian displacement was also reflected in the fact that, whereas Christians had been about 11% of the total Arab population in the British Mandate, they comprised about 21% of all non-Jews (34,000) in Israel 1949, when the war ended.
In its declaration of independence, the State of Israel promised minorities “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” and “freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.” Privately, Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion echoed what the declaration has implied publicly, saying, “Israel mustn’t cause its Christians any harm.” Around the same time the declaration was promulgated, the government set up its Department of Christian Communities within the Ministry of Religions to manage relations with the country’s many Christian communities. The department would be led by a number of very capable Jewish scholars of Christianity, most notably Shaul (Paul) Colbi, an expert in Catholic canon law.
Just as the Six-Day War expanded Israel’s borders, it also expanded Israel’s Christian population, and nowhere was this augmentation greater than in Jerusalem. When Israel annexed the city in 1967, Jerusalem’s almost 10,000 Christians passed under its rule. Since then, the Israeli authorities have protected Christian holy sites and ensured that Christian residents, worshippers, and pilgrims have enjoyed unimpeded access to them.
The history of Christians in the State of Israel since 1948 has been a success story, one that stands in stark contrast to the horror stories and tales of woe of Christians in other countries in the region. The numbers alone speak for themselves. Iraq has lost 90% of its Christians since 2003; Syria has lost 80% of its Christians since the civil war broke out in 2011; Gaza has lost almost 60% of its Christians since Hamas seized power in 2007; and Bethlehem has lost almost 65% of its Christians since Israeli troops withdrew in 1995 and handed the city over to the Palestinian Authority. In Israel, however, the Christian population is growing.
No less striking are the achievements of Israeli Christians. Half of all non-Jewish winners of Israel’s highest civilian award, the Israel prize, have been Christian, as have two of the four non-Jewish justices who have served on Israel’s high court. The educational successes of Israeli Christians are especially notable. Christians are overrepresented among Israelis with bachelor’s and advanced degrees, and whereas the majority of Arab Muslim women in Israel do not participate in the labor force, Christian Arab women not only work, they constitute the single best-educated demographic in the country. Christian students, moreover, outperform their Jewish, Druze, and Muslim peers on the national matriculation exam (bagrut), earning higher scores than any other community. High educational attainment has translated into overrepresentation in the professions. In virtually every field of professional endeavor, Christian numbers far exceed their small share of the population: medicine, engineering, computer science, law, architecture, even musicology.
The Christian efflorescence in Israel just goes to show that Jews haven’t been the only beneficiaries of the Jewish national renaissance in the Land of Israel. Non-Jews in the Jewish state have likewise reaped its rewards, as Israeli Christians freely recognize, never mind that some of their leaders say otherwise publicly. A recent survey, for instance, found that 84% of Israeli Christians are “satisfied with life in the country.” Even one of Israel’s staunchest Christian critics, Atallah Mansour–the first non-Jew to write a novel in Hebrew–even acknowledges this in his memoirs, “As a member of a peaceful Christian minority, I feel more protected in this open society than my ancestors were. The fact that my Christian community is made up of loyal citizens makes me feel even more secure.”
— Scott Abramson, December 2024