By Lucien Fong –
As a Christian, you don’t have to take sides against the Arabs or the Jews, a Christian pastor from the West Bank says.
You can be in favor of both sides and be opposed to evil done by either side. You can listen to the pain that both sides have gone through. But you should insist on a way forward not based on revenge and retribution but sees both peoples as they are, descendants of Abraham.
Increasingly, the divide is widening between opposing camps over who the land belongs to, ever before since the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion and massacre of 1,200 civilians in Israel.
The anti-Zionist faction chants “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – fundamentally a call for genocide of all Israelis. The pro-Zionists are little better; there are extremists who call for the decimation of Gaza and say that no Arab can be trusted.
Pastor Steven Khoury of Bethlehem straddles the fence. As a Biblicist, he acknowledges that the Jews are God’s people. As an Arab, he feels their pain of the multitudinous peace-loving Palestinians caught in the crossfire.
“You can love both the Jew and the Arab, you can support both,” says Khoury. “Today, we are reaping what we sowed. The Bible says the one that lives by the sword, dies by the sword. Many are still living eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Many are still living with the heart of anger , revenge, hatred and animosity.
“As Christians, we see this of course in the Good Samaritan: he did what he’s not supposed to do. There is enough room in the heart of the Father to love both the Jew and the Arab. You don’t have to love one and hate the other.”
Pastor Khoury leads the First Baptist Church in Bethlehem and ministers to Muslims who convert to Christianity, as well as Palestinian Christians. He also leads Holy Land Missions. He has seen Bethlehem’s Christian population go from 80% in the year 2000 to 20% today.
Meanwhile, in the other part of “Palestine,” in Gaza, the number of Christians has dwindled from 3,000 in 2015 to 260 as of January, according to Joel Rosenberg, co-founder of the All Israel News and All Arab News. Most of them have fled as refugees.
Christian populations throughout the entire Muslim world has dropped drastically. According to a 2018 report commissioned by the British government, Christians are “on the verge of extinction in the Middle East.”
“Evidence shows not only the geographic spread of anti-Christian persecution, but also its increasing severity,” the report states. “In some regions, the level and nature of persecution is arguably coming close to meeting the international definition of genocide, according to that adopted by the UN.”
In the Middle East, Christianity was the dominant religion until the Arabs conquered and imposed Islam with the convert-or-suffer-the-consequences proselytization.
The road forward, however, is not bombs. It is love, love for both Jew and Arab, Khoury says.
