Gaza’s minuscule community of Christians will spend
this Christmas feeling even more under siege than
normal. The Israeli military authorities have
denied the vast majority of the enclave’s 1,100
Christians a permit to exit the
Palestinian territory for the holiday season.
Unlike previous years, none will be allowed to join
relatives in Bethlehem, Jerusalem or Nazareth, or
visit their holy places in the West Bank and Israeli
cities. Alongside the enclave’s nearly two million
Muslims, they will be forced to celebrate Christmas
in what is dubbed by locals as “the world’s largest
open-air prison”.
Israel has issued 100 permits for travel abroad,
via Jordan, but even those are mostly useless
because only one or two members of each family have
been approved. No parent is likely to choose to
enjoy Christmas away from their children.
As ever, Israeli authorities have justified their
decision on security grounds. But no one really
believes this tiny, vulnerable minority poses any
kind of threat to their giant military and
intelligence-gathering machine.
For decades Israel has pointed to the steady
decline of the Palestinian Christian community as
proof of a supposed clash of civilisations in which
it is on the right side. The gradual exodus of
Christians, it argues, is evidence of the oppression
they suffer at the hands of the Palestinians’ Muslim
majority. Claiming to represent Judeo-Christian
values, it supposedly stands as their sole
protector.
In fact, the fall in Palestinian Christian
numbers relates chiefly to other factors.
A lower fertility rate than Muslims means Christians
have been shrinking as a proportion of the overall
population. More significantly, however, Christians have
been fleeing oppression – not by Muslims, but by Israel.
