When Defending Christians Turns into Antisemitism

In recent months, there has been a concerted campaign on social media to portray Israel as the leading country in the Middle East where Christians are persecuted. The supposed evidence consists of several regrettable incidents that have taken place this year in the Jewish state. These include acts of hostility toward Christians by ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem’s Old City — including an assault on a nun — as well as the desecration of Christian symbols by Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. These incidents are reprehensible, but they neither represent Israeli society nor reflect a policy of the State of Israel. In several cases, those responsible have been identified and punished.

The situation is more complicated in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria, particularly in Taybeh, where there has unfortunately been an increase in attacks by settlers against Palestinians, including Christians. Even in these cases, however, reprehensible as these attacks may be, their motivation appears to be primarily related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than specifically to the Christian identity of the victims. The targets are Arabs, both Christian and Muslim, although religious elements may also be involved.

Still, as serious as these incidents are — and as necessary as it is to punish those responsible and prevent them from happening again — they do not make Israel the Middle East’s foremost persecutor of Christians, nor do they demonstrate that the country has an anti-Christian agenda.

The data paint a very different picture. Israel does not appear on Open Doors’ annual World Watch List of the 50 countries where Christians face the most severe levels of persecution. By contrast, several countries in the region do appear on the ranking, including Yemen (3rd), Syria (6th), Iran (10th), Egypt (42nd), and Jordan (49th). Moreover, while ancient Christian communities have declined dramatically across several parts of the Middle East in recent decades, Israel’s Christian population has grown in absolute numbers.

Given the tragic history of Christian antisemitism, however, it is not difficult to understand why isolated incidents or genuine problems can so easily be transformed into a narrative portraying Israel as a state inherently hostile to Christianity. After all, one of the defining characteristics of antisemitism is precisely its ability to ignore, selectively interpret, or distort reality in order to fit preexisting prejudices.

And few prejudices are as old as the accusation that “the Jews killed Jesus.”

For centuries, the charge of deicide was used to justify the persecution, expulsion, and massacre of Jews. Even in the modern era, elements of this anti-Jewish Christian imagination remained embedded in European antisemitism. The Nazis, including Hitler himself, drew upon images and ideas inherited from this long tradition of Christian hostility toward Jews.

Therefore, when contemporary Jews are collectively portrayed as people who “hate Jesus,” “hate Christians,” or seek to destroy Christianity, we are no longer dealing with politically neutral criticism of the Israeli government. We are witnessing the revival of an antisemitic imaginary with nearly two thousand years of history.

Since the October 7, 2023 massacre, this form of Christian-rooted antisemitism, like other manifestations of hatred against Jews, has once again gained ground, particularly on social media. Old theological tropes have become intertwined with political criticism of Israel, producing a discourse in which concern for Middle Eastern Christians frequently serves as a vehicle for ancient accusations against Jews.

It is in this context that antisemites such as Tucker Carlson and other anti-Israel actors, including the Iranian regime itself, have sought to promote the narrative that Israel persecutes Christians. The instrumentalization of religious freedom becomes particularly evident when outrage over acts of intolerance appears to depend not on the identity of the victims, but on the identity of those attacking them.

An incident that took place in Jaffa this month helps expose the selectivity behind this supposed concern.

Last Sunday, August 16, a Catholic church in the city was vandalized, and a suspect was arrested. Immediately after the incident, speculation emerged that this was yet another attack by a Jewish extremist against Christians. According to information subsequently reported by Arabic-language media outlets, however, the suspect was a Muslim Arab citizen of Israel.

Suddenly, the incident no longer attracted the same level of interest.

Many of the pages and public figures that relentlessly share videos of ultra-Orthodox Jews harassing Christians in Jerusalem largely ignored the incident. This raises an unavoidable question: if the concern is genuinely about Middle Eastern Christians and religious freedom, why should the religious identity of the perpetrator determine the degree of outrage?

The answer helps illuminate the problem. For certain actors, the persecution of Christians seems to matter primarily when it can be used against Israel and, in some cases, against Jews themselves.

This does not mean that Israel should ignore the problems that do exist. Quite the opposite. The Jaffa incident also offers Israel an important lesson about how to counter this narrative: by strengthening protections for its Christian citizens, rigorously punishing those responsible for acts of anti-Christian violence, and working to prevent such incidents from recurring, including in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria.

Promoting religious freedom, besides being a value embedded in the founding principles of the State of Israel itself, is also a powerful response to antisemitism. The less room there is for extremists to harass Christians, the fewer genuine incidents there will be for those seeking to turn them into fuel for ancient prejudices.

But this responsibility must be matched by consistency from those who claim to defend Christians.

Religious intolerance against Christians cannot be fought by resurrecting intolerance against Jews. Nor can one defend Jesus by repeating, in the language of the twenty-first century, prejudices that for centuries caused Jews to suffer in his name.

Defending the religious freedom of Christians and combating antisemitism are not opposing causes. On the contrary, both are necessary to preserve the Christian presence in the Middle East, protect Jewish communities in Israel and around the world, and make it possible to write new chapters in the long and often turbulent history of Jewish-Christian relations.