It is not unusual for videos of persecuted Christians to go viral when posted by Catholic Arena. It is unusual however for people to doubt our right to post them.
Yet, that is exactly what has happened this week with our videos showing the increasingly regular and increasingly violent assaults on Catholics and other Christian groups in Israel.
In 2021, Christian leaders sounded the alarm about the treatment of their peoples there, stating that the violence had started in 2012, targeting churches, holy sites and ordinary Christians living their daily lives.
Israeli media outlets were incredibly dismissive of the message, portraying the leaders as tools of anti Israeli activists and calling them ‘weasles’.
Even more importantly, the government themselves were dismissive, calling the claims ‘baseless’.
Patriarch Pizzaballa, due to be made a cardinal in September, told Vatican News recently that the Israel government:
it has indirectly contributed to create a climate of tension and animosity in some circles of the Israeli society.
Pizzaballa also criticised the ‘unprecedented Israeli aggression’ that led to a Catholic church being destroyed during a ‘special military operation’.
Since at least last year, Christian places of worship came more and more under attack, with cemeteries targeted. In one instance, 30 headstones were destroyed.
Churches have also been targets of attack. Dating back to 2015, images of Israelis spitting at churches emerged. These images emerged at at a time when Bentzi Gopshtain and his organisation Lehava were calling for ‘idolatry’ to be burned, Christianity falling under that category according to some interpretations.
That same year, 2015, National Geographic and others reported on ‘Jewish Terror’, which led to children being brainwashed in schools and churches being torched. The article is an eye opener. Read it here.
In 2020, Gethsemane saw arson attacks against a church by radical Jewish extremists, leading the Orthodox Patriarch to say:
This radical act is a crime inspired by an extreme ideology that seeks to drive Christians from the Holy Land.
I call on the international community to take its role in protecting Christian shrines, and preserving the indigenous Christian presence in the Holy Land. The crime of attempting to burn the Church of Gethsemane is no less appalling and horrible than the radical organizations’ attempts to control churches properties, especially in Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate.
In the past year, the situation has gotten completely out of control.
In one attack, an American Zionist ransacked the Church of the Flagellation, smashing up statues.
In another, a Jewish man rushed a church and attacked a bishop and two priests as they said Mass, the same Gethsemane church set on fire 3 years earlier.
This summer, radical groups have stormed Catholic and Orthodox monasteries, their excuse being that they are seeing to pray at the tomb of Elisha. In their interactions, they have become violent, blasphemous and sacrilegious towards those involved. These are the images which have gone viral on Catholic Arena this week. We have been told by many that we have no right to post them, that Christians are in fact not enduring difficult times in Israel and that the wish the pray at Elisha’s tomb is a benign one, not motivated by efforts to displace Christians and to bully them.
That wishful thinking, delusion or denial is in complete contradiction to the statement posted at the beginning of this article, and it is a complete betrayal of our Catholic brothers and sisters seen here protesting this week at what is happening at Stella Maris in Haifa:
There have also been the attacks on the Sisters of Elizabeth in Jerusalem.
If you think that this clampdown on Christians is being done by mere force alone, you are wrong.
Social exclusion and psychological warfare are key aspects of this cleansing of Christians from the Holy Land.
In March of this year, a bill that sought to jail Christians for professing their faith gained serious support. It was proposed by prominent members of the government, not radicals, not outsiders, but by individuals including the Finance Committee’s Moshe Gafni. Preaching to Christian faith would be punishable by one year in jail. He admitted that the law was particularly aimed at Christians saying:
Recently, the attempts of missionary groups, mainly Christians, to solicit conversion of religion have increased
The Israeli government’s game was revealed in an article by AP, which quotes an Israeli journalist as saying:
Netanyahu is a longtime and proven friend to the global Christian community and his action today — amidst all the other issues on his plate — is further proof
Their game is this, convince Christians (particularly in the United States) that they protect Christians while convincing hardcore Israeli voters that their coalition partners are on their side against Christians.
The political climate has fed into a wider societal resentment towards Christians. In one instance, an Israeli journalist went undercover as a priest and was spat at, hissed at and hurled with slurs.
He was even assaulted.
Some of those extremists in the government include the ultra Zionist Otzma Yehudit. The group are not as fringe as some media outlets would have you believe, the head of Mossad was employed to help them to get elected. Another party that has been elected includes the Religious Zionist Party. Both parties identify as ultra Zionist and Jewish Supremacist. Those who prefer that we do not cover attacks on Christians or to call them Zionist should ask the government not to do so first. Their views are some of the most radical, racist and sectarian of any government parties in the entire world. By going into power with them, Benjamin Netanyahu must be ready to be seen as party to their goals.
He was adamant that these groups would not be allowed to stop Tel Aviv’s Pride events from taking place, saying that he has a ‘firm hand on the wheel’. If that hand is so firm, are we to believe then that he is turning a blind eye to these attacks on Christians?
With an election looming in the United States of America, the support for this Israeli government must become a key voter issue for Christian voters.
Christians have already been forced from Iraq, Syria and Libya in the past decade as direct results of US foreign policy.
They are existentially threatened too in Lebanon, they suffer in Armenia also.
If we want Christians to be extinguished from the Holy Land, by all means keep making excuses for a radical government that creates the climate for their cleansing. If we want however for them to to continue in the lands they have lived in for two thousand years, we must start to speak up.
Soon to be Cardinal, Patriarch Pizzaballa has said that there are:
reasons for hope, because these incidents have spurred strong reactions within Israeli society, even from Jewish religious leaders. I believe that over time this awareness of the problem will bear fruit.
Let us hope with him, by raising awareness of the plight of our brothers and sisters in Israel, without fear.
