Palestinian Christians in Israel

State Attitudes towards Non-Muslims in a Jewish State

Una McGahern

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136656804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Although Christians form a significant proportion of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel, very little research has, until now, been undertaken to examine their complicated position within Israel. This book demonstrates the limits of analyses which characterise state-minority relations in Israel in terms of a so-called Jewish-Muslim conflict, and of studies which portray Palestinian Christians as part of a wider exclusively religious-based transnational Christian community.

This book locates its analysis of Palestinian Christians within a broader understanding of Israel as a Jewish ethnocratic state. It describes the main characteristics of the Palestinian Christian community in Israel and examines a number of problematic assumptions which have been made about them and their relationship to the state. Finally, it examines a number of intra-communal conflicts which have taken place in recent years between Christians and Muslims, and between Christians and Druze, and probes the role which the state and various state attitudes have played in influencing or determining those conflicts and, as a result, the general status of Palestinian Christians in Israel today.

1 Introduction

Palestinian Christians are a religious minority whose unique interests and problems have received scant attention. They are a group that has faced almost uninterrupted persecution in the years since the Oslo peace process began, suffering from the difficulties of being a religious minority living in a Palestinian Authority [PA] whose inner workings, both from a legal and societal perspective, are often governed by strict adherence to Muslim religious law. They are a group that has been abandoned by its leaders, who have chosen to curry favour with the Palestinian leadership by refusing to acknowledge the magnitude of the threat. They are a group whose persecution has gone almost entirely ignored by the international community, the relevant NGOs, and other human rights activists. Facing widespread corruption in the PA security and police forces, facing growing anarchy and lawlessness in an increasingly xenophobic and restless Muslim populace, the Palestinian Christians have been all but abandoned by the very people whose task it is to protect them.

(Weiner 2005: 1)

The above excerpt is taken from the first page of a monograph entitled Human Rights of Christians in Palestinian Society, published by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs in 2005. The report, written by Justus Reid Weiner, a scholar-in-residence at the centre, lists several problems which, he claims, face Palestinian Christian communities under PA rule today. Such problems include: increased ‘Christian emigration’, ‘social and economic discrimination’, ‘boycott and extortion of Christian businesses’, ‘violation of [Christian] property rights’, ‘crimes against Christian Arab women’, ‘Palestinian Authority incitement against Christians’, ‘the failure of Palestinian security forces to protect Christians’ and ‘the inclusion of Sharia Law in the Palestinian Authority’s draft constitution’. While these problems are understood to have been exacerbated by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the report finds that they are ultimately due to the growth of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies within the majority Muslim population and within the PA itself, and calls upon the US government to uphold its 1998 Freedom from Religious Persecution Act and apply economic sanctions against the PA until sufficient democratic reforms are in place to protect Christians.

Weiner’s report had an immediate impact on international public opinion. Media outlets in Israel and throughout the world quickly took up the cause of Palestinian Christians under such titles as ‘The Dark Fate of Christians under Palestinian Rule’, ‘Christians under Cover’, ‘Palestinian Christians are Afraid’ and ‘Palestinian Christians live in Constant Fear’. While Weiner’s report accurately describes the scant, superficial and rather spasmodic attention given to the study of Palestinian Christians, the particular line and focus of inquiry which it adopts, and which has since been taken up with gusto by the international press, has done little to improve the situation of Palestinian Christians or the general quality of research undertaken on this small community.

One major explanation for the poor state of research into Palestinian Christians in Israel today lies in the continued popularity of generalised studies examining Christians throughout the Middle East as a whole. The work of scholars such as Robert Betts, Kenneth Cragg, Philippe Fargues, Andrea Pacini and Anthony O’Mahony – which has been published under such titles as ‘Christians in the Arab East’, ‘The Arab Christian: A History in the Middle East’ and ‘Christian Communities in the Arab Middle East’ – approaches the subject of Christians in the Middle East as a single regional religious minority. In so doing, these studies have tended to centralise, or over-state, the religious component of Christian identity in their analysis of the status of various Christian communities in different Middle Eastern states. While revealing interesting points of comparison and continuity between Christian communities, the focus of these studies has often come at the direct expense of a deeper and more holistic analysis of the range of issues affecting particular Christian communities. Critically, these studies – which may be collectively dubbed as ‘Holy Land’ studies – have diminished the role accorded to the non-religious components of Christian identity and, by extension, the non-religious factors and processes which affect the status of Christians in society and influence inter-communal relations in the Middle East.

This is not to suggest that religion does not play an important role in the status of Christian communities throughout the Middle East and in the particular nature of Palestinian inter-group dynamics and conflicts. Indeed, the history of the Middle East is replete with instances of religiously fuelled political and territorial conflict. Religious affiliation and identity within the land commonly referred to today as ‘holy’ cannot be disregarded. Nonetheless, a framework of analysis which centralises the religious factor not only runs the risk of over-simplifying the complex and dynamic nature of Palestinian identity and inter-group relations but of minimising or downplaying the equally important roles played by other factors and agencies.

Connected to this problem is the rather deliberate and selective choice of case study typical of much research into Palestinian Christians today. While further research should undoubtedly be undertaken to investigate Palestinian Christians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) in a full and comprehensive manner – including the more unsavoury aspects of religiously fuelled violence and discrimination – the absence of a comparable level of critical inquiry into the general status of Palestinians (Muslim and Christian) living under PA rule – and Israeli occupation – not only suggests the absence of intellectual rigour but also of several politically motivated ‘blind spots’.

One of the more obvious blind spots concerns the status of Palestinian Christians living inside Israel today. As three quarters of all Palestinian Christians currently resident within the combined territories of Israel-Palestine do not live under PA rule, but rather as Israeli citizens inside ‘Israel proper’ (the area inside the Green Line, or the pre-1967 borders of the State of Israel), it would not be unreasonable to expect that any analysis of the status of Palestinian Christians in the OPTs would be viewed relative to the status of this larger community. However, as Justus Reid Weiner’s report illustrates, this has not been the case. Underlying the absence of a comparative analysis is the assumption that the problems facing Palestinian Christians in the OPTs are intrinsically connected with PA, and by extension, Muslim rule. This conclusion is, however, deeply problematic and flawed.

Weiner’s statements on the ‘unique’ problem of Christian emigration from the OPTs have been vigorously challenged. According to Sabeel’s 2006 Survey on Palestinian Christians in the West Bank in Israel, patterns of Christian emigration, whilst far more pronounced in the West Bank, also exist inside Israel. Unlike Weiner’s report, the Sabeel survey indicates that the main reason underlying Christian emigration from both the OPTs and from Israel is not Muslim fundamentalism but, rather, the poor political and economic situation which Palestinians find themselves in under occupation in the West Bank or as a discriminated minority inside Israel. The ‘push’ factor of relative deprivation combined with the ‘pull’ factor of greater family connections abroad, Sabeel explains, accounts for the higher rates of Palestinian Christian emigration.

Christian emigration, however, is not the only issue of concern highlighted by Weiner’s report. The report raises several questions which have, to date, not been examined with respect to the Palestinian Christian population of Israel. With regards to social and economic discrimination, for example, how have Palestinian Christians in Israel fared, not just relative to Palestinians in the OPTs, but relative to Israel’s Muslim, Jewish and Druze populations? Have they been exposed to economic boycott by any segments of the Israeli population? If so, to what extent have these measures been experienced by other segments of the Israeli population (Muslim, Jewish or Druze)? As Christians, have they experienced any religiously motivated violence or violations of their property rights? In instances where discrimination, boycott or violence has taken place, who are the responsible parties (are they necessarily Muslim?), what grievances motivated them and how have the Israeli authorities and security forces responded or dealt with them?

These are just a few of the questions which can be asked in foot of Wiener’s report, but which, to date, have not. The absence of critical research into the status of Palestinian Christians living in Israel is, however, symptomatic of a larger and more traditional ‘blind spot’ affecting critical research of Israel and its sizable Palestinian Arab national minority. The Palestinian Arab minority in Israel is faced with a unique conundrum that has often been overlooked or ignored by both international media and academic scholarship. As Israeli citizens, Palestinian Arabs have access to a wide range of democratic rights and material benefits which are otherwise unavailable to the majority of state-less Palestinians forced to eke out a deprived existence either in refugee camps throughout the region or under Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories. As a result, many consider the status of Palestinian Arabs in Israel to be ‘normal’ and unproblematic. However, their Israeli citizenship does little to offset the unique dilemmas which Palestinian Arabs face in a state which was created to reflect and promote Jewish national interests and priorities over and above the interests and priorities of its large indigenous Palestinian Arab minority. Excluded and suspected, their identity and rights both as individual citizens and as a national minority have become a permanent battleground.

As a sizable non-Jewish minority, Palestinian Arabs are also deemed to constitute a ‘demographic threat’ to the future maintenance of the state as a Jewish state. Once viewed as a potential ‘fifth column’, descriptions of the minority as a veritable ‘ticking time bomb’ have become increasingly common following the watershed events of October 2000 in which 13 Palestinian citizens of the state were killed by Israeli police and security forces during legal demonstrations against Israeli state policy. Increasing tensions between the State of Israel and its Palestinian Arab minority and the growing number of calls from within right-wing and mainstream Jewish circles alike to make the citizenship of all Palestinian Arabs, including Palestinian Christians, in Israel conditional upon a pledge of loyalty to the state (as a Jewish state) have exacerbated the already unstable position of the Palestinian Arab minority and, by association, of Palestinian Christians inside Israel today.

This book is, therefore, motivated by the need to address the problematic status of both the Palestinian Arab minority and the equally problematic status of Palestinian Christians in Israel. Analyses of Palestinian Arabs in general, and the nature of state–minority relations in Israel in particular, have tended to overlook the diversity of Palestinian Arab society. While critical scholars such as Aziz Haidar, As’ad Ghanem, Nadim Rouhana, Amal Jamal and Ahmad Sa’di have attempted to overlook or minimise religious differences in their analyses of state–minority relations, others, such as Dov Friedlander, Ilana Kaufman, Alisa Peled and Raphael Israeli have explicitly focused their analyses upon the largest component of the Palestinian Arab minority – the Muslims. Whether motivated by particular political agendas or determined by sensitivities to alternative academic discourses, the current state of scholarship on the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel has become partially blinded to the role and significance of internal diversity within the minority and the particular experience of non-Muslim and non-Jewish groups in society.

Despite the fact that the majority of Palestinian Arabs in Israel are Muslim, almost one in five are not. Given an international discourse that is increasingly located within foreign policy concerns and which stresses the so-called ‘Islamic threat’ emanating from the Middle East as well as the alleged ‘clash of civilisations’ between Islam and the ‘West’, there is a marked parallel tendency to oversimplify state–minority relations in Israel along the same lines. As such, this book aims to avoid this slippage by focusing its analysis on one non-Muslim segment of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel – the Palestinian Christians.

The choice to focus on Palestinian Christians is, therefore, influenced by two main factors. In the first instance, the neglect and marginalisation of Palestinian Christians within the social and political sciences has served only to reify generalisations which have traditionally equated Arab ethnicity with the Muslim faith. Furthermore, the significant contribution of Christian Arabs to the development of Arab culture and the crystallisation of both Palestinian and Arab nationalist thought has often been overlooked by studies which focus on church issues or the exclusively religious aspects of Christian identity. The importance of integrating Christian political identities and orientations within any analysis of the Palestinian Arab minority is, therefore, essential to the promotion of a more nuanced understanding of Palestinian and Israeli society and politics.

This leads on to the next main factor motivating this study’s particular focus, which is that Palestinian Christians represent an alternative but useful test-case for state–minority relations in Israel. An analysis of Palestinian Christians in Israel, who are a non-Muslim Arab community, can provide new insights into the nature of Israeli state attitudes and policies towards its Palestinian Arab minority as a whole. Palestinian Christians have historically played an important and high-profile role within the Palestinian Arab minority that is disproportionate to their small numbers. The contributions of such figures as Edward Said, Emil Habibi, George Habash, Emil Touma, Anton Shammas, Mahmoud Darwish and Azmi Bishara to Arabic literature, culture and poetry and, critically, to the development of Arab and Palestinian nationalism is well known. The cultural engagement and political activism of Palestinian Christians has been reflected in the system of classification used by the State of Israel to categorise the nationality of its non-Jewish population. While Christians and Muslims are both defined as ‘Arab’ nationals, the Druze – the only other non-Muslim Arab community in Israel – have been accorded a separate Druze nationality by the state. Similarly, both Palestinian Christians and Muslims have, on the basis of their shared Arab nationality, been exempted by the state from performing mandatory military service, while the Druze are subject, together with the majority of Jews, to compulsory service.

The decision to focus on Palestinian Christians is, therefore, a calculated one. A focus on Palestinian Christians not only liberates this study from the pitfalls associated with many contemporary investigations of Muslims in society, but provides fresh avenues of inquiry through which state attitudes and policies towards Palestinian Arabs as a whole can be analysed. In so doing, it provides a unique opportunity not only to push the boundaries of research into state–minority relations in Israel, but also to challenge assumptions concerning the nature of the state itself and the status of Palestinian Christians within it.

In order to examine Israeli state policy and attitudes towards Palestinian Christians, this study applies a theoretical framework that borrows heavily from critical theories of state, society and minority policy. It is influenced by the contributions of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge which emphasises the contingency of all ideas, value-systems, power relations and state institutions upon the bedrock of society. As both policy and attitudes are understood to originate in socially embedded mores and impulses, the ideological premises upon which Israeli society is founded are, therefore, given a central position in this study’s analysis. The principles of political Zionism are central to the determination not only of social relations but of the boundaries within which the state is permitted to act on behalf of its Jewish majority. This has, however, led to a number of fundamental contradictions between the aspirations of the state to be both democratic and Jewish. Therefore, ethnocratic theory is used to overcome and reconcile these contradictions, providing a holistic understanding of the nature and structural limits not only of the state but of state–minority relations in Israel. As an ethnocratic state, this study then explores theories of systemic control which have been elaborated by others in their analyses of state policy towards the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel. A systemic approach is one that centralises the fundamental priorities and interests of the state over individual policies which, by themselves, may not sufficiently explain the manner in which the state perceives or engages with its minority. As this book’s analysis of state policy towards its Palestinian Christian population is located within and subsumed by a broader systemic approach to the state’s minority policy, the notion of a separate policy towards Palestinian Christians is considered to be both theoretically superfluous and ideologically redundant. Instead, this study identifies and examines a number of prevalent state attitudes towards Palestinian Christians in Israel and aims to locate these within the broader context of the state’s systemic minority policy.

The theoretical framework outlined above has determined not only the manner in which the literature is assessed in this book but also the selection and interpretation of data. The methodology applied here combines a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research methods. The significance of demographic and territorial considerations to the maintenance of a given political order and the formulation of state policy, particularly within the context of deeply divided and plural societies, has resulted in the necessity to include an empirical profile of Palestinian Christians in Israel that is sensitive to these considerations. This profile draws heavily on data provided by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and, to a lesser extent, on statistical databases and reports produced by governmental and non-governmental organisations such as the Arab Centre for Alternative Planning (ACAP) in Israel, the Institute for International Strategic Studies (IIS) and the National Insurance Institute (NII) of Israel. However, given that statistics are, by their nature, malleable and subject to diverse interpretations, they cannot, in the context of their political functionality, be entirely relied upon or trusted.

While offering obvious benefits, the limits and dangers of statistical enquiry can never be fully overcome or neutralised. This does not mean that they cannot be contained. By integrating a qualitative basis to this research, the benefits of quantitative research can be more fully embraced. As such, a series of semi-structured interviews was conducted with 36 respondents from four different segments of society who are, in various capacities, expert on, or familiar with, matters relating to Palestinian Christians in Israel. The four segments were: academics, church leaders, NGO representatives and, finally, political and governmental representatives. These four respondent segments were chosen in order to acknowledge the potential diversity of views that can arise from differences in occupational and social statuses.

The nine academics who kindly shared their expertise for this study were: Amalia Sa’ar (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Haifa University); As’ad Ghanem, (School of Political Sciences, Haifa University); Dan Rabinowitz (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University); Gabriel Ben-Dor (School of Political Sciences, Haifa University); Majid al-Hajj (Centre for Multiculturalism and Educational Research, Haifa University); Sammy Smooha (Faculty of Social Sciences, Haifa University); Raphael Israeli (Department of Middle Eastern and Chinese History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem); Michael Karayanni (Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Fuad Farah (retired academic and Chairman of the Greek Orthodox National Council in Israel).

The church leaders and representatives who gave generously of their time were: the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theofilos III; the Greek Catholic Archbishop of the Galilee, Elias Chacour; the Maronite Archbishop of Haifa and the Holy Land, Paul Sayyah; the Greek Catholic (Melkite) Patriarchal Vicar of Jerusalem, Joseph Saghbini; the Rector of the Latin (Roman Catholic) Seminary of Beit Jala, William Shomali; the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land, Pierbattista Pizzaballa; the Court Registrar of the Anglican Church in Jerusalem, Nabil Zumot; as well as the Greek Catholic parish priest of Mailiya, Nadim Shakour and the Greek Orthodox parish priest of Rameh, George Hanna.

The political and government figures who contributed their vie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Map
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Society, state and minority policy in Israel
• 3 Profile of the Palestinian Christians in Israel
• 4 Writing the Palestinian Christians in Israel
• 5 Locating state attitudes
• 6 Conflict in Nazareth
• 7 Military service and village conflict
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index