Christians in the Middle East and Palestine

Background information and framing

I sometimes ponder the idea of producing a series called ‘how to stop having trash opinions about the Israel-Palestine conflict’. Not telling you what to think, but certainly telling you what not to think. Conservatively, 90% of Israel-Palestine discourse could just stop tomorrow if participants were somehow dissuaded from believing things that are obviously not true if you just reflect on them for 30 seconds, or read three paragraphs into a Wikipedia page.

On this score, I saw this trash article by mendacious imbecile and slop poster

UBERSOY

about Christians in Israel and the Occupied Territories. It’s a masterpiece in its own way. The volume of lies, obvious misinterpretations of evidence, non sequiturs, copy-paste from AI, graphs with no link to a source, and genuinely ridiculous arguments are such that it puts you in a bind. If you respond to all of them, you look like an obsessed pedant; if you leave some, it appears as if you are tacitly admitting the rest are correct. It’s the platonic example of a bad-faith interjection to poison public discourse. And, like an absolute unit, he forbade comments on the article. So instead of doing a classic refutation, I thought it more apposite to do the opposite. By reading Ubersoy, your understanding of the world is decreased, by reading me, your understanding of the world is improved. So you should subscribe to me and give me money.

The political expression of indigenous Christianity

If you go back to the mid 1800s, the situation for Christians in the Middle East was, broadly speaking, pretty OK. The jizya system, which many centuries earlier turned Christians from a majority in the Levant to a minority, had gradually eased off from its original status as a rite of humiliation into basically a fee. Though people at the time didn’t know enough about natural selection to appreciate it, its effect was probably to gradually improve the human capital of the Christian minority. In any case, the jizya was formally abolished in the Ottoman empire in 1856, and Christians were more or less equal subjects of the empire. On the other hand, if you were the type to be pessimistic, there was plenty of cause for concern. The same modernizing Ottoman reforms that gave equal rights to Christians provoked the Aleppo riots of 1850. Because the Christian community was (accurately enough) associated with the modernizing regime, they became targets, and seventy were killed, including the Catholic patriarch.

In that case, the Ottoman regime firmly cracked down on the rioters and showed both the ability and will to protect Christians from attack. That protective stance lasted until the reign of Abdul Hamid II, who promoted pan-Islamic identity as the new privileged ideology of the empire. In practice, that was mostly for show, and Christian civil rights were not seriously impaired. However, Christians were understandably alarmed, and the multiple genocides¹ the transitional regime between the Ottoman empire and modern Turkey eventually committed in order to create a purely Sunni Anatolia showed in due course that they were onto something.

The basic problem Christians faced was that they were a minority among a population of Sunni Muslims, and the Ottoman regime that protected them was, one way or another, on its way out. The responses to this predicament were multiple, but two were particularly important. The first of these is Arab nationalism. I’ve written about this a bit before, but, from the perspective of Christians, the attraction of Arab nationalism was chiefly that it taught the following:

1. All people who speak Arabic and are from around here are part of an Arabic nation, regardless of religion, definitely including Christians.

2. The Arab nation should team up and defeat its enemies, and definitely not focus on religious differences, and definitely not persecuting Christians, which is what the enemies of the Arab nation would want you to do.

3. The ruling class of the Arab nation will be disproportionately Christian, and that’s fine, because we are all Arabs. Only someone deficient in Arab patriotism would object to such a state of affairs.

Unsurprisingly, a large number of prominent Christians were enamoured of this creed, with prominent exponents including Butrus al-Bustani, Jurji Zaydan, Naguib Azoury and Michel Aflaq.

The second response we might simply call ‘GTFO’, principally to the Americas. Christians were not the only minority group to wish they were somewhere else, but they had two key advantages, namely their superior education and skills, and their ability to leverage connections with and empathy from Christians abroad. Between 1860 and 1914, somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 Christians, perhaps half or more of the total, left Ottoman Syria (which includes modern Syria, Lebanon and Israel and the less deserty part of Jordan) mostly for the new world. These included the ancestors of Nayib Bukele, and, though El Salvador has been a rocky ride, I think we can say they made the right choice.²

Zionism

When Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine, they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. The extraordinarily dense and complicated politics of Zionism were fundamentally narcissistic, concentrated on the moral, ethical, economic, spiritual and religious conditions of the Jews of Europe, and conducted with almost entire obliviousness to the conditions of the country they wanted to go to. Jabotinsky was really quite a blowhard, and delighted in dressing up mundane or even inane thoughts in an atmosphere of portentousness. However, the fact that he had anything to say at all about intellectual trends in the Arab world gave his star a boost. His cringe Iron Wall essay was based on his having read an editorial in the Arab nationalist newspaper Al-Karmil, founded by Najib Nassar. If you’re keeping up, you already guessed that Nassar was a Christian.

The opposition of Arab nationalism to Zionism was in one sense quite straightforward: the Zionists wanted territory the Arab nationalists wanted for their state. On the other hand, the proposed Arab nationalist state was going to be pretty big, and, if the Arabs had cooperated and played their cards right, they probably could have reigned in Zionist aspirations to something like the 1937 partition plan:

If you didn’t take this deal, there is a good chance you’re a bit off.

The fanatical and frequently hysterical opposition of Arab nationalism to Zionism required multiple factors in combination. One is that Zionism was seen not solely as an attempt to form a Jewish state in part of the Levant, but as a proof of concept for European colonisation that would eventually swallow the whole thing. Arab nationalism came to view the conflict in Palestine not as just one struggle, but as a microcosm of all its struggles. (Had they been paying attention, they might have noticed that European imperialism was collapsing). At the same time, local Palestinian elites, some of them demented nuts, worked to make the Palestine issue central to Arab nationalism more widely in order to boost their status in the movement and in some future pan-Arab state.

However, another factor that is probably not talked about enough is the instinctive disgust with which Christian intellectuals viewed the concept of Zionism. Muslims were and are very agitated about the Al Aqsa issue, and, of course, are bound by the belief that Dar-al-Islam can never be relinquished, but a Jewish state per se holds no more horrors (or at least it didn’t then) than a Christian one. Middle Eastern Christians, conversely, believed in the traditional Christian idea that Jews were corporately responsible for the execution of Jesus and have been condemned to wander the earth until its ends. On such a view, Zionism is a mixture of preposterous and obscene. This is commonly called ‘anti-semitism’, and while I disagree with use of the label, it’s probably preferable to denying sectarian motives altogether, as western Palestinian propaganda does. Thus, if an Arab Christian was pious, he found Zionism revolting, and if he was a secularized Arab nationalist, he found Zionism revolting, and if he was somewhere along the spectrum, he found it revolting.

One of the more interesting counter-factuals is what would have been the relationship between Arab nationalism and the Jews of the Middle East in the absence of Zionism. One possibility is that the Ba’ath governments of Syria and Iraq would have been full of shifty Jews, as they added their forces to the coalition of the fringes. It’s also possible that the Arab nationalist movement would have imbibed the rising anti-semitism of Europe as it absorbed every other garbage idea, just like it did in our timeline. In any case, Zionism became the lightning rod and crucial test for Arab nationalism, a test it decisively failed in 1967, since which point the ideology has progressively waned, retaining its hold only amongst those who have nowhere better ideologically to go. Which brings us to…

The political identity of Arab Christians in Israel

The Christian Arab community in Israel is the most educated religious group in the country. It has the lowest rate of poverty and unemployment, and demonstrates the usual demographic patterns of such a group, most notably a low birth rate. The vast majority live in Nazareth, Haifa, and various Arab towns in the Galilee where they either constitute the majority or the economic elite. In Jerusalem, there have been frequent condemnable incidents of sectarian hostility, principally by Charedi-Zionist crossover types, including, most famously, spitting like a disgusting pig. Most Christians, though, live in areas where this is not relevant, simply for reasons of proximity.

A more pressing issue is the Arab crime wave, with the murder rate across the Arab community rising year on year to about 11 per 100,000 today. Traditionally, Arabs in Israel have benefitted, along with exemption from the draft, from the police treating their towns as no go zones, allowing for endemic tax evasion. It’s well known that the only way to buy affordable cigarettes or cars in this country is via an Arab. However, eventually Arab criminal syndicates realised that this meant they could just shoot people in the middle of the street, so that’s what they did. Christian Arabs are mostly not involved in gang violence directly, but they do like to walk around without dodging gang shootings. To pick a random example, one of the five gangland murders committed in a single day last April, was of a 61 year old in Shefa-Amr, home to the fourth largest Christian Arab community in Israel.

Overall, I think you can make a good case that Christian Arabs are doing not so bad in Israel. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the great majority are hostile to Zionism, and perhaps more so than the Muslim population at large. Certainly, the chief political expression of the Christian Arab community, namely the nominally communist party Hadash, would not, unlike the Islamic Ra’am, join a centrist Israeli coalition government. Of course, there are exceptions like Father Gabriel Naddaf who is very pro-Israel, but he gets beaten up a lot, and also had to withdraw from public advocacy following allegations of sexual harassment and abuse.³ The most prominent pro-Zionist Arab Christian is this sweet and somewhat unstable guy Yoseph Haddad, who makes a living shouting. However, these clearly don’t and won’t represent the mainstream.

Why is this? Well, people believe things, and beliefs are sticky. Golan Druze, in contrast to the Israeli ones, got their anti-Zionist identity fixed in the 40s and 50s, and stuck with it quite doggedly until the recent massacres in Suweida shook them out of it. Similarly, Christian Arabs in Israel just really believe in Arab nationalism. I think that’s a pretty dumb thing to believe, and sometimes it’s just plain cringe, like here:

But that’s how it is. This is the Middle East, and it wouldn’t be the Middle East if people didn’t stick stubbornly to dumb beliefs. Perhaps the best justification for this is that Christians fear that, if they are perceived as collaborators with Israel, this will have bad consequences for Christians in the Occupied Territories, and the Middle East generally, and for them too if Palestine is ever liberated from the Zionists. Plus, of course, they are bitter about the Nakba thing in which most of them had a family member at some degree of remove expelled.⁴

In addition, though actual emigration is low, a lot of Christian Arabs in Israel express a desire to leave, which, all things considered, is smart, and they tend to vaguely blame Israel and Zionism for their desire. Their preference remains relying on an Assad or Nasser figure to bamboozle the Sunni masses into leaving them alone. Except they don’t choose to go to Arab countries where they can have that; they prefer to go to the West. Well, go figure. Anyway, that’s a wrap. You have slightly less trash opinions now. Also, give me money.

1. The Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian.

2. The third most important strategy was that of the Maronite Christians of Lebanon (those who didn’t leave) who went the opposite route to Arab nationalism, and attempted to found their own state by leveraging connections with France.

3. A friend of mine who worked in pro-Israel advocacy once told me that he struggled to find pro-Israel Arabs to use for propaganda who weren’t homosexuals.

4. The top destination for Palestinian Christians was Lebanon, and they mostly sided with the PLO/Lebanese Left in the civil war, both participating in massacres against, and being victims of massacres by Lebanese Christian militias.