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This time of year, Palestinian Christians are often invoked in media and political discourse as emblems of faith, coexistence, and hope. Yet the political conditions threatening their collective existence — military occupation, genocide, and forced displacement — are too often minimized or wholly ignored.
In Gaza, Israel has completely destroyed some of the world’s oldest churches and killed civilians who sought shelter inside them. In the occupied West Bank, settler militias have repeatedly attacked the Christian village of Taybeh, while in Beit Sahour, a predominantly Christian town on the outskirts of Bethlehem, Israeli settlers recently established a new illegal outpost after seizing and bulldozing Palestinian land.
If before the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian Christians were already a small community, today they make up less than 2 percent of the population across Israel-Palestine — a decline mainly driven by decades of Israel’s apartheid policies, ethnic cleansing, and dispossession. The Israeli state has also consistently sought to leverage their precarity as a minority group, blaming Palestinian leadership for their plight and seeking to divide Palestinian Christians from their Muslim counterparts and the broader Arab and Palestinian national movements.
Yet Palestinian Christians have long resisted this erasure and political manipulation. Two weeks ago, residents gathered in Bethlehem’s Nativity Square to light a Christmas tree for the first time since 2022, a muted act of endurance amid continuing devastation. And grounded in both their religious and national identities, the community continues to forcefully oppose Israel’s occupation and reject attempts to depoliticize their faith.
In this episode of The +972 Podcast, we speak with Palestinian theologian and lecturer John Munayer about the Palestinian Christian experience and the community’s active political role, as Israel accelerates its Jewish supremacist policies with active support from Zionist Christians abroad. Rejecting the notion that religion and politics can be disentangled, Munayer explains how Christian leadership and institutions have at times helped legitimize Palestinian subjugation, while also tracing a counter-tradition of resistance in Palestinian liberation theology — a framework that challenges the colonial assumptions in much of Western Christian thought.
