How Zionist evangelicals seek to erase centuries of Palestinian Christianity

Last week, more than one thousand American evangelical pastors and Christian "influencers" descended upon Israel in what organisers hailed as a historic pilgrimage, the largest such delegation since the state’s founding.

Arranged by the Friends of Zion initiative and blessed by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the mission was greeted with presidential ceremony by Isaac Herzog. It was marketed as a spiritual awakening.

In reality, it was a political crusade cloaked in the language of revelation.

From Jerusalem’s stages came the predictable liturgy.

US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, urged attendees to return home with "the fire of God burning in your bones", so that they might be "pro-Bible" and therefore "pro-Israel". Mike Evans - founder of the Friends of Zion Museum, self-styled kingmaker behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, by his own account, Donald Trump’s first presidential victory - warned against giving "Bible land to radical Islam Jew-haters".

The message was unmistakable: Israel is presented as the embodiment of biblical truth; its enemy is "radical Islam"; the conflict is framed as a cosmic duel between Judeo-Christian virtue and Muslim darkness.

It is a script long rehearsed by Netanyahu and his allies, faithfully echoed by Christian Zionists who imagine themselves guardians of a besieged Holy Land.

Yet, beneath this theatrical certainty lies an astonishing erasure. The entire spectacle rests on a deception: that Palestine’s story is a binary struggle between Jews and Muslims, and that Christians - by faith, by identity, by history - naturally belong on Israel’s side.

It is a distortion so sweeping that only ideology can sustain it.

A shared civilisation

Christians are not outsiders in Palestine. They are not visitors, observers, or decorative minorities. They are an indigenous, ancient, constitutive part of the Palestinian people, older than Zionism, older than Europe’s nation-states, older than the very political theologies now mobilised in Israel’s defence.

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For more than 14 centuries, Muslims and Christians in Palestine lived not in grudging coexistence but within a shared civilisation. Few places on earth can claim a record of religious harmony so deep, sustained, and organically lived.

That history begins with an episode the evangelical pilgrims rarely mention. When Jerusalem surrendered to the Muslim army in 637 CE, Greek Orthodox Patriarch Sophronius agreed to hand over the city’s keys only to Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab himself. Umar travelled from Medina with one servant and a single camel, taking turns walking beside it.

As they approached Jerusalem, the servant happened to be riding while Umar walked, leading those awaiting them to mistake the servant for the caliph. The ruler of a vast empire entered the city in coarse clothes, indistinguishable from ordinary people, rejecting spectacle as a measure of authority.

Umar signed the Aelia Covenant, guaranteeing Christian lives, churches, property, and worship.

Not one church was destroyed. Not one Christian was forced to convert. There was no massacre, no looting -nothing resembling the carnage the Crusaders would unleash in 1099, when Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians alike were slaughtered in an orgy of sanctified violence.

A moment of moral clarity followed. When it was time for prayer, Sophronius invited Umar to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Umar refused. If he prayed there, he explained, future Muslims might seize the building, claiming: "Umar prayed here."

Instead, he humbly prayed on the steps outside and issued a decree forbidding Muslims from turning the church into a mosque. It was not merely tolerance but principled restraint, a philosophy of power grounded in the protection of the Other.

That ethic endured.

A strong Christian presence

When Muslim leader Salahuddin al-Ayyubi liberated Jerusalem centuries later, the arrangement governing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was not imposed upon its Christian custodians but accepted by them as a stabilising solution. 

To prevent conflict among rival Christian denominations, the the keys of the church were entrusted to two Muslim families, the Joudeh al-Husseini and the Nuseibeh, whose neutral stewardship was recognised as a guarantor of peace. 

Palestine is a society in which Muslim and Christian life has long been intertwined long before settler colonialism arrived to tear that shared world apart

Some 850 years later, those families still unlock the doors at dawn and close them at night. This is not domination but stewardship: a daily ritual of shared guardianship over the sacred.

This shared life carried into modern Palestinian history.

During the Great Revolt of 1936–39, Christians were not peripheral to the national struggle - they were among its leaders. Fouad Saba served as secretary of the Arab Higher Committee before being exiled by the British to the Seychelles, alongside other members of the leadership, including Alfred Roch, the prominent Christian Palestinian from Jaffa.

The Palestinian flag of the revolt bore the crescent and the cross intertwined, symbols of a national movement sustained by both faiths.

Later generations produced an extraordinary constellation of Palestinian Christian figures whose influence shaped not only Palestinian national life but global intellectual and cultural discourse. 

George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, were among the most prominent political architects of modern Palestinian resistance.

Hanan Ashrawi emerged as one of the most articulate diplomatic voices of the Palestinian cause on the world stage. Emile Habiby, novelist, satirist, and political leader, gave literary form to the lived absurdities of Palestinian life under settler-colonial rule.

Palestinian Christian contribution extended far beyond politics. Edward Said, one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century, reshaped entire disciplines - literature, cultural studies, postcolonial theory - while remaining unwaveringly rooted in the Palestinian experience. 

The pastors walked among a living Christian people and did not see them. They claimed to defend Christianity while turning their backs on its oldest communities

His insistence that Palestine was not merely a geopolitical problem but a human and cultural catastrophe transformed how the world understood colonialism, exile, and power.

Said was not a peripheral Palestinian voice; he was among its most globally resonant, a legacy that endures at Columbia University, where Palestinian Christian intellectuals Wael Hallaq and Joseph Massad continue to challenge colonial orthodoxies and defend Palestinian historical truth.

Decades earlier, Khalil Sakakini, the Jerusalemite Christian educator, diarist, and reformer, laid the foundations of modern Palestinian pedagogy and civic thought.

A fierce opponent of sectarianism and colonial domination alike, Sakakini championed Arabic language, cultural self-confidence, and intellectual independence at a time when Palestine was being reshaped by imperial designs.

The Nasir family, Palestinian Christians from Birzeit, founded what would become Birzeit University, the intellectual heart of Palestinian national life. The institution began in 1924 as an elementary school for girls, co-founded by Nabiha Nasir, educator, feminist, and political activist.

After colonialism

In culture and the arts, Palestinian Christians have been no less central. The Trio Joubran - Samir, Wissam and Adnan, three brothers from Nazareth - transformed the oud into a global instrument of Palestinian memory, carrying to world stages the words of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s greatest modern poet - a Muslim, as his name suggests - whose voice became inseparable from their music.

Their partnership distils something essential about Palestine itself: a society in which Muslim and Christian life has long been intertwined, intellectually, artistically, emotionally, long before settler colonialism arrived to tear that shared world apart.

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A few weeks ago, I attended the Joubran Trio’s concert at the Barbican in London, marking the 20th anniversary of their extraordinary collaboration with Mahmoud Darwish.

The evening was deeply moving throughout: the ache of the oud intertwined with Darwish’s voice, while images of Palestine were projected behind them, folding sound, memory, and land into a single experience.

Before performing The Trees We Wear, Samir paused to explain its origins. The piece, he said, had been composed deliberately as a love song, with no political insinuation, an insistence on something often denied to Palestinians: the right to be seen as romantic, tender, fully human.

When the trio performed the piece in Ramallah in 2019, Shireen Abu Akleh had attended the concert and later noted that it was her favourite of the evening. Three years later, Shireen, the Palestinian-American Christian journalist whose reporting carried Palestine’s daily reality to the world, was shot dead by an Israeli soldier while covering a military incursion in Jenin.

Her body was found near a tree, an image Samir recalled with quiet gravity, as though she had worn it, a tragic echo of the song’s title. The Trio later dedicated The Trees We Wear to her memory.

When mourners insisted on carrying Shireen’s coffin on foot during her funeral procession in East Jerusalem, Muslims and Christians stood together to shield it as Israeli soldiers attacked the pallbearers, turning grief itself into an act of resistance.

Together, these figures expose the fiction at the heart of the Christian Zionist narrative. Palestinian Christianity is not marginal, residual, or fading by historical accident. It has been central to Palestine’s political imagination, cultural production, educational institutions, and moral vocabulary.

It is precisely this reality that Israel and its Christian Zionist patrons seek to obscure.

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The Nakba displaced some 90,000 Palestinian Christians and saw the forced closure of around 30 churches, hollowing out centuries-old communities.

During Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, churches that once offered sanctuary have themselves been struck: the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, among the oldest Christian sites in the world, was bombed, killing families sheltering inside; the Holy Family Catholic Church was also hit, leaving civilians dead and wounded.

This was not without precedent. In 2002, Israeli forces subjected the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to a 39-day armed siege -the only time in its fourth-century history such an assault occurred.

Beyond Gaza, Christian life across Palestine has come under sustained pressure. Homes, monasteries, hospitals, schools, and cultural institutions have been damaged or destroyed. Settler militias have repeatedly attacked the Christian town of Taybeh, vandalising property and threatening residents.

Ideological zeal

Before the Nakba, Palestinian Christians made up 12.5 percent of the population; today they are roughly 1 percent. Clergy and community leaders, including Pastor Munther Isaac, have warned that if current conditions persist, there may be no indigenous Christian presence left in Palestine by 2050.

Christianity and Judaism are being stripped of their depth and bent to the needs of a colonial project that crushes the very Christians whose ancestors first sanctified this land

Meanwhile, Israeli extremists routinely spit on priests and harass clergy in Jerusalem, behaviour dismissed by Israel’s minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as “an old Jewish tradition". Christian Zionists, who speak endlessly of "biblical values", respond with silence.

That silence is not accidental. It is inherited. The Crusaders, too, cloaked ambition in scripture, sanctifying violence while discarding inconvenient lives, including those of Eastern Christians.

Today’s Christian Zionists revive the same posture: not faith, but fervour; not devotion, but ideological zeal wrapped in biblical language.

They defend a state that bombs churches, kills Christian civilians, and drives Christian families from their ancestral land. They pledge to train tens of thousands of evangelists to serve Israel’s cause, while remaining wilfully blind to the erasure of the very Christian communities whose presence gives the Holy Land its meaning. 

They cheer politicians and commentators who treat Christianity not as a living faith but as a useful relic. British commentator Melanie Phillips captured this contempt with startling frankness when she described Christianity as a "Jewish sect that got slightly out of hand".

Zionism, born of secular nationalism and often deeply suspicious of religion, discovered that religion could be pressed into service. Christian Zionists supply the passion, the theatre, the vocabulary of destiny, baptising military campaigns and sanctifying domination. 

For this performance to succeed, Palestinian Christians must be written out of the script. Their existence punctures the myth of a "Judeo-Christian West" confronting a Muslim enemy.

Christianity and Judaism are being stripped of their depth and bent to the needs of a colonial project that crushes the very Christians whose ancestors first sanctified this land. No amount of biblical verse can disguise that reality.

The pastors came searching for prophecy. They walked among a living Christian people and did not see them. They claimed to defend Christianity while turning their backs on its oldest communities.

And beneath it all lies the starkest truth: they mistook political allegiance for faith, idolatry for devotion, and forgot that Christ’s fiercest words were reserved for those who cloaked tyranny in piety.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.