Christian gravestones vandalized by Muslims in West Bank

May 25, 2009

Reuters reports: 

Vandals desecrated some 70 graves in two Palestinian Christian cemeteries on Sunday in what a Palestinian Authority official said was a rare attack on the Christian minority in the occupied West Bank.

Watch how everyone interviewed goes out of their way to stress that this was a rare or isolated incident.

A church official in the village of Jiffna near Ramallah where the attack took place called in Palestinian security officials to investigate, but neither he nor the investigators said they had any initial clues who was responsible.

"This unfortunate incident has brought Muslims and Christians closer and many from the Muslim community have shown solidarity with us and have condemned this action," said Greek Orthodox Church official George Abdo.

Abdo said it was the first time such an incident had occurred in the village.

Issa Kassissieh, a Palestinian Authority official and adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas on Christian affairs, said he believed it was "an isolated act against Christian symbols".

"Palestinian Christians and Muslims have always lived in harmony in the Holy Land," Kassissieh said.

Jiffna, northeast of Ramallah, is home to some 1,600 inhabitants, about two thirds of whom are Christians from the Greek Orthodox and Catholic communities. The Palestinian Authority says 50,000 of the West Bank's 2.5 million Arab population are Christians.

Christians have emigrated from Palestinian territories en masse in the past three decades. The official line is that the Israeli occupation is causing dire economic conditions is forcing them to leave. No mention of Muslim persecution of Christians. They've always lived in harmony. Right.

But the decline of Christian numbers in Bethlehem long pre-dated the building of the security barrier. Scholars note that it even pre-dated Israel’s capture of the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War. 

Greater Bethlehem, which includes the linked towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, was part of the British mandate of Palestine until 1948, then fell under Jordanian control until June 1967. Israel administered the area until it handed authority to Yasser Arafat’s P.A. in 1995 as a result of the Oslo peace accords.

Israeli political analyst Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli government liaison to the U.S. Congress, revealed several years ago that in the run-up to the handover to Arafat, former Bethlehem mayor Elias Freij, an Orthodox Christian, lobbied the Israeli government not to transfer Bethlehem, saying it would become a town with churches but empty of Christians. Freij later became a P.A. minister, and died in 1998.

Read more here (http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=48189) and here (http://therealbarackobama.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/pope-in-bethlehem-a-missed-opportunity-aaron-klein-argues-benedict-ignored-murder-persecution-of-christians/).