Palestinian Christians are disappearing. Warnings are not enough
Sami Mshasha writes in Mondoweiss on 30 August 2026:
I was born and raised in Jerusalem, and I still live here. Growing up, I do not remember my generation or my father’s sorting friends and neighbors by religion. I never thought of Issam, my friend, as “the Christian,” or Nizar, my next-door neighbor, as “the Muslim.”
At some point, however, a strange new phrase entered our vocabulary: “our Christian brothers, our partners in the homeland.” I never liked it. Why “partners”? They were never anything other than an indigenous part of this country — milh hadha al-ard, or “the salt of the earth,” as we say in Arabic.
I feel the same discomfort with slogans such as “we seek national unity between Palestinian Muslims and Christians.” Such slogans often end up proving the opposite of what they intend — as though we first have to establish that people who have lived together for centuries are, in fact, one people.
This matters because the decline of the Palestinian Christian presence is real, serious, and accelerating — and the response remains largely stuck at the level of warning. Every few months, church leaders, activists, and the Palestinian media return to the same message: Christians are disappearing. But there is no plan to confront that decline.