Can Christianity survive in the Holy Land?

This week’s historic visit by Pope John Paul II to the Holy Land is above all a pilgrimage to mark two millennia since the birth of Christ and forge a more amicable understanding between the world’s three great monotheistic religions. Thus the Pope has proposed a trip to Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, and is also scheduled to tour a Palestinian refugee camp. Less noticed, but no less important, are the Pope’s efforts to bolster threatened Christian communities in the Middle East. As matters now stand, his visit could not come a minute too soon.

Years of war, oppression and neglect by their mother churches and clerical leadership have caused a mass exodus of Christians from the Middle East. What started as a trickle at the turn of the century grew into a flood after the withdrawal of Western colonial powers from the Middle East, creating large Christian Arab communities in North and South America. It will take a miracle to reverse this trend.

The numbers tell it all. In the Holy Land, emigration has turned majorities in once distinct Christian enclaves into minorities. In all of Israel, where Christians prospered most, they have dwindled to a mere 130,000, about 2.1% of the population. Only 14,000 Christians remain in Jerusalem. Of close to 70,000 people living in Nazareth, Christians, who until recently constituted a majority, are now only 30% of the population.

Under the Palestinian Authority, it is claimed that there are about 90,000 Christians (exact figures are not available) among an Arab population of 3.5 million. In the greater Bethlehem area, where a Christian majority once controlled the municipality, they are now a 30% minority of about 50,000. They are also a 25% minority, 40,000 people, in greater Ramallah, north of Jerusalem.

Reduced Christian Communities

A low birthrate common among upwardly mobile, better-educated people has also reduced Christian communities. This contrasts dramatically with high Muslim birth rates, where families of 10 and more are common. Demographics speak.

Christian woes in the Middle East have, of course, a long history. True, Islam was generally more tolerant toward the “people of the book” (Christians and Jews) than medieval Christianity was toward “unbelievers.” Still, ever since the Prophet’s fierce cavalry conquered the Middle East in the 7th century from a weakened Byzantine Empire, Islam has considered Christianity its chief adversary. An expansionist Islam extended its domain from the Atlantic to the Pacific, reaching to the middle of France in the 8th century and the gates of Vienna in 1589. Indeed, the scales were tipped only in the 18th century, when Napoleon invaded Egypt, and more so in the 19th century, after European imperial powers began dominating the Middle East.

A triumphalist Islam felt mortally wounded by Christian success. Local Christians (as well as Jews) came to be considered as a kind of Western beachhead, and so bore the brunt of sometimes-murderous Muslim hostility. Obsessed with past glory, fundamentalists (such as Iran’s present-day rulers) seek to reassert past Muslim domination. Should they prevail, Muslim-Christian coexistence will be in danger, especially in the Middle East.

Even now, the situation for Christian Arabs is a dire one. They feel rejected as outsiders in Israel, and because of their small numbers have little political clout, no small matter in a country that is so highly politicized. Then too, though most Israelis are secular, their ethnic attachments remain strong. Arab Christians are not “in,” a feeling that is intensified by their strong identification with the Arab cause, and sometimes with Israel’s enemies.

In the Palestinian Authority, where most of the population is devoutly Muslim and religion is very influential in public life, the position of Christian Arabs is even more tenuous. Although several Christians, such as Yasser Arafat’s right-hand man Dr. Ramzi Khoury, occupy high positions, Christians have been treated as suspect. As the supposed descendants of the Crusaders, they are routinely accused in Muslim pamphlets of harboring treasonous intentions. In the territories ceded by Israel, Palestinian policemen often harass Christians. This may be due to the general misrule in the Authority, where kidnapping and criminal activity even by officials is widespread. Still, restaurants selling alcohol have been ransacked and girls wearing “immodest” dress treated as prostitutes. Mr. Arafat has tried to suppress such activity, in part because his wife is a former Christian, and in part because of the Palestinian Authority’s dependence on strong European political support and financial aid. But he has also shunted aside Christian aides like Hanan Ashrawi, who for years was far and away the most effective Palestinian spokesperson.

Generally, Christian communities have been passive, enclosed in their ghettoes. This is a holdover from Ottoman times, when Western powers forced the Sultan to give autonomous Christian communities special privileges. These communities are led by clerics who often prefer to maintain a fragile religious status quo even at a cost to other vital communal interests.

Christian Arabs have also responded to their identity problem among a Muslim majority by importing to the Middle East a Western notion of nationalism, largely an effort to create a secular framework that would include Arabs of all faiths. They often became its most fervent—some say extreme—proponents. But under Islam, nationalism cannot be so easily divorced from religion. The combination of Islam and nationalism has caused the almost total disappearance in Iraq and Syria of the Assyrian Church, dating to the early part of the first millennium. It has also made life very difficult for the ancient Coptic Church in Egypt, whose followers are periodically subjected to murderous attacks. And it has had disastrous consequences for the various Christian communities in Lebanon.

Growing Muslim Majority

As the recent violent struggle between Muslims and Christians in Nazareth indicates, the combination of Islam and nationalism also threatens Christians in the Holy Land. For years, the Nazareth municipality was dominated by Communists elected, mostly by Christian Arabs, as a protest vote against Israel. But before the 1998 municipal elections, a growing Muslim majority, led by an Islamic party, occupied a site near the venerated Basilica of the Annunciation. The Islamicists insisted that a mosque be erected there to mark the alleged grave of an Arab warrior, Shihab-a-Din (who helped Saladin eject the Crusaders from the Holy Land), and that it be large enough to overshadow the Basilica, as is customary in Muslim domains.

The Christians, led by the Communist mayor, protested vehemently, leading to serious anti-Christian riots. Israeli bureaucratic stupidity and indecisiveness was then exploited by the Islamicists to make further political hay during the 1999 national elections, and aggravated the conflict. It remains unresolved, even after churches went on an unprecedented “strike,” closing their gates for several days.

It remains to be seen whether the Pope’s visit can do much in the short term to patch up these conflicts. And he certainly cannot put an end to centuries of suspicions and hostility with a one-week visit. His moral courage and good intentions could, however, begin to soften hearts in a strife-torn Middle East and promote a message of peace among three religions that have so much in common. That would be no small capstone to a papacy that already has done so much to change the world.