The Synagogue Church is hard to find. Unobtrusive, tucked away in the narrow, winding alleys of Nazareth’s Old City — you have to know exactly where it is to find it. Even then you could walk right past its walls without realizing it.

Inside a little courtyard, it’s a small stone building said to have been constructed around AD 1200. Ancient tradition says it sits on the site of the synagogue where Jesus preached. According to Luke’s account (Luke 4:14-30), Jesus entered the Synagogue and began to teach from the Book of Isaiah, revealing that he was the Messiah. The people were impressed with Jesus’ words, and asked each other, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” In reply, Jesus told them:

Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.

This so enraged those in attendance, they attempted to kill Jesus by taking him to the top of the hill that Nazareth is built on and throwing him off the cliff.

When I entered the church, it was mostly empty. There were no crowds of pilgrims and tourists, since it was not any holy day. The interior was austere and humble and seemed to contain a deep aura of peace. The medieval stone walls were mostly bare, and the room was filled with ordinary white plastic chairs to sit on. I settled down in one of them, next to an elderly man.

As I sat in there, I reflected on the fact that even in the present day, most of the Christians in the land of Israel are not among Jesus’ fellow Jews. Rather, gentile Arabs make up most of the local Christian population. Not much has changed in Jesus’ hometown.

I introduced myself to the old man beside me. He was, it turned out, a Palestinian Christian — an Arab. That was not surprising. Nazareth is the largest Arab city in Israel proper (as opposed to the Palestinian territories of Gaza, West Bank, and Golan Heights). Almost all of its inhabitants are Arab, though most hold Israeli citizenship. The population is roughly two thirds Muslim and one third Christian.

Once the old man realized I spoke Arabic, he became very chatty. He was a cheerful fellow, easy to talk to. I asked him about the situation for Arabs in Israel. He seemed to hesitate to answer, then made up his mind: “There is discrimination — let’s speak frankly.”

In Israel, he told me, you have to be a Jew to be treated as a full person. This was not fair. In Europe and America, he pointed out, you have secular democracies — why does only Israel have to be an ethno-theocracy?

I asked him if Arabs in Israel hate the Jews. He said that, no, it’s not about hatred. It’s just a desire for fair treatment.

Not everyone agrees. One Israeli Arab Christian, interviewed by National Geographic for an excellent 2009 article about the decline of the ancient Christian populations throughout the Middle East, had this to say: “I hate the Israelis. I really hate them. We all hate them… And that makes me a sinner. But I confess my sins when I go to church, and that helps. I’m learning not to hate. In the meantime, I go to confession.”

Inconvenient Christians

Many people assume that if an Arab is a believer, he must be a convert from Islam. In fact the Christian communities scattered throughout the Arab world are among the most ancient on earth. Arabs were present at Pentecost (Acts 2:11). Even though Arab tribes converted to Islam en masse in the 7th century, Arab Christianity could not be rooted out. It has endured almost 2,000 years of persecution, and still exists today.

But these days, Arab Christians are inconvenient to the standard narrative among evangelical Christians regarding Israel. The narrative, which I grew up with, goes something like this:

The Jews were kicked out of the Promised Land by the Romans in the first and second centuries AD. But it was prophesied in the Bible that they would someday return. This prophecy was fulfilled when the Jews returned to the Promised Land in 1948. But hateful Muslims in the surrounding region can’t stand the idea of there being one little Jewish nation in a sea of Islamic nations, and so they want to destroy Israel.

It’s a nice, clean, simple story. There’s truth in it, and yet reality is never so simple. The existence of Arab Christians, who like their Muslim compatriots claim to be oppressed and driven out of their lands by the Israeli government, throws a wrench in the narrative.

The awkward truth is, most Palestinian Arab Christians identify with — and side with — their fellow Palestinians who are Muslims, and not with the Israeli Jews. This is true of those in the Palestinian territories, and of those in Israel proper with Israeli citizenship. It’s also true of the massive populations in multigenerational exile in Jordan and Lebanon, and of the diaspora throughout the world.

It’s not so surprising if you believe that actual injustice was committed against the Palestinians. Palestinian Christians are Palestinians, after all. But it is very surprising if you believe the narrative that Palestinian oppression is just a myth propagated by Jew-hating Muslims.

The Ugly Truth

When I first moved to the Middle East, I believed that narrative, by and large. After all, there’s plenty of Jew-hating propaganda flying around in the Muslim world, and certain political factions in our own country are always happy to exploit it to drag America through the mud at any opportunity.

But while it’s easy to imagine that Al-Jazeera or Ilhan Omar would dispense propaganda against Zionists and the nation of Israel, it’s hard to imagine that the grandma and grandpa of each and every one of my friends and neighbors would do so — which would basically have to be the case where I live for this to be mere propaganda.

Still, I didn’t really accept that the Arabs in Palestine had been severely mistreated until I read a first-hand account of the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, written by an Anglican priest who also happens to be a Palestinian Arab. Father Naim Ateek describes his experience in his 1989 book Justice and Only Justice:

I had just turned eleven in 1948 when the Zionists occupied my hometown, Beisan (Beth Shean). We had no army to protect us. There was no battle, no resistance, no killing; we were simply taken over, occupied, on Wednesday, May 12, 1948. Our house was on the main street, so as a boy I watched the Zionist troops, the Haganah, come into town past our door, watched them enter every house in the neighborhood, looking for weapons. They searched our house, too, but did not find any. My father had never owned a gun; he did not believe in doing so…

On May 26, the military governor sent for the leading men of the town; at military headquarters, he informed them quite simply and coldly that Beisan must be evacuated by all of its inhabitants within a few hours. My father pleaded with him, “I have nowhere to go with my large family. Let us stay in our home.” But the blunt answer came, “If you do not leave, we will have to kill you.”

I remember vividly my father’s return from headquarters to give us the bad news. With great anguish he said, “We have been given no choice. We must go.” The next two hours were very difficult. I can recall with great precision what happened, almost minute by minute.

My father asked us to carry with us whatever was lightweight yet valuable or important. The military orders were that we should all meet at the center of the town in front of the courthouse, not far from my father’s shop…

As people gathered at the center of the town, the soldiers separated us into two groups, Muslims and Christians. The Muslims were sent across the Jordan River to the country of Transjordan (now Jordan). The Christians were taken on buses, driven to the outskirts of Nazareth, and dropped off there, since Nazareth had not yet been occupied by the Zionists. Within a few hours, our family had become refugees, driven out of Beisan forever.

That’s how the book begins. He goes on to document the callousness and indifference of Christians throughout the world to the ongoing plight of Palestinians.

That’s hard to swallow. But it gets worse. The problem is not just Arab Christians getting caught in the crossfire of a Muslim vs. Jewish or Arab vs. Jewish conflict.

That would be bad enough, but it’s worse than that. There is specifically anti-Christian sentiment in Israel, and persecution. Just this year, two priests and a bishop were attacked during mass, a statue of Jesus at the Church of the Condemnation was vandalized, and a bill was proposed by Israeli legislators that would make Christian evangelism punishable with jail-time.

“There Should Be a Little Justice”

All this is hardly to suggest that the nation of Israel should not exist, or that Israel doesn’t have to do what it takes to make itself secure from terrorist threats. It doesn’t deny that the Arabs aren’t also guilty of atrocities, or that Muslims wouldn’t treat the Jews worse if they were in power, or that Arab Christians aren’t also persecuted in Muslim countries, or … and so forth.

It’s just to say that the Israelis did not, and do not, have the right to simply do whatever they want to the Arabs who have lived in the region for generations.

Few American Christians would come out and say that Israeli settlers have a right to do anything they like to the Arabs in the land. But in practice, American Christians give them that right, by accepting an overly simplified narrative about what is going on in the region, and lobbying for simplistic pro-Israel policies accordingly.

This oversimplification seems often to be motivated by partisanship, and/or by a desire to see End Times prophesies fulfilled in Israel, and/or by guilt about what happened to the Jews in Europe. Meanwhile, the hard truth is that the church is being slowly extinguished in Israel, just as it is throughout the Middle East.

I mentioned to the old man that many people say that the Palestinian Arabs need to be driven out, because they are terrorists who will not be satisfied until all the Jews are killed or driven out of the entire region.

He didn’t bother to deny it. “But ask yourself,” he said, “‘What made him a terrorist?’ Maybe he saw his father’s house get bulldozed over. Ask yourself what made him a terrorist.”

I nodded, and suggested that people like to argue over who started the conflict in the first place — the Arabs or the Jews.

He laughed, not the least bit bitterly. The conflict was started, he said, by British and American Christians who thought that if they gave the Jews their nation back, the end of the world would come. Maybe this is true, he acknowledged.

“But there should be a little justice!”

Amen! That’s something all Christians should be able to agree on. Regardless of our theological and political opinions, we should all agree on that. We should stand beside our Arab Christian brothers and sisters in their suffering — or at least be willing to listen to what they have to say.

Peter Rowden is a friend of The Stream living in the Middle East.