'Jesus under Gaza's rubble': Rev Munther Isaac warns that Palestinian Christians are under attack

At Reverand Munther Isaac's Christmas Eve mass in Bethlehem last year, the Evangelical Lutheran pastor told his Bethlehem flock: "If Jesus were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza."

The priest, one of the most prominent clerical voices for Palestinians, probably did not expect the war on Gaza would continue for another nine months, nor that a planned trip to the UK to highlight the plight of Palestinian Christians would be cancelled due to an Israeli blockade on the West Bank.

"We’re broken, to see one family after anther leave because of this difficult political reality and because of frustration. The West Bank, believe me, and I mean this, is no longer livable," Rev Munther told The New Arab via Zoom from his Bethlehem home.

"I don’t know what future there is for us in Bethlehem, with all of this. You know, we really are being suffocated."

Palestinians of all faiths in the West Bank were effectively imprisoned for days when Israel closed the occupied territory's land borders with Jordan earlier this month after the shooting of three guards, but the situation for Palestinians in Gaza is even grimmer with much of the enclave's Christian population confined to two churches in Gaza City or fleeing.

Their suffering is one in parallel with Muslim Palestinians but the Israeli assaults in Gaza and the West Bank threaten the very survival of Palestine's two millenia-old Christian population.

"Our future is tied with that of all Palestinians because we are Palestinians," he said. "If you are really concerned about the Christian presence [in the West Bank] then you must work for justice for all Palestinians. This is the only way that will enable us to stay in this land."

Due to the last-minute travel restrictions, Bethlehem residents Mays Nassar, a representative of the Palestinian Christian advocacy group Kairos Palestine, and Dalia Qumsieh, a Palestinian Christian lawyer, were left to make the advocacy mission to London without Rev Munther but both had powerful messages to British politicians and clergy.

"The West Bank has become a heavily militarised zone. Every single policy of the occupation was intensified and aggravated in the West Bank," Qumsieh told The New Arab in London.

"We have witnessed alarming surges in land confiscation, settlement expansion, house demolitions, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions in horrifying conditions, torture, entire blockades of movement between Palestinian cities."

While tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in Gaza since 7 October, at least 674 Palestinian lives in the West Bank have also been ended during this period, while waves of Israeli assaults (one offensive in September, the most bloody in decades) adding to the restrictions on Palestinians' already limited freedoms there.

To give an idea of what conditions are like for Palestinians in Bethlehem, Rev Munther said a phalanx of Israeli military checkpoints surrounding the city means that a four-minute school run for his two kids now takes 40 minutes, describing the area as a large but shrinking prison camp.

"If Israel decides to close two checkpoints outside of Bethlehem, one to the south and one to the north, then Bethlehem becomes another Gaza, completely isolated from the world," he warned.

Israeli seizures of Palestinian land have also increased exponentially since the appointment of far-right settler politicians to senior positions in the Israeli government in late 2022 with Israeli 13,000 housing units for illegal settlements approved last year, and a land grab of around 6,000 acres of Palestinian farms and other territory in the first six months of 2024 alone.

"There are no adequate terms to describe the gravity of the situation in the West Bank," Qumsieh added.

Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently approved new settlements at a UNESCO World Heritage Site, near Bethlehem, while settlers have seized land from the Christian Kisiya and Nassar families close to the ancient Palestinian city.

Qumsieh said Israel is using a variety of tactics, including Ottoman and British mandate-era laws, to seize Palestinian land, and challenges to this in Israeli courts often end up legally reaffirming the policies of the occupation.

"The best way for us Palestinians to challenge the illegal and massive land grabs is by actually being present in our land," she said.

Such peaceful resistance is already happening with the Kisiya family, whose land was seized by Israeli settlers on 31 July, holding regular protests in a bid to see their stolen land retrieved, alongside international and Israeli peace activists.

For Rev Munther, such acts of solidarity from Israelis, however small or seemingly ineffective, are important to challenging the right-wing status quo in Israeli politics.

"I think what’s happening is that it is about making a stand, and it is about making sure that [when the history books] are written, it is mentioned that we stood on the right side, we said no, and I’m grateful for these courageous voices," he said.

Despite this, the approach of the Israeli government is uncompromising, determined to strangle Palestinian resistance and cement Israeli occupation in the West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that under his rule, there will be no independent Palestinian state while Foreign Minister Israel Katz called for the mass displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank as in Gaza as part of military operations.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has gone one step further by calling for the establishment of a synagogue at Al-Aqsa Mosque complex and repeatedly storming the site, in an apparent attempt to intimidate both the Muslim and Christian Palestinian populations.

"The scary part is that everything Ben-Gvir and others have said they will do, they have done," Rev Isaac said. "They’re doing it, and the world is not moving a finger to stop them."

While these actions are likely designed to weaken Palestinian resistance,  Rev Munther, Nassar, and Qumsieh said it has done the reverse and they - like other Palestinians - are determined to stand firm, and will continue to reach out to the international community to solicit their help.

This includes educating members of churches worldwide about the situation of Christian Palestinians and the wider Palestinian community, hoping they engage in active solidarity with their brethren in the Middle East.

During their visit to the UK, Nassar and Qumsieh met politicians at a press conference in Westminster, and later the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby at Lambeth Palace. They both hope their messages will be translated into action.

"One of the reasons we are here is to embolden the church, as well as educate the politicians about the reality and the dangers on the ground, but also to push them to take more serious actions for a ceasefire [in Gaza]," Nassar told The New Arab.

"We are trying to emphasise the real danger and threat to our existence 11 months into [the] genocide in Gaza, and a war of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank; Palestinian Christians are part and parcel of the Palestinian population."