Arab-Israeli Christians demonstrated at the EU embassy in Tel Aviv, urging protection for members of their faith who are being persecuted in Muslim countries as well as in the Palestinian-administered territories.
More than 150 Arab-Israeli Christians gathered in front of the European Union’s embassy in Tel Aviv last week to demand that the EU do more to help Middle East Christians, who face growing persecution from Islamic extremists throughout the region.
Sha’adi Mur’an Halul, a spokesperson for the Israeli Christian Recruitment Forum, which organized the rally, compared the situation of his coreligionists in the Muslim world to that of Jews in pre-World War II Europe.
“We saw how the silence of the world brought about the Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed,” he declared.
Arab-Israeli Christians ‘live a normal life’ in Jewish state
“Israel lets us worship freely, and to live a normal life,” Halul stated. “We decided to speak up and tell the European governments, as well as human rights groups in Israel and around the world, to do something. Do not repeat the mistakes of the past.”
“We get a lot of news about what is happening to Christians in the Middle East, and they are begging us to help them. They envy our being citizens of Israel, and wish that they, too, could live in the Jewish state,” he added.
Father Gabriel Nadaf, spiritual leader of the Forum, declared: “A Christian is murdered every five minutes [in the Middle East], and the Western world is silent.”
Nadaf lamented that from Syria to Egypt to Iraq to the Palestinian Authority, Christians suffer intimidation, harassment, desecration, coercion, torture, rape, physical abuse and murder on a daily basis.
Arab-Israeli Christians slam EU ‘hypocrisy’
Prior to the protest, Israeli Christian leaders had sent a letter to the head of the European Union’s delegation to Israel, Lars Faaborg-Andersen, expressing their frustration with the EU’s “hypocrisy” on the issue of the ethnic cleansing of Middle Eastern Christians.
“The slaughter, persecution, discrimination, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and all other crimes against the Indigenous Aramaic & Christians of the Middle East…continue to be committed without any intervention of the Western countries,” the letter says.
The missive ended with a call to action: “We are turning to you as someone who represents a Western country that engraved the values of human and citizens’ rights on its flag. Get up and take action.”
While Europe sleeps, the Jewish state remains a haven for Arab-Israeli Christians. A September 30, 2013, column by Steve Apfel in The Commentator noted that “in 1949, Israel had 34,000 citizens of that faith [Christian]. Today the number is 168,000.”
Israeli-Arab Christians include an Israel Prize-winning author and a Supreme Court justice, as well as an anti-Zionist member of parliament. As a group, Arab Christian Israelis have long maintained the top position on Israel’s scholastic achievement charts.
In February, a bill that allows the Israeli government to legally recognize Arab Christians as a separate national identity for the first time passed in the Knesset. The law enables Arab Christians to identify solely as Christian, separate from the larger Arab community, and will add an Israeli Christian Arab representative to the panel of the Advisory Committee for Equal Opportunity.
The legislation is meant to boost employment among Israel’s minorities and is seen by supporters as the first in a series of legal steps that will facilitate the integration of the Christian population into Israeli society.
Author: Gidon Ben-Zvi, contributor, United with Israel
Date: Mar. 31, 2014
(Featured image courtesy Trending Central)