MELANIE PHILLIPS

Christmas, the time of goodwill to all men, has been the occasion for the latest vicious attack upon the Jews by the Church of England. In the Catholic weekly The Tablet, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was reported as saying:

“People are leaving Bethlehem in large numbers. It is now very difficult to get in and out of and we thought we could go there, and do what we can to encourage that very beleaguered community, and remind others that it matters that there are Christians in the middle of that conflict.” Dr Williams challenges the Israeli Government: “I would like to know how much it matters to the Israeli Government to have Christian communities in the Holy Land. Are they an embarrassment or are they part of a solution? That’s a question.”

The assumption behind his question is that the very real beleaguerment of the dwindling number of Christians in Bethlehem is caused by Israel. This is a diabolical falsehood. A story in the Mail provides a very different picture of the cause of the Bethlehem Christians’ suffering:

“Life for Palestinian Christians such as 50-year-old Joseph has become increasingly difficult in Bethlehem - and many of them are leaving. The town’s Christian population has dwindled from more than 85 per cent in 1948 to 12 per cent of its 60,000 inhabitants in 2006. There are reports of religious persecution, in the form of murders, beatings and land grabs. Meanwhile, the breakdown in security is putting off tourists, leading to economic hardship for Christians, who own most of the town’s hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops…

“The sense of a creeping Islamic fundamentalism is all around in Bethlehem…George Rabie, a 22-year-old taxi driver from the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jala, is proud of his Christianity, even though it puts him in daily danger. Two months ago, he was beaten up by a gang of Muslims who were visiting Bethlehem from nearby Hebron and who had spotted the crucifix hanging on his windscreen. ‘Every day, I experience discrimination,’ he says. ‘It is a type of racism. We are a minority so we are an easier target. Many extremists from the villages are coming into Bethlehem.’

“Jeriez Moussa Amaro, a 27-year-old aluminium craftsman from Beit Jala is another with first-hand experience of the appalling violence that Christians face. Five years ago, his two sisters, Rada, 24, and Dunya, 18, were shot dead by Muslim gunmen in their own home. Their crime was to be young, attractive Christian women who wore Western clothes and no veil. Rada had been sleeping with a Muslim man in the months before her death. A terrorist organization, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, issued a statement claiming responsibility, which said: ‘We wanted to clean the Palestinian house of prostitutes.’ “

The story goes on to say that that isolation is exacerbated by Israel’s security barrier. But the only reason that was erected was as a desperate last resort to prevent the Palestinians from murdering large numbers of Israelis by human bomb attacks. As the story makes clear, however, the principal reason for the Christians’ flight is Muslim violence.

A report by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs provides an informed riposte to the Christian lies:

•The plight of Christian Arabs remaining in the PA is, in part, attributable to the adoption of Muslim religious law in the PA Constitution. Israel, by contrast, safeguards the religious freedom and holy places of its Christian (and Muslim) citizens. Indeed, in recent years Israel has been responsible for restoring many of the churches and monasteries under its jurisdiction.

•The growing strength of Islamic fundamentalism within the Palestinian national movement poses problems for Christians, who fear they will be deemed opponents of Islam and thereby risk becoming targets for Muslim extremists. This is exacerbated by the fact that Hamas holds substantial power and seeks to impose its radical Islamist identity on the entire population within the PA-controlled territories.

In a July 3, 2006, article, “Who Harms Holy Land Christians?,” syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, a long-time critic of Israel, paraphrased a letter from Michael H. Sellers, an Anglican priest in Jerusalem, to U.S. Congressmen Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Joseph Crowley (D-NY), who were circulating a draft resolution blaming the Christian decline on the discriminatory practices of the Palestinian Authority. Sellers insisted that “the real problem [behind the Christian Arab exodus] is the Israeli occupation—especially its new security wall.”

Yet two-thirds of the Christian Arabs had already departed between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip, decades before construction began on the security barrier. Every one of the more than twenty Muslim states in the Middle East has a declining Christian population. In fact, Israel is the only state in the region in which the Christian Arab population has grown in real terms— from approximately 34,000 in 1948 to nearly 130,000 in 2005.

From Christian Arabs under the thumb of the PA, I have heard testimony of forced marriages of Christian women to Muslim men, death threats against Christians for distributing the Bible to willing Muslims, and Christian women intimidated into wearing ultra-modest Islamic clothing. Churches have been firebombed (most recently in Nablus, Tubas, and Gaza) and/or shot up repeatedly. And this is the tip of the iceberg.

Under the Palestinian Authority, Christian Arabs have found their land expropriated by Muslim thieves and thugs with ties to the PA’s land registration office. Christians have been forced to pay bribes to win the freedom of family members jailed on trumped-up charges. And Arabs, Christians and Muslims alike, have been selling or abandoning homes and businesses to escape the chaos of the PA and move to Israel, Europe, South America, North America, or wherever they can get a visa.

Not a peep of any of this from the Archbishop of Canterbury, or indeed any other prominent Christian leader. Instead the Church blames Israel for the flight from Bethlehem, part of the systematic campaign of libelous propaganda against the Jewish state and the sanitization of Arab murderous hatred that is circulated and believed as holy writ among so many Christians in Britain and elsewhere. Recently, a cleric of the Church of England sent me—as an apparently pointed rebuke —a truly wicked book, Bethelehem Besieged, by one Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian Christian pastor in Bethlehem. With a jacket garlanded by encomia from Hanan Ashrawi, George McGovern, James Zogby, Desmond Tutu and others, this book presents a picture of Bethlehem’s Christians suffering under a yoke imposed by the cruel and belligerent Israelis. Page after page is devoted to claims about the “apartheid-like wall”; unwarranted “invasions” of Bethlehem by overwhelming Israeli military might; the siege of the Church of the Holy Nativity when Israeli troops “clearly had instructions to go in and destroy” (doubtless that’s why there was a stand-off for days while the Israelis tried to persuade the Arab gunmen inside, who were trashing the church, to surrender) — a scandalous misrepresentation with more than a whiff of old-style theological prejudice, when the author compares his family locked inside the parsonage for safety to “the first disciples after the crucifixion of Jesus”; describes the “devastating impact” of the curfews under the Second Intifada; and so on and dishonestly, virulently, sickeningly, on.

No mention whatsoever of the never-ending murder of Israelis perpetrated by the Palestinians; no acknowledgement of the fact that Israel’s military actions in the town were solely acts of self-defense against Palestinian aggression; no mention at all of the truly unwarranted persecution of Bethlehem Christians by Palestinian Muslims. Instead, the Israeli victims of Arab aggression are blamed by this Arab Christian as a source of unredeemed evil — a nationalistic scapegoating of the Jewish state that mirrors the theological scapegoating of the Jewish religion in the Gospels and the calumnies of the early church fathers.

This vile travesty merely mirrors the kind of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli filth that pours out of places like the Sabeel centre and other sources of Palestinian Christian writing, along with NGOs like Christian Aid. As Canon Andrew White has more than once observed, not only does this all smell of replacement theology or supercessionism, the ancient Christian calumny against the Jews, but it has become once again standard fare within the Church of England and many other churches.

The results of all this incitement to hatred are on display in the response to a gruesome opinion poll in The Tablet: “Do you accept that Israel is engaged in a struggle for its survival and support its efforts to root out its enemies? 21.2%”

Read that last figure again. Almost 80 per cent of British Christians polled do not accept that Israel is fighting enemies who are pledged to destroy it. Almost 80 per cent of British Christians are ignorant of the truth, have swallowed a diabolical lie and as a result have turned Jewish victims into global villains. Where, alas, have we heard this before?

I’m sorry if this pains the many decent Christians who uphold truth and fight evil and therefore support Israel in its existential struggle to survive the attempt to exterminate it; but it has to be said that, at a time when Iran is openly threatening to destroy Israel, the churches in Britain are not only silent about the genocidal ravings emanating from Iran but are themselves helping pave the way for a second Holocaust. The time has arrived for decent Christians around the world to raise their voices as loudly as they can against this terrible, primitive anti-Jewish stain that once again besmirches their religion.

This is excerpted from Melanie Phillips’s Diary: www.melaniephillips.com/diary.