Does Israel persecute Christians and drive them out?

“Israel persecutes Christians and is driving them out of the Holy Land.”

Israel is the one country in the Middle East where the Christian population has grown, from about 34,000 at the founding in 1948 to roughly 185,000 today, a more than fivefold increase while every Christian community around it shrank. Iraq’s Christians fell from over a million before 2003 to under 250,000 now. Syria’s Christian population was cut roughly in half after the 2011 civil war began. Turkey’s Christian community, once numbered in the millions under the Ottomans, is down to a few thousand. And under the Palestinian Authority, Bethlehem, Christianity’s birthplace, went from 86% Christian in 1950 to roughly 10% by 2017. Israeli Christians, meanwhile, are among the country’s most educated citizens, outscoring the national average in university admission and matriculation rates.

Origin of the claim

The charge that Israel persecutes Christians and is driving them out took its current form in the Kairos Palestine document, published 11 December 2009 by a group of Palestinian church leaders and laypeople under the title “A Moment of Truth.” It called the Israeli presence in the West Bank “a sin against God and humanity,” urged churches worldwide to pressure Israel through boycott and divestment, and cited the “shrinking number of Christians” in the territories as one of the “dangerous consequences” of the conflict. The document grew out of two decades of Palestinian liberation theology centered on Jerusalem’s Sabeel Ecumenical Center, founded in 1990 by Anglican priest Naim Ateek, and it was quickly adopted by mainline Protestant bodies already running divestment campaigns against Israel, including the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Church of Christ. Annual “Christ at the Checkpoint” conferences, hosted by Bethlehem Bible College since 2010, carried the same argument to evangelical audiences: that Israeli control, not Palestinian governance, is what empties the pews.

The record

The strongest honest version of the claim points to something real. Movement restrictions, checkpoints and permit systems make life harder for Christians living under Israeli security control in the West Bank and Gaza, exactly as they do for Muslim Palestinians, and access to holy sites is genuinely constrained during periods of conflict.

But the demographic record runs the other way, and the timing gives it away. East Jerusalem’s Christian population fell from about 25,000 in 1948 to 12,646 by 1967, while the city was ruled by Jordan, which barred Jews from the Old City and let Christian numbers erode along with everyone else’s standing. After Israel took the city in the 1967 Six-Day War, the trend reversed: Jerusalem’s Christian population climbed back to roughly 16,500 by 2022. That is the opposite of what the claim predicts: decline under Arab rule, stabilization and growth under Israeli rule.

Bethlehem shows the same reversal in miniature. The town sat under Jordanian and then Israeli administration through 1995 with its Christian majority largely intact; the collapse from 86% to about 10% Christian has happened almost entirely since the Palestinian Authority took control under the Oslo Accords. A 2022 mob attack on a Bethlehem-area church and a 2022 shooting targeting a Christian-owned hotel are among the documented incidents; researchers studying the exodus cite land disputes with PA-connected clans, employment discrimination and pressure on converts from Islam as drivers, not Israeli policy. In Gaza, the small Christian community of roughly 1,000 lived under Hamas rule before the current war, and surveys found their desire to emigrate ran twice as strong as their Muslim neighbors’.

Inside Israel itself, Nazareth, the town where Jesus grew up, remains the country’s largest Arab-Christian city, and its Christian population keeps growing, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. That is the control case the claim has to explain away: the only jurisdiction in the region where Christians hold full citizenship, courts and a vote is the one where their numbers are rising.

Who pushes it today

The claim’s modern carriers are largely the institutions that produced it: Kairos Palestine signatories and affiliated church networks, Sabeel’s international “Friends of Sabeel” chapters, and Palestinian Authority officials who cite Bethlehem’s Christian decline in international forums while its causes sit inside the PA’s own jurisdiction. UN special rapporteurs on the Palestinian territories have periodically echoed the framing in reports on Israeli restrictions, without engaging the demographic record from Jerusalem, Nazareth or the wider region.

What’s real about the friction, and why it doesn’t change the count

Fairly stated: ultra-Orthodox fringe elements in Jerusalem’s Old City have spat at clergy and desecrated Christian property in isolated, well-documented incidents, and Christian clergy in Gaza and the West Bank do face genuine friction obtaining travel permits for holidays, a real cost of the security regime even when it is not aimed at Christians as such.

Israeli police have made arrests over the Old City incidents, and senior officials have publicly condemned them as an embarrassment. None of it changes the basic count: Israel’s Christian population has grown for over 75 straight years while the region’s has collapsed around it, and the places where Christians are actually disappearing sit outside Israeli control.