John Menadue writes of the ethnic cleansing of Christians from the Holy Land and the shameful silence of Australian Christian leaders.
They are the oldest Christian communities in the world. They have endured Roman persecution, Byzantine decline, the Crusades, Ottoman rule and British colonialism. What they have not survived is the state of Israel.
The 1922 British census identified that approximately 11 per cent of the population of what was then known as Mandatory Palestine were Christians. Then followed the Nakba and Palestinian erasure. Today Palestinian Christians across all of historic Palestine – Israel, the West Bank and Gaza – account for approximately 1 per cent of the total Palestinian population.
In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christianity, and the neighbouring towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour, Christians comprised 86 per cent of the population in 1950. They now constitute approximately 10 per cent. This is among the most rapid population collapses of an Indigenous Christian community in modern history.
In his October 2024 letter to Catholics of the Middle East, written on the first anniversary of 7 October, Pope Francis expressed solidarity with Gaza and Middle Eastern Christians. In his Easter message, just before his death, he said: “I think of the people of Gaza and its Christian community where a terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation”. He also declared his “closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel and all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people”.
Days after his election as Pope, Leo called for an immediate ceasefire and delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Four months later, and marking the International Day of Peace, Pope Leo said “those who really love the people living on the Gaza strip will work to achieve peace in the Holy Land…. Together with you and with the pastors of the churches in the Holy Land I repeat there is no future based on violence forced exile or revenge”.
The Australian Catholic Bishops issued a token statement in May 2024 calling for an end to violence in the Holy Land, but omitted to say anything about the erasure of the Christian community. In May 2025, together with other Catholics – Claire Condon, Chris Sidoti, Marilyn Hatton, Francis Sullivan, Claire Victory, John Warhurst and Patty Faulkner – I sent a letter to Catholic Bishops asking them to speak up for Palestine. There was no response.
Palestinian Christians report that Israel’s control of the West Bank and the current war in Gaza are the primary drivers of the community’s decline, not Muslim neighbours with whom Palestinian Christians have existed for over a millennium. Research carried out by Dar al-Kalima University in the occupied West Bank, interviewing more than 1,000 people, concluded that the Israeli occupation of Palestine was the main factor behind the exodus of Palestinian Christians from the region. Only 2 per cent of Christians named religious extremism as a driving factor. The report said the main causes were: “The pressure of Israeli occupation, ongoing constraints, discriminatory policies, arbitrary arrests, confiscation of lands added to the general sense of hopelessness among Palestinian Christians.”
Israel’s nation state law of 2018, which declares Israel the nation state of the Jewish people, specifically downgrades Arabic from an official language and has institutionalised a discriminatory framework that explicitly excludes Christian and Muslim Arab citizens from the founding national character of the state of Israel. It’s called apartheid.
There has also been concern about the violence against Christians in the Holy Land. It has included physical aggression, spitting and stone throwing, and vandalism against churches, cemeteries and Christian property. The heads of all the churches in the Holy Land signed a joint statement in 2023 condemning the attacks and warning of the threat to the Christian presence in the Holy Land. The statement specifically condemned: “This systematic and unprecedented attack against Christians in the Holy Land …”
The small village of Emmaus tells a very big story about erasure. It was a sacred Christian site destroyed by Israel in the 1967 war. For Christians, Emmaus represents the foundational post-resurrection encounter, the moment when the risen Christ was recognised not in the temple or the synagogue but in the sharing of a meal with ordinary people on the road.
The site was venerated by Christian pilgrims from the third century. Throughout the mediaeval period, Eastern Orthodox pilgrims and Catholic missionaries identified Imwas, the Arabic rendering of Emmaus, as the authentic site of the gospel encounter. At the time of the 1967 war there was a mixed community that had lived continuously on the site for centuries. During the 1967 war, the inhabitants of Emmaus were expelled by the IDF. The village was obliterated by the IDF, along with two other Palestinian villages nearby.
On the ruins of Imwas/Emmaus a Canada Park was established, a recreational forest funded by the Jewish National Fund of Canada. Was the park planted over the ruins specifically to make the erasure of the ancient villages permanent and to reframe the landscape as Israeli recreational space rather than Palestinian homeland? Human rights organisations campaigned for the Jewish National Fund to at least acknowledge the history of the land on which the park was built and to include information about the destroyed villages. The JNF declined to do so. Only after litigation did signs go up, which were soon vandalised and/or removed. The park continues to function as Israeli recreational space without any acknowledgment of the villages that it replaced, including Emmaus.
The ethnic cleansing of both Christians and Muslims from Palestine continues. It is not only erasure of a people but of their culture and history.
Australian leaders in church and state are complicit in the ethnic erasure of the Palestinian people, Muslim and Christian alike, from their homeland. They appeal for our help. But they are not being heard. They are being ignored.
John Menadue is the Founder of Pearls and Irritations and a board member. He was formerly the Editor-in-Chief. John was the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.