The Forgotten Flock: How Israel Wages War on Holy Land Christians While American Evangelicals Look Away by Jeff Callaway

 

The Forgotten Flock: How Israel Wages War on Holy Land Christians While American Evangelicals Look Away

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

There is a silence in America that roars louder than any bomb dropped in the Middle East. It is the silence of men and women who call themselves Christians, who wave Bibles in one hand and checkbooks in the other, who send hundreds of millions of dollars to the State of Israel year after year — while the actual flesh-and-blood descendants of the first Christian Church, the people who live within walking distance of the manger in Bethlehem and the empty tomb in Jerusalem, are being systematically driven from the land where Jesus Christ was born, walked, bled, and rose from the dead.

This is not a political story. This is a Gospel story. And the Gospel does not lie.

A Church Bombed on the Feast of Its Savior's Birth

On the night of December 16, 2023, as Christians around the world were preparing to celebrate the coming of the Lord, Israeli Defense Forces snipers opened fire on civilians sheltering inside the Holy Family Church in Gaza — the only Catholic parish in the entire Gaza Strip. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem confirmed in a formal statement that two Christian women, a mother and her daughter named Nahida and Samar, were shot and killed as they walked across the church compound toward the sisters' convent. The Patriarchate stated there was no warning issued and that these women "were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the Parish, where there are no belligerents." Seven more people were wounded. The nearby Convent of the Missionaries of Charity — home to more than 54 disabled persons — was simultaneously struck by an Israeli tank rocket, rendering it uninhabitable.

Pope Francis, the 266th successor of Saint Peter, did not mince words. Speaking to pilgrims gathered in St. Peter's Square on December 17, he called the attack terrorism and condemned it before the whole world. That same day, the Missionaries of Charity home for disabled persons lay in ruins in Gaza.

It did not stop there. In October 2023, an Israeli airstrike struck the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza — the oldest standing church in the entire Gaza Strip, built in the year 425 A.D., a building that has endured Roman persecutions, Crusades, centuries of Ottoman rule, and two World Wars. The strike killed at least 18 people, including nine children, who had taken refuge inside its ancient walls. In July 2024, Israel bombed Saint Porphyrius again. In July 2025, Israeli tanks targeted the Holy Family Church a second time, killing three more people and wounding the parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli — a man who had spoken weekly by phone with Pope Francis himself to describe the suffering of his congregation. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, along with every Patriarch and Head of Church in Jerusalem, issued a joint statement calling the 2025 attack on Holy Family a heinous crime and a violation of international law, calling it "an affront to human dignity, a trampling upon the sanctity of human life, and the desecration of a holy site." In August 2025, the Israeli government demanded that the priests and nuns of both the Holy Family Church and Saint Porphyrius abandon their churches and communities entirely so that Jewish settlers could build new colonies on what remains of Gaza. Every last priest and nun refused the order.

This is what is happening in the Holy Land. Right now. To the Christian Church. And most of America does not know, because most of America has not been told.

The Long Erasure: From Majority to Ghost

The erasure of the Christian population in the Holy Land is not a recent phenomenon. It is a slow, methodical, decades-long catastrophe. And the numbers tell a story that should make every believing Christian in America fall to their knees.

In 1948, when the modern state of Israel was established, Christians made up roughly 18 percent of the population of historic Palestine. In Bethlehem — the city where the angel announced "Fear not, for I bring you good news of great joy" to the shepherds of the field — Christians composed 85 to 86 percent of the city's residents as recently as 1950. Today, Christians represent approximately 10 to 12 percent of Bethlehem's population. In Jerusalem, Christians have fallen from 25 percent of the city's residents a century ago to less than one percent today. Across all of Israel and the Palestinian territories combined, Christians now make up less than 2 percent of the population — a community on the verge of extinction in the very birthplace of their faith.

In the words of the Rev. Drew Christiansen, a Roman Catholic priest and former adviser to the U.S. Catholic Bishops on Middle East policy, this is "a quiet ethnic cleansing. It's not large-scale massacres or large-scale deportations, but it is bit by bit over many years with a variety of policies which Christians are not necessarily attacked as Christians but they are marked by being Palestinians."

The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us in paragraph 2241 that the political community has a duty to honor the human person and, by extension, their dignity, their homes, and their freedom of movement and worship. Israel's policies directly contradict this principle. The separation wall — declared illegal by the International Court of Justice — has cut Bethlehem off from Jerusalem, strangling its economy and severing Christians from their most sacred pilgrimage sites. A Christian teacher in Beit Jala described watching Israeli forces seize six acres of his family's farmland to construct that wall, cutting down ancient olive trees and destroying his livelihood. He once visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre monthly. Now he needs military-issued special permission to enter Jerusalem at all.

Around Bethlehem alone, there are 32 physical barriers to movement erected by Israel, including checkpoints, roadblocks, dirt mounds, and gates. There are 22 Israeli settlements built on land belonging to Bethlehem, expanding daily, surrounding and isolating the city of Christ's birth from the rest of the world.

Spit, Fire, and the Price Tag

The violence against Christians in the Holy Land is not confined to bombed churches in Gaza. It is daily. It is intimate. And it is carried out openly, in broad daylight, in the very streets where Jesus carried His cross.

According to the annual report published in March 2025 by the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue — a Jerusalem-based research institution — there were 111 documented anti-Christian incidents in Israel and East Jerusalem in 2024 alone. These included 46 physical attacks, 35 attacks against church properties, and 13 cases of harassment. The perpetrators are overwhelmingly ultra-Orthodox Jews, religious nationalists, and Israeli settlers, acting, observers note, with a visible sense of impunity.

Christian clergy walking the Via Dolorosa — the very path Jesus walked to His crucifixion — are routinely spat upon, cursed at, and pepper-sprayed by extremists. In February 2023, Jewish vandals entered the Church of the Condemnation in Jerusalem, smashing an olive-wood statue of Jesus and attempting to set the church on fire before being subdued by a Muslim security guard. In June 2015, far-right Jewish extremists set fire to the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes at the Sea of Galilee — the site of one of the most beloved miracles in the Gospels. In June 2019, a group of 20 Armenian Christian seminary students walking to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were attacked by three extremists who shouted "Christians must die" and "We will exterminate you from this country" before releasing an unmuzzled dog on a student, breaking his hand.

In July 2025, Jewish settlers attacked Taybeh — the only entirely Christian-majority Palestinian village in the West Bank, a town identified with the biblical Ephraim where Jesus Himself withdrew after raising Lazarus from the dead, as recorded in John 11:54. The settlers burned vehicles, torched the ancient 5th-century Church of Saint George, and spray-painted threatening graffiti. The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem issued a joint condemnation shortly after, calling the attack "part of an alarming pattern of settler violence."

All of this is documented. All of this is on record. And the Israeli government has passed a 2018 Basic Law defining Israel exclusively as the nation-state of the Jewish people — a law that, as Zenit News reported, has effectively enshrined what critics call a legal hierarchy of identity, accelerating a policy researchers now call "Judaization," including plans to construct over 11,000 new housing units for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, a December 2024 survey found that 48 percent of Christian youth under 30 in Israel and East Jerusalem are considering emigration. Christians organizations protecting the Holy Land's native communities have warned starkly: at the current rate of decline, within a generation, there will be no Christian communities left in the Holy Land.

The Money Trail: American Evangelicals and the Theology of Abandonment

Here is where the story becomes a sin of omission — and in Catholic moral theology, sins of omission are no less sins.

There are an estimated 100 million evangelical Christians in the United States. They represent the most politically powerful religious constituency in America. And for decades, they have been the most fervent, most organized, and most financially committed supporters of the State of Israel on the face of the earth — funding an apparatus that, by all evidence, treats the native Christian population of the Holy Land as expendable.

One investigation found that American evangelicals donated over 65 million dollars in a single decade to Israeli causes, not including untold thousands of volunteer hours. Organizations like Christians United for Israel, founded in 2006 by Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee, have raised millions more. After the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, millions of dollars in evangelical donations flooded into Israeli relief organizations within days. Christians United for Israel launched the "Don't Look Away" campaign, plastering images across Times Square. Around half of all American evangelicals consider support for Israel an important priority in their charitable behavior.

Meanwhile, Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem cannot get running water to their homes. Christian clergy in Gaza cannot secure residency permits. Arab Christian bishops are denied entry into Gaza by Israeli authorities to visit their own congregations. A Christian family in Bethlehem watches Israeli bulldozers plow through their olive groves to build another segment of the wall.

The theological foundation for this evangelical financial crusade is Christian Zionism — the doctrine, rooted largely in American dispensationalist theology, that God's biblical covenant with Israel demands that modern Christians support the political Israeli state at all costs, and that the gathering of Jewish people in the Holy Land is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ. Under this framework, approximately 82 percent of white American evangelicals believe Israel was given to the Jewish people by God. A full 60 percent oppose any restriction on U.S. military aid to Israel, regardless of what Israel does with that aid. Calls for ceasefire, in the words of one Southern Baptist Convention leader, are described as "tantamount to forcing Israel to live with heinous violations."

This theology is not Catholic theology. It has never been Catholic theology. The Catholic Church does not subscribe to dispensationalism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 674, addresses the end times with careful humility, and never teaches that American dollars wiring to Israeli settlements serve as down payments on the Apocalypse. The Catholic Church's position is clear: those who suffer injustice deserve justice, regardless of nationality, religion, or geopolitical utility. The Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes states plainly that "the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ." Palestinian Christians are afflicted. They grieve. They are anxious. And they are being systematically erased.

What is even more disturbing is that the Israeli government treats evangelical support not as a spiritual alliance but as a strategic asset. Investigative reports published in late 2025 confirmed that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs paid over four million dollars to a U.S. contractor specifically to map, profile, and digitally target American Christian congregations with pro-Israel messaging. A separate project offered over 1,000 American evangelical pastors all-expense-paid trips to Israel in exchange for their service as "ambassadors for Israel" upon returning home. This is a foreign government using American sanctuaries as political outposts — and many American evangelical pastors have willingly signed up to serve in that role.

The Vatican Speaks. American Evangelicals Do Not Listen.

To its eternal credit, the Roman Catholic Church has not been silent on these matters, even when silence would have been politically convenient. Pope Francis repeatedly condemned Israel's actions in Gaza as terrorism and cruelty. In December 2023, he called the killing of the two Christian women at Holy Family Church terrorism. During his Christmas Eve Angelus address that same year, he mourned "children machine-gunned, the bombing of schools and hospitals." The Holy Land Commission for Justice and Peace, led by Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, formally stated that Israel's military campaign in Gaza does not meet the criteria of a just war under Catholic moral doctrine — a declaration for which the Israeli Embassy to the Holy See publicly attacked the Cardinal.

That is the measure of the situation. A foreign government publicly attacks a Catholic Cardinal for quoting Catholic teaching. And the response from American evangelical Christianity is to send more money.

The native Christian communities of the Holy Land — the Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholics, the Melkites, the Armenians, the Copts, the Maronites — are among the oldest Christian communities on the face of the earth. They are not abstract entities. They are bishops and priests and grandmothers and children who pray in Aramaic dialects that echo the language Jesus spoke. They are the living stones of the Church, as Saint Peter writes in his first epistle: "You also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house" (1 Peter 2:5). And they are being buried under the rubble of bombed churches while their American brothers and sisters in Christ hold fundraisers for the people doing the bombing.

The Silence Is the Scandal

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 1868, teaches that we bear responsibility for the sins of others when we cooperate in them, when we do not disclose them when we have the obligation to do so, or when we do not hinder them when we can. American Christians — Catholic and evangelical alike — who have the resources, the political influence, the pulpits, the media platforms, and the freedom to speak, bear a moral responsibility for the silence that is slowly burying the Church of the Holy Land.

There are organizations doing the righteous work. Aid to the Church in Need, the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, Catholic Relief Services, and the Pontifical Mission for Palestine all work to support the persecuted Christian communities of the Holy Land and broader Middle East. These organizations deserve the dollars, the prayers, and the advocacy that are currently flowing in another direction.

The Christians of Bethlehem are not asking for much. They are not asking for tanks or political dynasties or prophecy charts about the end of the world. They are asking for the right to walk to their own church without showing a military permit. They are asking to keep their land, their olive trees, and their children in the city where the Word was made flesh. They are asking the world to remember that the manger was not empty — and neither is Bethlehem, not yet.

But it will be. If American Christianity does not wake up and reckon with the difference between the biblical Israel of Scripture and the political state of Israel that is currently bombing the only Catholic church in Gaza, persecuting Christian clergy in Jerusalem, burning churches in the West Bank, and driving the flock of the Good Shepherd from the hills of Judea — it will be.

The Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 45, is unambiguous. Jesus does not provide an exemption for geopolitical allegiances: "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."

The Christians of Bethlehem, of Nazareth, of Gaza, of Jerusalem — they are the least of these. They were there before the Crusades, before the Ottoman Empire, before the British Mandate, before 1948. They are there still. Barely.

The question is not whether they deserve our solidarity. The question is whether we, who call ourselves the Body of Christ, will finally choose to give it to them.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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