People come to the Holy Land because this is where Christianity began. Here in Jerusalem and on lands nearby are the stony hills where Jesus walked and taught and died —and later, where his followers prayed and bled and battled over what his teaching would become. Huddled alongside Jewish converts in the caves of Palestine and Syria, Arabs were among the first to be persecuted for the new faith, and the first to be called Christians. It was here in the Levant—a geographical area including present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories—that hundreds of churches and monasteries were built after Constantine, emperor of Rome, legalized Christianity in 313 and declared his Levantine provinces holy land. Even after Arab Muslims conquered the region in 638, it remained predominantly Christian.
Ironically, it was during the Crusades (1095-1291) that Arab Christians,slaughtered along with Muslims by the crusaders and caught in the cross fire between Islam and the Christian West, began a long, steady retreat into the minority. Today native Christians in the Levant are the envoys of a forgotten world, bearing the fierce and hunted spirit of the early church. Their communities, composed of various Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant sects, have dwindled in the past century from a quarter to about 8 percent of the population as the current generation leaves for economic reasons, to escape the region's violence, or because they have relatives in the West who help them emigrate. Their departure, sadly, deprives the Levant of some of its best educated and most politically moderate citizens—the people these societies can least afford to lose.
For anyone living in Israel or the Palestinian territories,stress is the norm. But the 196,500 Palestinian and Israeli Arab Christians,who dropped from 13 percent of the population in 1894 to less than 2 percent today, occupy a uniquely oxygen-starved space between traumatized Israeli Jews and traumatized Palestinian Muslims, whose rising militancy is tied to regional Islamist movements that sometimes target Arab Christians.
But immigration to the West is not always a blessing for Arab Christians. Living as Arabs in the U.S. after 9/11 is an eye-opener for many immigrants. "It's funny," [one man] says, "what Americans think about things. They've never heard of Arab Christians. They assume all Arabs are Muslim—terrorists, that is—and that Christianity was invented in Italy or something. So when you say, I'm an Arab Christian, they look at you funny, like you just said, the moon is purple. Ihad one lady ask me, 'What does your family think about you being a Christian?I suppose they must have been very upset!' "
“This is the lesson the West has yet to learn and that Arab Christians are uniquely qualified to teach. They are the last, vital link between the Christian West and the Arab Muslim world. If Arab Christians were to disappear, the two sides would drift even further apart than they already are. They are the go-betweens." observes Paolo Dall’Oglio a monk who hosts Muslims in interfaith dialogue at Deir MarMusa, the sixth-century desert monastery he and his Arab followers restored between Damascus and Homs.
