THE video is horrifying, though it is the kind of horror that is now synonymous with the behaviour of Israel, its military, its armed settlers and a society that has been conditioned to see the “other” as subhuman.
Yet, this was not the typical viral video that emerges almost daily from the Occupied Territories. The victim, this time, was not a Palestinian. She was an elderly French nun.
On May 1, footage surfaced from occupied Jerusalem showing a 36-year-old Israeli man running up to the nun — a researcher at the French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research — from behind and shoving her violently to the ground.
In a chilling display of cruelty, the assailant did not simply hit and run. He walked away a few paces, then returned to the fallen woman to kick her repeatedly and mercilessly as she lay helpless.
What was most astonishing was the sense of normality that followed. The assailant remained on the scene, conversing with another man who appeared entirely unperturbed by what should have been a devastating event in any other context.
The video briefly imposed itself on the mainstream media scene, garnering perfunctory condemnations. Many explained the event as part of the larger landscape of Israeli violence, highlighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza as the most obvious example of this unchecked aggression.
But even the context of general violence does not fully explain why a French nun was targeted. She is not dark-skinned, she is European, she is Christian, and she holds no historical or territorial claims that would typically trigger the “security” paranoia of the Zionist state.
Still, the incident was anything but “isolated,” despite the rush by Israeli officials to label it a “shameful” exception. On the contrary, the nun was attacked specifically because she is a Christian.
This raises the question: why?
To answer this, we must acknowledge how Palestinian Christians have been systematically written out of the history of their own land.
Palestinian Christians are not merely present on the land; they are among the most historically rooted communities in Palestine. They are anything but “foreigners” or “bystanders” caught up in a supposedly religious conflict between Jews and Muslims.
In fact, the Christian Arab presence in Palestine predates the Islamic era by centuries. They are the descendants of historic tribes that shaped the region’s identity long before the advent of modern political labels.
The marginalisation of Palestinian Christians is a relatively new phenomenon, deeply linked to Western colonialism. For centuries, European powers used the pretense of “protecting” Christian communities to justify their own imperial interventions.
Consequently, this framed the native Christian not as a sovereign Arab with agency but as a ward of the West — a narrative that effectively stripped them of their indigenous status and alienated them from their own national fabric in the eyes of the world.
Zionism added a lethal layer to this erasure. It has often projected itself as a “protector” of Christians to avoid raising the ire of its Western backers. In reality, Palestinian Christians have been subjected to the same policies of ethnic cleansing, racism and military occupation as their Muslim brothers and sisters. How else can we explain the catastrophic dwindling of the Christian population?
Before the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian Christians made up about 12 per cent of the population. Today, that number has plummeted to a mere 1 percent. During the Nakba alone, tens of thousands were expelled from their homes in West Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa, their properties looted and their communities dismantled.
A quick look at a map of Jerusalem and Bethlehem today tells the story of an ongoing erasure. Jerusalem is being systematically emptied of its native population, both Christian and Muslim. Christian properties and houses of worship are restricted and the “Little Town” of Bethlehem has been swallowed up by a ring of illegal settlements and an eight-meter-high apartheid wall that has transformed the birthplace of Christ into an open-air prison.
Yet, despite this, we rarely hear about the struggle for survival of Palestinian Christians. Instead, the world occasionally glimpses “incidents” — like the common habit of Jewish extremists spitting on foreign pilgrims and clergy in Jerusalem. This behaviour has become so normalised that Israeli government ministers, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, have defended the act as an “ancient Jewish custom” that should not be criminalised.
The reason the Palestinian Christian story is rarely told is that it fails to factor neatly into the convenient narratives used by Western governments. They are keen on presenting the conflict as being between a Jewish state fighting for its identity and a monolithic Islamic threat. Israel is heavily invested in this “clash of civilisations” trope, positioning itself as the vanguard of “Western civilisation” against Arab extremism.
But some Palestinians — Muslim and Christian alike — are, to a lesser degree, also guilty of falling into this trap. The former often frame the Palestinian resistance as an exclusively Muslim struggle; meanwhile, some Christians participate in the very discourse that led to their marginalisation in the first place.
The Gaza genocide, however, has proven this logic not only erroneous but unsustainable. Throughout the slaughter, Israel has destroyed more than 800 mosques, but it has also not spared the Christian sanctuaries.
On Oct. 19, 2023, an Israeli airstrike targeted a building within the compound of the Church of Saint Porphyrius — one of the oldest churches in the world. In that massacre, 18 Palestinian Christians were killed, their blood mixing with the dust of a sanctuary that had stood for 1,600 years. It was a devastating reminder that the Israeli missile does not distinguish between a mosque and a church, nor between the blood of a Muslim and a Christian.
The story of the French nun is worth every bit of the attention it received, as is the targeting of pilgrims. But as the headlines move on, we must remember that Palestinian Christians endure a suffering that is collective and rooted in the soil of Palestine. They are now an endangered community and Israel is the culprit. Without them, Palestine is not the same.
The Palestinian homeland is only whole when it is the cradle of religious coexistence. And Palestinian Christians sit at the heart of that history, dating back two millennia. Their survival is not a “minority issue” — it is the survival of Palestine itself.
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Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, ‘Before the Flood,’ was published by Seven Stories Press. He is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
