The Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation does excellent work. America hosts a great guest blog from Jeffery M. Abood of this organization. He notes that over the past half century, the Christian Palestinian population has fallen from 18 percent to 2 percent. The Pavlovian American response, never inclined to disfavor Israel, would be to blame Islamic persecution. Not so:
“Contrary to current popular opinion in this country, the Christians there are not leaving because of the Muslims. For 1500 years, the Christian population has been relatively stable despite living in a largely Muslim culture. Even today, many of the elected leaders are Christians as they enjoy popularity and a wide base of support.
The number one reason Christians themselves living there give, as to why they are leaving, is because of the economic conditions created by the Occupation. In fact, in a statement put out by all the Heads of all the Churches in Jerusalem, they state: “Occupation remains the root cause of the conflict and of the continued suffering in the Holy Land”.
He goes on to point out a whole host of Israeli attacks on religious freedom, including the confiscation of Christian lands by settlements, cutting off access to hospitals and elderly care centers, routine denial of clerical and religious visas, efforts to remove tax exempt status from the Church, a mandatory prison sentence in Israel for evangelization, denial of access to the holy sites (including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for the Easter Vigil). He ends by calling for solidarity with our Christian brothers and sisters in the Holy Land, noting that “many Christians in the West seem to hold kind of a default Christian Zionist viewpoint, which actually works against our brothers ands sisters there”. How sad and how true.
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