In the British mandate of Palestine, the Christian population was 9.6 per cent of the population. By 1999, it was 2.9 per cent. Meanwhile, 35 per cent of the Christians of the West Bank and Gaza left between 1967 and 1999
After 44 Christian Copts were killed in two church bombings in Egypt in April 2017, can they stay?
Almost exactly a quarter of a century ago, I wrote a story for the front page of what was then The Independent’s Weekend Review. It was headlined: “Exodus: A story of Christians”. It told the tragedy of those people of the faith who were fleeing the lands of the forefathers.
I interviewed the only hermit left in Lebanon, in a cave in the north of the country, and he said to me: “I am the only hermit left in all the Middle East.” His eyes creased in happiness when I acknowledged his unique theological condition. “I will never leave Lebanon,” he said. “No Christian should leave the Holy Land. Those who have left will come back.”
He exuded faith: Childlike, passionate, precise, and untrammeled by contradiction or facts. And he was wrong.
As I wrote at the time – from Iraq, from the West Bank, from Lebanon and from Egypt, “probably” (that was my word then) from Syria, too – the Christians were leaving. A community of 14 million people, the inheritors of the original, Eastern Church of Christ, was draining away from lands.
Today, the Copts of Egypt alone may be as many as 15 million, but they make up only 10 per cent of the population. Under attack from Islamists, they are leaving for the West in huge numbers – which is one reason the Pope lands in Egypt on Friday, April 28, in the hope that Christians and Muslims can take violence out of religion. We pretend to care very much for these Christians, of course.
Twenty five dead during Mass at Egypt’s main Coptic Christian Cathedral
It is much moving that some two years ago, in the little Syrian town of Qamishli, the local priests and bishops of the Maronite (Catholic), Armenian and Orthodox churches pleaded to stop suggesting that the Christians should seek sanctuary in the West. If they went to Canada or the US or Europe, they said, they will become part of a secular world in which they would lose their faith. This should not be the fate of the Christians of the Middle East.
But, after 44 Christian Copts were killed in two church bombings in Egypt this month, can they stay? When Christian Copts are murdered in Sinai, can they stay? When ISIS in Iraq tells them to convert or die, can they stay?
By 1999, only 10 per cent of the people of Jerusalem were Christian. Just 30 per cent of Nazareth’s population of 172,000 was Christian.
In the British mandate of Palestine, the Christian population was 9.6 per cent of the population. By 1999, it was 2.9 per cent. Meanwhile, 35 per cent of the Christians of the West Bank and Gaza left between 1967 and 1999. And Christianity is supposed to be one of the world’s great religions.
