The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians and the Turn of a New Millennium.
Irani, George Emile
by Charles M. Sennott. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. 479 pages. $30.00, hardcover.
Years ago while I was researching a book on the role of the Vatican in the Middle East,l the late Lebanese scholar and jurist Edmond Rabbath told me that the Arab Christians were in the process of becoming "fossilized" communities. This prophetic statement has today become a factual description of Christian communities in the Levant. Charles Sennott, who was the Middle East bureau chief of The Boston Globe from 1997 to 2001, details his "journalistic pilgrimage along the path of Jesus's life that took [him] to the Holy Land -- Nazareth, Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, Jerusalem -- Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon." As an American "secularized" Catholic, Sennott discovers and relates the predicament facing Arab Christians squeezed between a powerful Jewish state on one side, which since 1967 has occupied and settled the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and an assertive Islamic revivalist movement on the other. Another important factor is dramatized by the difficult economic conditions made impossible by constant uncertainty and warfare throughout the region.
The first challenge facing the Christian presence in the land where Christ was born, lived and died is emigration. In 1914, the Christian population in the Ottoman Empire constituted 24 percent of what is considered today Israel-Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Today, the Christian presence in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem has dwindled dramatically to less than 2 percent of the total population. In the West Bank and Gaza, the number of Christians in 1995 was estimated at no more than 32,000 out of a total of nearly 3 million. According to the author, in 1995 there were about 133,000 Palestinian Christians in Israel and the Palestinian territories, compared to an estimated 145,000 under the British mandate.
To dramatize these figures, Sennott quotes Bernard Sabella, a Palestininan professor at Bethlehem University. Sabella states that "the best way to look at the diminished Christian presence is to project what the population would be with a conservative growth rate of 2 percent. If the Palestinian Christian population had maintained a 2-percent growth rate (which was lower than the average in Israel/Palestine) from its prewar population of about 145,000, by the year 2000 it should have reached about 420,000...." Sabella goes on to say that "if the rate of decline continues, the indigenous Christian community could virtually disappear within two generations" (p.23). The same type of communal population depletion is also taking place in Lebanon. In 1975, on the eve of the civil war, the Christian population was estimated to be at around 1,000,000 to 1,300,000. Between 1975 and 1989, around 700,000 Lebanese left their country permanently; half of them were Christians.
Sennott's account of the Arab Christians' predicament is best exemplified by his chapters on Nazareth, Egypt and Lebanon. Nazareth, the informal capital of the Palestinian citizens within Israel, has been engulfed in communal and religious strife since 1998. The conflict pits the city's Christian and Muslim communities -- cynically manipulated by the Israeli government, whether Likud or Labor -- against each other in a competition over literal and metaphorical civic spaces. The municipality of Nazareth (whose population is 65-percent Muslim) and its Christian-born communist mayor wanted to implement a renewal project for the city to welcome the new millennium (Nazareth 2000). This project, initially supported by the Israeli government under the late Yitzhak Rabin, involved, among other projects, the building of a public plaza in the center of the city before the Basilica of the Annunciation. The purpose of this plaza was to welcome Christian pilgrims who would be flocking from the United States, Europe and elsewhere. The mayor's opponents in the Islamic movement claimed that the new plaza would lead to the demolition of a nineteenth-century school building, near which was a small and ancient Muslim shrine dedicated to Shehab al-Din, a nephew of Saladin, the famous Kurdish warrior who defeated the Crusaders. Tensions between the two communities in Nazareth came to a head in April 1999, when young Muslims and Christians attacked each other physically during Easter week. Soon after, supporters of the Islamic movement entered Nazareth and terrorized its Christian population. In all of this, the Israeli government's attitude was to stand by and watch the violence while promising the Islamists that they would be allowed to build a mosque in the center of Nazareth. This incident became an important point of contention between the Vatican and the Israeli government, which recently had to renege on its promise to the Islamic movement and freeze plans to build a mosque.
Dramatizing the plight of Nazareth and its population -- both Christian and Muslim -- Sennott writes,
In the year 2000, the people of Nazareth were Muslim and Christian, and the people just up the hill, in Upper Nazareth, were Jews.... The Arab Nazarenes called themselves Palestinians, but they were citizens of Israel. The Israeli Upper Nazarenes called themselves Zionists, although some [mostly some Christian immigrants who came from Russia with Jewish spouses in 1989-92] refused to call themselves Jews. The Palestinians were members of the Communist-influenced Front and also devout believers in the Islamic Movement. The Israelis were Labor and Likud. It seemed that the year 2000 had brought an intense struggle within and among Nazarenes, between all of these overlapping identities (p. 231).
If in Israel-Palestine, Arab Christians are confronted with Israeli political machinations and occupation, on the one hand, and an energized and assertive Islamist movement on the other, in Egypt the Copts -- who are less than 5 million, or 6 percent of Egypt's population of 70 million -- are stymied by fringe fundamentalist groups that constitute a challenge to the powers that be in Cairo. Sennott's chapter on Egypt is an excellent depiction of what happened to the Coptic Christian community in a small town of Upper Egypt called Al-Kosheh in 1998, where two Christians were found dead. The Egyptian authorities went on an unjustified campaign of arrests and torture to force the Copts of Al-Kosheh to confess to the murder. The family of the victims and local church leaders claimed that the killing was the work of five Muslims from Al-Kosheh. Later, following an international uproar, the Egyptian government had to rein in its security forces, which were known to have committed extra-judicial murder, systematic use of torture, and hostage taking. These tensions reflect the failure of a political and economic system that is unable to bring a satisfactory answer to the growing poverty and anger within Egypt's disenfranchised population.
In his chapter on Egypt, Sennott mentions the Freedom from Religious Persecution Act (1998). This legislation, which was introduced in the U.S. Congress by Arlen Specter, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, and Frank Wolf, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Virginia, became known as the International Religious Freedom Acts (IRFA). IRFA called for the creation of a new ambassador-at-large within the State Department and the setting up of a U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) to monitor violations of religious freedom worldwide. The U.S. president was also given the power to take action against violators, ranging from private or public condemnation to suspending foreign aid and imposing strict economic sanctions. So far the commission has focused its attention on countries that have either a large Muslim population (Egypt, Pakistan, Sudan and Saudi Arabia) or countries with socialist regimes such as North Korea, Vietnam and the People's Republic of China.
The story of USCIRF and its selective use of religious freedom highlights how the plight of Christians in the Middle East was hijacked by crass political interests in Washington. An egregious example took place in March 2001, when several members of the USCIRF undertook a fact-finding tour to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and the Occupied Territories to survey the status of religious freedom in these countries. At the end of the trip, members of the commission reached a consensus and issued a statement on the situation in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. However, they refused to comment on the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Dr. Layla Al-Marayati, an Arab-American pediatrician and then a Muslim member of USCIRF, issued an "Individual Dissenting View" regarding the situation in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. In her report Dr. Al-Marayati discusses cases of discrimination against Jews and non-Jews and focused specifically on cases of religious-freedom violations in the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem. For instance, Al-Marayati discussed problems arising from the closure of Jerusalem and internal restrictions in the West Bank and Gaza. She also mentioned among other violations of religious freedom the fact that Palestinians who were not residents of Jerusalem were prevented from worshipping at holy sites in the city. Al-Marayati also wrote that "since October 2000, Muslim men under the age of 45, regardless of whether or not they are citizens of Israel, have been prevented from worshipping at the Haram al-Sharif on Fridays." Finally, Dr. Al-Marayati urged the U.S. government to pressure Israel to "abide by internationally recognized guarantees aimed at protecting the rights of civilians living under occupation." In another of her recommendations, Al-Marayati also urged the U.S. government forcefully to denounce the targeting of Christian, Muslim and Jewish holy places. (2) In all this, Egypt's Copts became the focus of USCIRF's attention, underlined by hearings on Capitol Hill and other meetings with some reactionary Coptic groups residing in the United States.
Sennott's chapter on Lebanon is shallow and disappointing, given Lebanon's importance to the future of any Arab Christian presence in the Middle East. He focuses most of his chapter on South Lebanon and the fate of the Israeli-sponsored South Lebanon Army (SLA), a militia created following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 to serve as a "buffer," first against the PLO (until it was forced out of Beirut in 1983) and then against Hizballah (Party of God). The author does not focus on the various mistakes and deadly crimes committed by some Maronite militia leaders during the war (1975-89). It would have been helpful to present, even if briefly, the troubling fact that more Christians died at the hands of other Christians during the war than at Muslim hands. Moreover, Sennott should have focused on other Christian communities in Lebanon, such as the Greek Catholics (Melkites), Greek Orthodox and others to discover their perception of Lebanon's future. The flimsy nature of the author's analysis of Lebanon is revealed in his treatment of Lebanon's internally displaced population. A complex issue such as this would have required more than one paragraph and possibly an update. Yes, the Ministry of the Displaced was and still is under the control of the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt (accused of being responsible for the Christians' initial displacement from the Chouf Mountains), but this does not exclude the fact that Jumblatt, in the summer of 2001, welcomed the Maronite Patriarch to his Druze-dominated region and called for reconciliation with the Maronites. Last but not least, Sennott could have elaborated on the keen interest of Pope John Paul II in Lebanon and the pontiff's exhortation to save Lebanon in order to save the Christians.
Christian communities in the Middle East are victims in several respects: 1) they lack a credible leadership and a corresponding definition of what their mission is in the twenty-first century; 2) they are crushed or sidelined by the ongoing struggle between Judaism and Islam; and 3) they are pawns of the U.S. government and the American religious communities -- Christians, Muslims and Jews. Despite its shortcomings, Sennott's book is a welcome contribution to a topic -- the fate of Arab Christians -- that has become increasingly obscure and irrelevant in the current structure of power politics and imperial hegemony. To recover their relevance, Christian communities in the Middle East ought to reexamine the true social and political message of Christianity and reinterpret it for a world that has lost the true meaning of acknowledgment, forgiveness and reconciliation.
(1) See The Papacy and the Middle East: The Role of the Holy See in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1962-1984 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).
(2) For further details, see Addendum To The Report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, May 14, 2001, Part III. Text can be accessed via www.uscirf.gov. George Emile Irani Professor, Royal Roads University (Victoria, Canada)
