The group in America that I’d say is most fervently urging President Trump to crush Palestinian hopes for a state is not the Jewish community but rather evangelical Christians.
“We have no greater friends than Christian supporters of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once told the conference of Christians United for Israel, which with 10 million members is twice the size of the much better known American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Evangelical leaders have been calling on the White House to “reject all efforts” to constrain Israeli control over the West Bank, in the words of a group called American Christian Leaders for Israel. These evangelicals often cite God and the Bible as authorities for their position that Israel should annex Palestinian lands.
I couldn’t reach God for comment, but I suspect that the divine press office would have referred me to the Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.”
Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister and former governor of Arkansas, has favored Israel’s annexing the West Bank and has said, “There is really no such thing as a Palestinian.”
In the face of this American Christian enthusiasm for crushing Palestinians while saying it is God’s will, I wondered what Palestinian Christians thought. So I visited Bethlehem and asked them.
“Do we feel betrayed?” mused Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran Palestinian pastor who is president of Dar Al-Kalima University and, like many Palestinian Christians, against annexation. “Yes, to some extent. Unfortunately, this is not new for us.”
Fewer than 2 percent of West Bank Palestinians today are Christian, but they are an influential minority who endure the same land grabs and hardships as the majority Muslim population. In the Makhrour Valley near Bethlehem, I met Alice Kisiya, 30, a member of an old Christian family, on an overlook where we could see her family property — from which her family has been barred.
Kisiya said that she was physically attacked by Israeli settlers, that her family restaurant was torn down four times and that she had been finally forced off her land last year by the Israeli government. She also pointed to where she said the Israeli authorities had knocked down a wooden church her family had built.
So what does she think of these American Christian leaders?
“Let them come and live here so they can maybe deal with the settlers,” Kisiya told me.
Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian Christian writer and the author of the new book “State of Palestine NOW,” says that far-right American Christians have embarrassed the Christians who actually live in the holy land.
“When the Bible is used to justify land theft and war crimes against civilians, it puts the faithful in an awkward position,” he said.
The far-right Christian-Jewish alliance would seem a little awkward for Netanyahu himself, because some evangelicals base their support for hard-line Israeli policies on the idea that they are advancing the biblical end of days, when they will go to paradise — but in their view, Jews risk being dispatched to hell.
One group in the West Bank where biblical themes of love and justice do prevail is Tent of Nations, a Christian community that promotes nonviolence and declares, “We refuse to be enemies.” It operates on the farm of an old Palestinian Christian family, the Nassars, who have used their property to hold youth camps and advocate peace toward all.
That attitude has not been reciprocated. The Nassars have documented their woes: assaults by settlers, destruction of their olive trees, efforts to push them off land they have occupied for a century and denial by Israel of access to running water and the electrical grid.
American Christian leaders have done an excellent job championing religious freedom around the world, from China to Azerbaijan — but Daoud Nassar, as he showed me around the family farm, spoke of his sadness that these leaders are quiet about the repression of their fellow Christians in the holy land.
“Persecution is happening,” he said, noting for example that some Christians and Muslims alike have difficulties getting permission to pray at religious sites in Jerusalem. American Christians can easily visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus is said to have been crucified, but it’s harder for West Bank Christians to get permission to worship there.
“We were the first followers of Christ,” Nassar said. And yet, he added, Christian leaders seem indifferent as families like his (along with Muslims) are driven off their lands by settler attacks, endless checkpoints, demolitions of buildings and second-class status.
Christians are of course as varied in their views as Jews and Muslims are: The most striking differences are not among religions but rather between moderates and zealots of all faiths. Some American and European Christians regularly volunteer at Tent of Nations, partly to deter violence by settlers. On my visit, a Dutch Christian volunteer, Riet Bons-Storm, a retired theology professor, was staying in a cave on the farm (the Nassars are not allowed to build new structures) and celebrating her 92nd birthday.
“We are like human shields,” she explained. Maybe I looked skeptical that Bons-Storm, a frail Dutch nonagenarian, constituted much of a shield, for she quickly added that it would look bad if settlers or soldiers killed her.
Nassar joined a party of volunteers celebrating Bons-Storm’s birthday and then told me he wished that more American Christians would visit and see for themselves the inequalities of West Bank life.
“We need the U.S. Christians to understand what is happening,” he said. He sighed and added, “We are also people.”
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