EU diplomats have been given a searingly honest assessment of the situation for Christians in the Holy Land by Canon Dr Don Binder in his capacity as Undersecretary to the Council of the Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches in Jerusalem.
Outlining the challenges that the Christian community faces, his online address covered topics as varied as Jewish supremicism, vandalism at Christian sites, unpredicatable restrictions on access, Government taxation policy,the situation in Gaza and even attempts at arson at the Church of All Nations in Gethsemane.
The full text of his address is below.
The challenges I shall describe have been made all the more urgent over the course of the past fifteen months during a devastating war. And although we are presently in the first week of a ceasefire, that ceasefire remains fragile. Moreover, it is limited only to the Gaza Strip and not to other areas of the West Bank, where conflict continues unabated. And so we remain here very much on edge.
Yet while the Gaza War has brought many of the region’s religious tensions to a boil, these have been heating up now for over the past decade. This development has been in concert with the recent rise of a religious extremism fueled by an ideology of Jewish Supremacism. Once considered a fringe element of Israeli society, this ideology has become more prominent in recent years within the governing coalition. Its unfortunate rise has given sanction and political cover for extremist groups to enact their vision of cleansing the land of religions other than their own.
As an example of this, let me begin with an incident that personally affected our Anglican and Lutheran communities here in Jerusalem. It took place in our joint cemetery on Mt. Zion on New Year’s Day, 2023, less than a week after the current governing coalition came to power.Security camera footage from that afternoon revealed two young men wearing kippahs, maliciously smashing to pieces a stone carving of the second Protestant Bishop of Jerusalem. It went on to show them doing the same to numerous stone crosses, as well as to the tombstones of Christian police officers. As our Council subsequently wrote: “The choice of these specific targets signals to us that the perpetrators of these criminal deeds were clearly motivated by religious bigotry and hatred of Christians.” That public statement went on to note that this was not the first such attack upon this cemetery, but “part of a repeating pattern of attacks against Christian sacred sites and cemeteries on Mt. Zion and elsewhere that have been on the rise over the past decade.”
In the aftermath of that incident, our Diocese was grateful to receive many expressions of outrage from the local Jewish community at what had been done to our cemetery. Moreover, from the video evidence, the police were shortly able to locate and arrest the two alleged perpetrators. Nevertheless, after two years now, there has been no significant movement in the prosecution of the case, and the two charged with the attack remain free on bail. As the Council’s Statement noted, this attack was not an isolated incident. We and other monitoring groups such as the Rossing Center have documented dozens of similar acts against churches, church properties, and church leaders themselves. Sometimes these involve the spraying of hate-filled graffiti on our church walls.
Other times they are attempts to burn down the church itself, as happened with the Church of All Nations in the Garden of Gethsemane in December of 2020 when a man doused its pews with flammable liquid and set it on fire. Frequently, it includes Christians being spat at as they walk through the Old City, something I myself have personally experienced numerous times.
Yet as serious as these incidents are, they are in some ways the least of our problems. That’s because we are beginning to face even greater challenges from the governing authorities themselves. Some of the most serious of these involve restrictions on Christian worship, taxation of our properties, and even control over our church ministries.
In the first of these categories, I can give you a very recent example. Each year, the Orthodox of the surrounding region celebrate Christmas at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on the evening of January 6th. This has been going on for centuries and is well-known to the local authorities. This year, His Beatitude Theophilos III kindly invited a group of ten American bishops to accompany our own Archbishop Hosam in attending that service. Yet when we arrived at the checkpoint into Bethlehem that evening, we found it inexplicably closed to all vehicles. We had to spend another forty-five minutes driving through an alternative route into the West Bank in order to arrive at the church. s you might imagine, the ten visiting bishops were dumbfounded that the government would close the very gates of Bethlehem on Christmas Eve itself. Yet, as we told them, the same thing has sadly happened in the past on our own western Christmas as well. Moreover, we said to them, after each unannounced closing, we never receive an explanation from the authorities, much less an apology.
Again, these are not isolated incidents. Over the past three years, Jerusalem’s Old City has been placed on near total lockdown on the day of the Holy Fire service at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Easter Eve. As I have personally documented in videos and livestreams over the past few years, only a small fraction of the indigenous Christian community is allowed into the city, much less the church itself. Those who try are often beaten and berated by police—even if they are from among the clergy themselves. In recent years, similar restrictions have been put in place for local participation in the annual Palm Sunday service in Jerusalem, and at the Orthodox celebration of the Feast of the Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor in Galilee.
Moving on to the matter of taxation: The municipal tax or Arnona also continues to be a concern for the churches. In this, municipalities have for the past several years threatened fines and the collection of unfair taxes on the churches, all flying in the face of the religious Status Quo. Last June, church leaders went so far as to raise this issue with Prime Minister Netanyahu himself in written correspondence. To date, no response from his office has been received. A month later, we held a meeting with the Mayor of Jerusalem that also did not resolve the issue. It remains tied up in legal proceedings that continue to be a significant financial drain upon the churches.
Lastly, there is the recent plan to incorporate Church properties into the existing Jerusalem Walls National ParkThat measure is up for consideration later this year in June. It threatens to restrict access and control over our church properties on the Mount of Olives, including the Garden of Gethsemane. We remain apprehensive that this measure will advance despite our objections, further limiting the free exercise of religion in our churches.
Earlier, I mentioned how the Gaza War has negatively impacted the Christian presence in the Holy Land. Nowhere has this been seen more than in Gaza itself. Only 1,200 Christians were living in Gaza at the start of the war, mostly divided between the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities. Today, less than 700 remain. Most of those no longer there fled, as they were able, through the Rafah border crossing while it was still open. But, as you might remember, eighteen of them were killed during the second week of the war when an IDF airstrike collapsed the parish hall of St. Porphyrios’ Orthodox Church while members and other refugees were sleeping inside. Two months later, in December of 2023, IDF snipers shot and killed two women at Holy Family Catholic Church as they came out of worship services. Seven others were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others inside the church compound. This all followed earlier rocket fire by an IDF tank at the adjacent Sister’s Convent, a home to over 54 disabled persons. The resulting damage made the home uninhabitable. While our Anglican Diocese has no congregation in Gaza, we do have the ministry of our Ahli Arab Hospital in that same part of Gaza City. It too was bombed during the second week of the Gaza War, with the most recent forensic evidence suggesting that the exploding missile was a fragmentation bomb. Hundreds were killed or wounded that night from the razor-edged shrapnel that flew from its warhead when it detonated on impact near the center of the hospital’s courtyard.
Despite this horrific loss of life, the staff and volunteers of our hospital persevered in their healing ministry, often short on food, fuel, and medical supplies. During the week before Christmas of that same year—2023—the IDF arrested many of them without charge. They were taken into custody and held for between three and six weeks before finally being released. And then, their release was not back to the hospital, but to Rafah at the southern border with Egypt. Yet even there our staff persevered, opening a free clinic for the hundreds of thousands of displaced families taking refuge in the area. Then, a few months later when they were driven from Rafah, they opened a similar clinic in Khan Younis! Such is their fortitude and commitment to serving the poor and downtrodden in need of medical attention.Today Ahli is the only hospital still open in the north. It remains a beacon of hope in the midst of a sea of death, destruction, and despair. Through the support of the international community and our many donors, we pray that its mission can continue in the weeks and months ahead so that it can address the dire medical needs of that devastated community.
Let me now conclude my remarks by saying that I wish I didn’t have to issue you this report in its present form. When I first came to Jerusalem more than six years ago as a Christian missionary, I arrived with a heart filled with hope that we of all religious faiths could work together constructively to solve the many problems that have vexed this region for so long. While I wasn’t totally naïve about the many challenges here, over time I came to understand that they are far wider and deeper than I had ever imagined. Yet even now, as a person of faith, I do not believe that these challenges are insurmountable. I believe that there are enough people of goodwill both here and around the world who can join together to change the course of the present trajectory and make it bend more towards the direction of justice and peace.As part of the European Union diplomatic corps, you are key members of the team that can help bring about positive change both here in the Holy Land and throughout the Middle East. And so, on behalf of our Council, I ask for your support in working with us and with the leaders of the other Abrahamic Faiths in helping to promote an environment of safety, mutual respect, and religious tolerance here in this Holy City that is held in reverence throughout the world.
Thank you for listening, and may God bless you in your good efforts on behalf of our battered and war-torn region
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