In a jointly authored piece published in the Sunday Times, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Palestinian Anglican Bishop Hosam Naoum suggest Israel is to blame for the precipitous decline in the region’s Christian population.
Writer Rachel O’Donaghue observed that the Archbishop and Bishop fail to identify the “groups” attacking Christians and desecrating their sites. Violence and persecution against Christians abound in the Palestinian territories, but Welby and Naoum dwell instead on Israeli and Jewish actions. “The growth of settler communities and travel restrictions brought about by the West Bank separation wall,” they write, “have deepened the isolation of Christian villages and curtailed economic and social possibilities.”
These vague insinuations stand in stark contrast with the ongoing and well-documented abductions, murders, forced conversions, vandalism, and petrol bombs faced by Christians in the Palestinian territories. Such cases do not appear in Welby and Naoum’s piece. Nowhere do they so much as name the Palestinian Authority or the Hamas terror organization.
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Nevertheless, Archbishop Welby and Bishop Naoum acknowledge that Israel’s Christians “enjoy democratic and religious freedoms that are a beacon in the region.” In reality, it is only in Israel that the Christian population is growing in the Middle East, and the situation in Israel is in especially marked contrast to that in the Palestinian Authority and Hamas-controlled territories. Readers are left to wonder, then, why Christians are fleeing the territories not under Israeli jurisdiction, if Israel and its “settlers” are to blame.