Categories: Opinion

The centuries-old Christian presence in the West Bank is under threat

The community I grew up in near Bethlehem is being squeezed out by Israeli settlers.

By Rev Dr Fares Abraham

I grew up less than a mile from Shepherds’ Field in Beit Sahour in the occupied West Bank – the hillside where, according to the Gospel of Luke, the news of Jesus’s birth was first proclaimed. For my family, these were not distant biblical landscapes. They were the backdrop of our daily lives: The olive groves we played in, the terraces we tended, the land where our faith and identity were rooted.

Today, for the first time in my life, I felt fear that the community that raised me may not survive.

In recent weeks, a new illegal Israeli settlement outpost has been established on the edge of Beit Sahour. Caravans and construction equipment have appeared on a site the town had hoped to use for a children’s hospital, cultural centre, and public spaces – projects supported by international donors and meant to strengthen a Christian community that has endured for centuries. Instead, those plans are now suspended, and the families who live nearby are bracing for uncertainty, rising tension, and the real possibility of further displacement.

Others have documented the legal and political ramifications of these settlements. My concern is more personal and more urgent: What is happening today threatens the very continuity of Christian presence in the Bethlehem area – not abstractly, but concretely.

Beit Sahour is one of the last majority-Christian towns in the West Bank. Our families are Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical. We worship together, marry across traditions, and share a heritage that traces back to the earliest centuries of the Christian story. But like many Palestinian communities, we are running out of land – and with it, out of time.

Due to decades of confiscation, the separation wall, and settlement expansion, only a small fraction of our town remains accessible for Palestinian construction. Youth who wish to build homes often cannot. Parents worry about their children’s future. Families who want to stay rooted in their ancestral land face barriers that make leaving seem like the only viable path.

That is how communities disappear. Not because they stop believing, but because the conditions required for them to flourish are steadily stripped away by the Israeli military occupation of their land.

For many Christians around the world – especially in the United States – this situation creates real confusion. I hear it often: “We support Israel because we care about the Jewish people. We don’t want to see them harmed, displaced, or endangered ever again. So what do we do when Palestinian Christians say they are suffering too?”

This is a sincere question, shaped by conscience and by history. And yet it reveals a painful misunderstanding – the idea that supporting Jewish security requires tolerating the dispossession of others, or that acknowledging Palestinian suffering threatens the safety of Jews.

It does not. It never has.

The aspiration for Jewish safety is legitimate and deeply important – especially after centuries of anti-Semitism, culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust. No person of faith should ever be indifferent to the vulnerability of Jewish communities.

But affirming Jewish safety does not require silence when Palestinian Christian and Muslim families lose their land, face escalating violence, or see their future shrinking. Safety for one people cannot be built on the insecurity of another. There is no moral framework – Christian, Jewish, or secular – that asks us to choose between the dignity of one child and the dignity of another.

If anything, the deeply biblical truth is that justice is indivisible. When we diminish one community’s rights to protect another, both are ultimately harmed.

And yet, too often, many churches in the West remain silent when Palestinian Christians raise their voices. Every December, American congregations sing about Bethlehem without acknowledging that many families in the Bethlehem area are struggling to stay on their land. Pilgrims visit Shepherds’ Field without asking what is happening to the people who have cared for it across generations.

This silence is not intentional malice. In many cases, it stems from fear of appearing partisan, or from the mistaken belief that speaking about Palestinian suffering undermines support for Jewish safety.

But silence has consequences. It sends an unspoken message that some lives matter less. It weakens the moral credibility of the Church. And it leaves communities like mine – Christian families who have lived in Bethlehem’s hills more than 2,000 years – feeling abandoned by the very global body they belong to.

What is happening in Beit Sahour is not simply a political conflict. It is a question of human dignity and the future of a Christian witness in the place where the Christian story began. If the Christian community in Bethlehem’s district disappears, the loss will not only be Palestinian. It will be a loss for the global Church and for anyone who cares about the continuity of the gospel’s birthplace.

I grew up less than a mile from these fields. I know what is at stake. And I believe that American Christians can hold two truths at the same time: That the Jewish people deserve safety, and that Palestinian Christian communities deserve to live on their land without fear.

This is not a choice between peoples. It is a choice between justice and indifference.