Smashing a figure of Jesus is part of Israel's ongoing erasure of Christians

Smashing a figure of Jesus is part of Israel's ongoing erasure of Christians Submitted by Fares Abraham on Mon, 04/27/2026 - 11:40 If Christians in the West want to stand with Middle East Christians, they must do more than condemn one grotesque image. They must confront the deeper climate that made it possible A nun walks inside Saydet al Doukhoul Church in Beirut, Lebanon on 20 April, 2026 (Reuters/Emilie Madi) On An Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon recently took a hammer to a figure of Jesus. The image was startling, which is why it travelled globally. In a single frame, it captured the kind of desecration many still want to treat as aberrational: crude, visual, undeniable.  Israeli military authorities confirmed the incident in the Christian village of Debel, condemned it, and claimed it punished the soldiers involved. But the deeper problem is not that this happened once. It is that too many still want to treat as exceptional what Christians in this land have long recognised as part of a pattern. What happened in Lebanon did not begin in Lebanon. It exposed a posture already visible in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. The Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, a Jerusalem-based organisation that monitors attacks on Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem, documented 155 anti-Christian incidents carried out by Israelis in 2025 and described a "continued and expanding pattern of intimidation and aggression." Physical assaults were the largest category, and clergy were the most frequent targets. Between 'smashing' and 'squeezing' incidents Rossing’s distinction between incidents that "smash" and those that "squeeze" is especially clarifying. Mike Huckabee's distorted theology does not speak for Christians worldwide Read More » The smashing is what makes headlines: a desecrated statue, a vandalised church, a viral image. The squeeze is quieter: spitting, harassment, intimidation, obstruction, and the low-grade humiliation that makes a community feel less secure and less certain that it has a future. As a Christian, I read the image from Debel alongside the warnings we have heard for years from Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Taybeh. Rossing’s report makes clear that Palestinian Christians are vulnerable not only as a religious minority, but also because of their national identity. In the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, church leaders have repeatedly warned that settler attacks, movement restrictions, and a deepening climate of insecurity are pushing Christians, especially the young, to consider leaving. The threat is not only to Christian symbols. It is to a living Christian presence. That presence has been shrinking for a long time, and for multiple reasons. The dwindling number of Christians in the land reflects decades of cumulative pressure under Israeli occupation: displacement, emigration, slower population growth, economic hardship, and recurring cycles of violence.  Bethlehem’s Christian presence has declined dramatically over the past century, falling from about 85 percent of the population in 1947 to roughly 10 percent in the Bethlehem area by 2017. A deeper danger A 2020 survey of Palestinian Christians found that the strongest drivers of emigration were conditions tied to occupation, including checkpoints, settler attacks, and land confiscation. My own family’s path to the United States during the Second Intifada is part of that story. People grieve when Christ is struck in stone but say far less when the Christians in the Holy Land are hemmed in by fear and uncertainty Too often, Christians in the West respond more readily to an offence against an image than to the slow erosion of a people. A shattered statue produces outrage because it is visible. A shrinking church often does not. One gives the world a photograph; the other unfolds over years through systematic pressure, fear, restriction, economic decline, and the exhausting sense that your future in your ancestral homeland is being closed off. This is why the image from Debel struck so many of us with such force. It did not merely depict an act of desecration; it revealed a climate. A society does not arrive at such a moment in a vacuum. It gets there through habits of contempt, the normalisation of intimidation, and the hardening of public life against the Palestinians, including their Christian communities. A few incidents smash, but many more squeeze, and the constant squeezing leaves a community wondering whether it still has a future. That is the deeper danger facing Palestinian Christians today. They are confronting an environment in which harassment becomes routine and disappearance becomes thinkable. In that climate, the question is no longer only whether Christians are protected in theory. It is whether they can endure in practice. An invisible reality For many outside the region, especially those who speak often about Israel and Palestine, this reality remains strangely invisible. Jesus is invoked constantly, as a symbol of civilization, prophecy, or political identity. Yet the living Christian communities of this region are too often treated as marginal to the story. The season of goodwill? Not for Palestinian Christians facing Israel's religious persecution Read More » People grieve when Christ is struck in stone but say far less when the Christians in the Holy Land are hemmed in by fear and uncertainty. Palestinian Christians are an integral part of this land’s fabric, and their erosion should alarm anyone who claims to care about the Holy Land. They are not relics or symbolic props in someone else’s theology or politics. They are living communities with names, histories, memories, graves, and futures that can still be lost. If Christians in the West want to stand with Christians in the region, they must do more than condemn one grotesque image. They must confront the deeper climate that made it possible.   They must listen to the warnings coming from Christians living there. And they must stop exhibiting practical indifference to the extermination of Palestinian Christian life. The real question raised by that shattered figure of Jesus is not whether one act crossed a moral line. It is whether the world will finally notice the people who have been living under this pressure for years. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Israel's war on Lebanon Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0