How Zionist evangelicals seek to erase centuries of Palestinian Christianity
A Palestinian Christian girl decorates the Holy Family Church, as the community prepares modest Christmas celebrations after two years of war, Gaza City on 9 December 2025
Soumaya Ghannoushi writes in Middle East Eye on 17 December 2025:
Last week, more than one thousand American evangelical pastors and Christian “influencers” descended upon Israel in what organisers hailed as a historic pilgrimage, the largest such delegation since the state’s founding. Arranged by the Friends of Zion initiative and blessed by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the mission was greeted with presidential ceremony by Isaac Herzog. It was marketed as a spiritual awakening.
In reality, it was a political crusade cloaked in the language of revelation.
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Christians are not outsiders in Palestine. They are not visitors, observers, or decorative minorities. They are an indigenous, ancient, constitutive part of the Palestinian people, older than Zionism, older than Europe’s nation-states, older than the very political theologies now mobilised in Israel’s defence.
For more than 14 centuries, Muslims and Christians in Palestine lived not in grudging coexistence but within a shared civilisation. Few places on earth can claim a record of religious harmony so deep, sustained, and organically lived.
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During the Great Revolt of 1936–39, Christians were not peripheral to the national struggle – they were among its leaders. Fouad Saba served as secretary of the Arab Higher Committee before being exiled by the British to the Seychelles, alongside other members of the leadership, including Alfred Roch, the prominent Christian Palestinian from Jaffa.
The Palestinian flag of the revolt bore the crescent and the cross intertwined, symbols of a national movement sustained by both faiths.
Later generations produced an extraordinary constellation of Palestinian Christian figures whose influence shaped not only Palestinian national life but global intellectual and cultural discourse.