Via Hot Air, a plea from a defender of Palestinian Christian communities.
[A] number of... Palestinian Christian leaders assured me that they need our love and prayers—but they also badly need practical support if Christianity is not to die in our lifetime in the land that gave birth to our common religion....
The same holds true in Bethlehem (the City of Bread), where not only the French and Polish orphanages but the wider Christian community are literally depending on the Salesian Bakery for their daily bread. Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, jointly administered and run by a coalition of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Roman Catholic Church, stands empty. The Franciscan hostel beside it is shuttered, as are the nearby rows of souvenir shops, while Manger Square is so empty it might as well be in a ghost town.
The all-Christian town of Taybeh, a little over an hour’s drive past Ramallah to the north, is likewise on its last legs. The Khoury family have shuttered their hotel, their beer factory is running at a loss, and, like for the rest of the village, settler roadblocks and vandalism stop them from accessing their crops. Faced with all this, Christians continue to flee via Jordan to claim refugee status in Portugal.
There is probably nothing that can be done to save them, speaking pragmatically. This strikes me as being partly a consequence of the war begun by Hamas with its October 7th blood magic, which designed to use mass human sacrifice as a prayer to Allah for a final reckoning with Israel. They seem to be getting their prayer answered, by whomever it is that answers such prayers; it is likely that this conflict extends beyond human hands, and that its final outcome will not be subject to our opinions but to higher judgments. Everything associated with Hamas, including "Palestine" and anything that chooses that name for itself, is likely to be brought under that judgment. So I guess; but it is not for me to say, or even to know for certain, in matters such as this.
However, I am also reminded that this process has been ongoing for quite some time. Wars intensify and speed it -- the Iraq War, for example, led to the destruction of several Christian and Jewish communities in Iraq as well as the subjugation of other religious minorities. At the Aristotle University in Thessalonica, a recent conference pointed out that the shrinking of Christian communities is part of a trend more than a century long -- or longer yet, if you want to go back before the establishment of Islam, which provoked a great shrinkage through conquest and forced/coerced conversions.
Likewise, Jewish communities across the region have shrunk by approximately 99% in the last century in the Arab countries plus Iran. The 1978 Iranian revolution is part of that story, but mostly it's a reaction by Muslims to a century of relative weakness -- they are attempting to purge the land clean of those who deny the truth of their religion, and they tend to hit the Jewish communities because they are weak and vulnerable to the kind of force that Islamic militants can bring to bear. That's true of Christians and other minority groups as well; it is less true of the Kurds, but even they have been subject to intense violence from ISIS and other Islamic militants as well as from nation states like Iraq (under Saddam), Iran (periodically), Turkey (very much still today), and Syria (under Assad -- the new government at least for now is trying to play nice with the Kurds).
In that sense the current war is just another war, another accelerant thrown onto a long-burning fire. The real question is to what degree that fire will spread to Europe -- or Detroit -- rather than how it will eventually burn itself out in the Middle East.
