Beit Sahour in the occupied West Bank – the hillside where, according to the Gospel of Luke, the news of Jesus’s birth was first proclaimed. ...In recent weeks, a new illegal Israeli settlement outpost
has been established on the edge of Beit Sahour. Caravans and construction equipment have appeared on a site the town had hoped to use for a children’s hospital, cultural centre, and public spaces – projects supported by international donors and meant to strengthen a Christian community that has endured for centuries. ...Beit Sahour is one of the last majority-Christian towns in the West Bank. Our families are Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical. We worship together, marry across traditions, and share a heritage that traces back to the earliest centuries of the Christian story. But like many Palestinian communities, we are running out of land – and with it, out of time.
Due to decades of confiscation, the separation wall, and settlement expansion, only a small fraction of our town remains accessible for Palestinian construction. Youth who wish to build homes often cannot. Parents worry about their children’s future. Families who want to stay rooted in their ancestral land face barriers that make leaving seem like the only viable path.
That is how communities disappear. Not because they stop believing, but because the conditions required for them to flourish are steadily stripped away by the Israeli military occupation of their land.
The aspiration for Jewish safety is legitimate and deeply important – especially after centuries of anti-Semitism, culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust. No person of faith should ever be indifferent to the vulnerability of Jewish communities.
But affirming Jewish safety does not require silence when Palestinian Christian and Muslim families lose their land, face escalating violence, or see their future shrinking. Safety for one people cannot be built on the insecurity of another. There is no moral framework – Christian, Jewish, or secular – that asks us to choose between the dignity of one child and the dignity of another.
If anything, the deeply biblical truth is that justice is indivisible. When we diminish one community’s rights to protect another, both are ultimately harmed.
