SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: The violence and abuse, the dispossession and expulsions, should first and foremost be understood in the broader context of Zionism and Israel’s determination to establish a Jewish supremacist state i

https://x.com/MouinRabbani/status/2050653622455644559

Mouin Rabbani

There seems to be some misunderstanding regarding Israeli attacks on Christians.

Some of this violence and abuse, particularly when directed against clerics and others wearing identifiably Christian attire, is indeed motivated by specifically anti-Christian religious bigotry.

As messianic religious extremism becomes more widespread and gains increasing power within Israeli Jewish society and Israel's government, attacks directed at Christians specifically because they are Christian have indeed been on the rise.

But the majority of such attacks are not directed at Christians as such. Rather, the primary motive for such attacks is that these Christians are like their Muslim compatriots Arabs and, as in the case of Armenians, part of Palestinian society.

The violence and abuse, the dispossession and expulsions, should first and foremost be understood in the broader context of Zionism and Israel’s determination to establish a Jewish supremacist state in which the Jewish community maintains demographic, territorial, political, and economic hegemony.

Most prominently, the vast majority of Christians in the territory that became the state of Israel were expelled in 1948 as part of the Nakba. Not because they were Christian, but because they were like their Muslim neighbors not Jewish. Because they are Arabs. It is for this reason that they have been denied and deprived of the right to return to their homeland or reclaim their stolen properties.

Since 1967 vast amounts of Christian land and property in the occupied territories have been expropriated by Israel. Not because it is specifically Christian, but because it is not Jewish and because it is Arab.

Similarly, the regular pogroms against Christian villages and communities in the West Bank today are indistinguishable from those being launched by Israel, its military, and settler vanguards against Muslim villages.

The motive is Israel’s insatiable appetite for Palestinian land and property, not the Christian identity of its legitimate owners.

Israel’s campaign against churches and their properties also largely falls within this framework. The various churches have established extensive land and property holdings over the centuries. 

Property rights, it might be added, that were with few aberrations not only respected but upheld by successive Muslim authorities. That's why they still exist.

That has all now changed. Israel is introducing a variety of tax measures, and engaging in a range of other gimmicks, the purpose of which is to seize these properties from the churches, transfer their ownership to the state or settlement groups, and reserve them for exclusively Jewish use. Again, and on the whole, not specifically because they are Christian, but because like their Muslim counterparts they are not Jewish.

Needless to say, if the roles were reversed this would be immediately denounced across the globe for what it transparently is.