(Photo by Steve Martin)
When only half the story is told, the most vulnerable pay the price
In Nazareth, Pastor Saleem Shalash preaches the Gospel every Sunday at the Home of Jesus the King Church. In Haifa, Pastor Shmuel Aweida– born in the city to Arab Christian parents – leads Beit Eliyahu, the House of Elijah congregation, where Arab and Jewish believers worship side by side in a community whose roots reach back to the founding of the State of Israel.
In Seoul, Botrus Mansour – a lawyer and educator from Nazareth, co-founder of the Nazareth Local Baptist Church – was installed last year as Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, becoming the first Arab Christian ever to lead a global body representing hundreds of millions of believers.
Meanwhile, a few kilometers away in Judea and Samaria (internationally known as the West Bank), a Palestinian Evangelical Christian recently published an article on these very pages – anonymously, because revealing his name could cost him his life.
His opening words were: "If my identity is revealed, I could face danger or even death – not because I have committed a crime, but because I am trying to share truths that many people ignore."
The contrast between these two realities – the freedom of Arab Evangelicals in Israel and the mortal danger facing their co-believers across the line – is one of the most important untold stories of the Middle East.
The CNN report and the narrative it serves
The decline of Christian communities in Judea and Samaria is a reality that deserves global attention. No one should dismiss the hardships they face in their daily lives.
But when the international media foregrounds one set of causes and amplifies one set of voices, while leaving other documented pressures unexplored, it does not serve Palestinian Christians or help the world understand the broader picture.
The anonymous Palestinian Christian who wrote for ALL ISRAEL NEWS described a reality that barely reaches Western newsrooms.
As he puts it: "It is easier to blame every departure on Israel than to confront corruption, nepotism, abuse of power, and the absence of genuine justice within Palestinian society itself."
He described a Palestinian Authority that "prioritizes personal interests and political survival, where ordinary citizens remain a low priority." A Judea and Samaria "governed more by the influence of powerful families than by the rule of law."
Courts, prosecutors, police, and security services that "are often used to protect those with influence rather than to serve ordinary people."
He recounted cases of Christian families who lost their land to Muslim families through fraud and intimidation, only to see their appeals to President Mahmoud Abbas go unanswered.
He also described homes coming under gun fire to silence Christian residents – a reality that, he said, leaves many ordinary Christians feeling that life under the Palestinian Authority is "less like living under the rule of law and more like surviving under the law of the jungle."
He described a system where influential Christian leaders "do not speak openly about these issues because they do not want to confront the authorities or powerful families, or because they have interests they want to preserve." But when the subject turns to Israel, "they speak continuously about occupation and emphasize that occupation is the reason.
The Palestinian Christian leaders operate within a system that demands a unified front. The PA tolerates and instrumentalizes the Christian presence – and Christian leaders who wish to maintain their positions, their institutions, and their communities' survival must align with the narrative that attributes all Christian suffering exclusively to Israel.
The history of persecuted churches under authoritarian regimes – from the Soviet Union to Communist Eastern Europe – shows that clergy who must coexist with power structures controlling every aspect of their communities' existence inevitably become voices for the system, not only for their flock. The question is not whether these leaders are sincere, but whether the story they are permitted to tell is the whole story.
Where the media's failure becomes most glaring – and most revealing
In Nazareth, Pastor Saleem Shalash's congregation enjoys religious freedom—and puts it into practice by operating a major aid center serving Jewish, Muslim, and Christian families alike. Shalash, raised Catholic before coming to Evangelical faith, publicly supports the State of Israel and devotes his ministry to building bridges between Arab and Jewish communities.
In Haifa, Pastor Shmuel Aweida leads Beit Eliyahu – the House of Elijah – in the German Colony, a congregation founded around the time of Israel's establishment, whose earliest members included Holocaust survivors. Today, Arab and Jewish believers worship together there every week, a living testimony to the reconciliation that the Gospel makes possible. Aweida, born in Haifa to Arab Christian parents, has devoted his life to building a community where the dividing wall between Jew and Arab is broken down – not through political slogans, but through shared faith in the God of Israel.
And then there is Botrus Mansour. A native of Nazareth, a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the longtime director of the Nazareth Baptist School – the only recognized Evangelical K–12 school in Israel – and, since 2025, the Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, representing over 600 million evangelical Christians in 143 countries. The first Arab Christian ever to hold that office.
These are not marginal figures. These are leaders of thriving communities and global institutions – a pastor who feeds Jews, Muslims, and Christians from the same table, a shepherd whose congregation embodies Jewish-Arab reconciliation in the flesh, and the head of a global alliance representing over 600 million believers.
They read the same Bible and hold the same theology that some Palestinian Christian leaders dismiss as a peculiarity of the American religious right: that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are one and the same, that His covenant with the Jewish people endures, and that the restoration of Israel is evidence that the God of Scripture keeps His promises.
If Israel were the source of Christian suffering in the Holy Land, Arab Christians within Israel would be suffering the most. Instead, they are the freest Arab Christians in the entire Middle East – free enough to lead global Evangelical institutions from the city where Jesus grew up.
This is not to say their lives are without challenge. Even in Nazareth and other mixed cities, Christian Arabs – who tend to be highly educated, professionally successful, and among the more affluent segments of Israeli society – face growing unease as security incidents and social friction increase in neighborhoods bordering Muslim-majority areas.
Some families do choose to emigrate. But the nature of that pressure is a world apart from what their co-believers endure in Judea and Samaria: it is the friction of a diverse democracy, not the terror of a system where speaking the truth about your own community can cost you your life.
The Evangelicals caught between two fires
And then there are the Evangelical Palestinians of Judea and Samaria – the most silenced, the most endangered, and the most thoroughly erased voices in the entire conversation.
These Evangelical Christians pray behind closed doors, caught between an Islamic society that threatens them and a Christian establishment that excludes them – and who have no journalist, no advocate, and no voice.
These are Palestinian believers who hold the same faith as their brothers and sisters in Lagos, Seoul, São Paulo, and Nashville. They believe the Bible and arrive at conclusions about Israel and the Jewish people that put them at odds with every power structure around them.
Their situation is impossible – squeezed between two fires.
From one side, they face the Islamic environment: a society governed by Islamic social norms, where deviation from the dominant faith carries social ostracism and, at times, physical danger, where even born Christians are subject to pressures that make evangelical conviction an act of extraordinary courage.
From the other side, they face exclusion from the established Christian community, where they are seen as a liability because their acceptance of Israel could fuel Muslim suspicions that Palestinian Christians as a whole are collaborating with Israel.
The anonymous Palestinian evangelical from Judea and Samaria concluded his testimony with the words of Proverbs:
"Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy" (Proverbs 31:8–9).
May we heed that call by giving a voice to those who risk everything simply to tell the truth—and by praying for these vulnerable Christian communities, for their protection and freedom, for greater understanding among the peoples of Israel, and for a just and lasting peace across the Holy Land and the region.
