For years, Israel sought to distinguish itself from the “Middle Eastern muck”, as political scientist Ian Lustick puts it. Instead, it sought to present itself as the region’s only democracy and, later, as an entrepreneurial, high-tech society. Its public diplomacy now appears to be cultivating another, yet rather questionable, distinction: being the protector of Christianity in the Middle East.
The effort has gained momentum against the backdrop of Israel’s deteriorating international image following the Gaza genocide and the attacks on Lebanon. But it has been building for months, if not years.
In late 2025, Israel allocated up to $4.1 million for a campaign targeting evangelical Christians in the United States, while in December its foreign ministry helped bring more than 1,000 evangelical pastors and Christian influencers to Israel.
For over a decade, Netanyahu has touted Israel as a place where Christians “thrive”, contrasting it with their “persecution elsewhere in the Middle East”, most recently in an April Easter message. Weeks later, the Israeli Foreign Ministry appointed George Deek as its special envoy to the Christian world.
What about Palestinian Christians?
Yet many of the people at the centre of this “diplomatic campaign” tell a very different story. The Israeli state presenting itself as Christianity’s protector has presided over the erosion of one of the region’s oldest communities, Palestinian Christians.
The Christian presence in Palestine predates the arrival of Islam by centuries, and many of today’s Palestinian Muslims are rooted in the same indigenous population that gradually converted to Islam. This continuity is visible in towns like Bethlehem and Beit Jala, where Muslims and Christians have lived and thrived alongside each other for centuries.
This long Christian presence makes their marginalisation a relatively recent phenomenon, closely intertwined with the political transformations of the modern era. European powers repeatedly invoked the pretext of protecting Christian communities to justify imperial intervention in the Middle East. But the decisive rupture, and the onset of their demographic decline, came with Zionism.
After decades of transformation driven by Zionism and facilitated by the British Mandate authorities, the Nakba of 1948 displaced roughly 750,000 Palestinians, setting Palestinian Christianity on a trajectory of decline from which it has never recovered.
Christians in Palestine numbered roughly 89,000 in 1931, about 9% of the population, rising to 145,000 by 1946. The Nakba shattered this thriving community, and around 90,000 Christians were displaced, churches closed, and homes and property lost, alongside their Muslim compatriots.
The 1967 occupation deepened the process. When Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian Christians in the two territories numbered more than 42,000, around 6% of the population. By 1997, they were roughly 40,000 (1.5%); their share fell to 1.2% in 2007 and roughly 1% by 2017, even if their numbers increased slightly.
The contradiction is perhaps most stark around the places Christianity holds sacred. In 2002, Israeli tanks surrounded Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity for 39 days, and did not hesitate to fire at the compound and set part of it ablaze. It was an unsettling tableau, Christ’s peaceful sanctuary encircled by Merkavas, engulfed in smoke.
The impact of genocide
During the Gaza genocide, the Israeli knife was sharper and pressed harder against everyone’s neck. Christian or Muslim, church or mosque, there was nowhere to hide from the slaughter and blind bombs. Gaza’s Saint Porphyrius Church, one of the world’s oldest continuously active Christian churches, was struck by Israeli warplanes, killing 19 people sheltering there. The pattern continued in July 2025, when the Israeli army fatally bombed Gaza’s Holy Family Catholic Church.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, the contradiction is visible at street level. Spitting at Christian clergy and pilgrims has become a recurring form of harassment, particularly among some Jewish extremists. That alongside verbal abuse and vandalism.
Taken together, the decline cannot be explained simply by birth rates or religious tensions. Palestinian Christians live under the same occupation as their Muslim compatriots, facing restrictions on movement, land confiscation, settlement expansion and political insecurity. These conditions have also constrained economic opportunity, making emigration increasingly attractive to a community with established networks abroad.
And this history is precisely what Israel’s Christian diplomacy seeks to obscure. Its effort to present itself as the protector of Christians serves two interchangeable purposes: separating Palestinian Christians from the Palestinian national story and, second, recasting the conflict in religious terms.
The first requires erasing a history that contradicts the state’s narrative. Ignoring that Palestinian Christians were deeply involved in the national movement long before the Nakba.
The role of Palestinian Christians in the liberation struggle
Khalil al-Sakakini, an Arab Orthodox intellectual from Jerusalem, became one of Palestine’s prominent nationalist voices, while Issa and Youssef al-Issa founded Falastin in Jaffa in 1911, an influential Arabic newspaper that opposed Zionism. Even the term “Nakba” was popularised by the Christian Palestinian intellectual Constantin Zureiq.
This role continued into the 1960s and 1970s, when Palestinian Christians were prominent in the secular, Arab-nationalist and Marxist currents of the resistance, and within the PLO. George Habash, a Palestinian Christian, for instance, founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
That tradition continues today. Palestinian Greek Orthodox Archbishop, Atallah Hanna, remains an fierce critic of the occupation, and had his share of Israeli abuse. Much like Palestinian Christian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, whose killing by Israeli forces in Jenin in 2022 was followed by the violent desecration of her funeral in Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, the second purpose of ejecting Palestinian Christianity from local history is to portray the Palestinian struggle for freedom as essentially Islamist. Within this framework, Palestinians become less a national population resisting dispossession and more Muslims confronting Jews.
The framing is straightforward. Once a conflict is coded primarily in religious terms, people tend to interpret its participants through those categories. This places Israel within the Western narrative of the struggle against Islamic extremism. Netanyahu has repeatedly cast Israel as part of a broader Western struggle against “militant” or “radical Islam”, portraying Israel and the West as confronting a common civilisational threat.
Contradictions
The Islamisation also gives anti-Semitism a broader political reach, allowing Israel to invoke Western sensitivity to antisemitism as a form of political leverage.
A Palestinian Christian disrupts that mental shortcut: he is Palestinian, but not Muslim; Arab, but Christian; and capable of sharing the same national grievances as his Muslim neighbour.
But once the intellectual debate is put aside, what remains most contradictory in Israel’s narrative is the lives of many Palestinian Christians themselves. And most of us Palestinians have a story or two to tell about that.
I still think of our next-door neighbour in Gaza, Fadi, who was killed by an Israeli bullet while taking part in a demonstration against the occupation during the First Intifada. I did not even know he was Christian until his funeral.
None of that mattered. What joined us was not only that we were Palestinians, but the shared experience of affliction and dispossession. The grievances shared by Fadi’s family were no different from ours; their stories of displacement were ours. His grandparents and ours had walked the same Via Dolorosa after being driven from their towns and villages during the Nakba, hunted down by Jewish militias.
Fadi was carried to his final resting place on the shoulders of the same youngsters who had carried the local mosque attendant, killed by Israel a few weeks earlier.
We used to say, Fadi baptised the land with his blood.
That is perhaps the simplest answer to Israel’s claim on Christians.
Dr Emad Moussa is a Palestinian-British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics, focusing on MENA with a special interest in Israel/Palestine. He has a background in human rights and journalism, and is currently a frequent contributor to multiple academic and media outlets, in addition to being a consultant for a US-based think tank.
Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa
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