What we can learn from Gaza’s Christians
Only a few hundred Christians remain in Gaza today.
For a community whose roots there stretch back nearly two thousand years, that number should provoke a simple question: What happened to Gaza’s Christians?
Part of the answer can be found in the testimony of Naji, a Christian from Gaza whom I interviewed about growing up as a member of an increasingly small religious minority. His story is about radicalization — how ideas transmitted through sermons, mosque lessons, religious circles and everyday social life eventually reached children, classrooms and the Christian kid sitting at the next desk.
Naji describes a profound change after Hamas took complete control of Gaza. According to him, Christians increasingly stopped being understood simply as fellow Gazans and began being viewed through religious categories: dhimmi, “People of the Book,” unbelievers destined for Hell.
The consequences became particularly visible among children.
By high school, Naji was one of only seven or eight Christian students. Some classmates associated Christians with the Crusaders. Others believed Christians “worship the cross.”
“They didn’t grasp that we were Gazans just like them,” he told me. “For them, we’re merely guests.”
Guests.
That may be the most revealing word in Naji’s testimony.
Christianity has existed in Gaza for nearly two millennia. Yet a Christian child could walk into a classroom and discover that other children had somehow learned that he was the outsider.
This is what radicalization looks like before anyone picks up a weapon.
We tend to discuss radicalization at its most spectacular stage: a militia, a terrorist organization, an attack. But the process begins much earlier and somewhere far more ordinary.
It begins with categories.
A child learns who is a believer and who is an unbeliever. Who will enter Heaven and who will enter Hell. Who belongs naturally to society and who is merely tolerated within it.
Then he meets a Christian child at school.
The theology suddenly has a face.
Naji described Christian students being bullied because of their faith. The children doing the bullying did not invent these ideas themselves. They were absorbing an environment created by adults and reproducing it in the classroom.
As a Syrian Christian, this aspect of Naji’s story resonated with me. Our experiences are different, but I understand the strange experience of belonging to one of the oldest communities in a country while sometimes being treated as though your presence requires an explanation.
Naji’s account goes beyond childhood bullying.
He recounts Christians being abducted and describes the case of a Christian who, he says, was pressured into converting to Islam on television before eventually fleeing to Cyprus.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s Christian population continued shrinking.
Naji estimates that only around 300 to 400 Christians remain, compared with several thousand in previous decades.
The demographic decline should matter more than ceremonial language about coexistence. A society can preserve churches while losing Christians. It can celebrate Christmas while Christian families quietly conclude that their children would be safer and freer somewhere else.
And this vulnerability is not limited to Gaza.
I have heard troubling stories directly from Christians in Beit Jala concerning pressure and encroachment involving Christian-owned land and property. Their experiences reveal another dimension of the problem: Christians can become low-hanging fruit.
In this region, social power is not always exercised through courts and institutions. It can come from large families, clans, weapons and networks capable of mobilizing quickly.
Many Christian families possess none of these advantages.
They do not have enormous armed tribes behind them. They cannot summon hundreds of relatives when somebody threatens their land. They do not have militias waiting to intervene.
In an environment shaped by militarization, weak institutions and radical ideas, people learn who can retaliate — and who cannot.
That creates a dangerous equation.
Religious radicalization tells someone that the Christian is different, perhaps inferior. Social reality tells him that the same Christian may also be vulnerable.
Contempt combined with perceived weakness is dangerous for any minority.
Once families begin leaving, the problem compounds itself. A community of several thousand becomes a community of hundreds. Extended families scatter. Children are born abroad. Every departure makes those remaining more isolated.
This is how ancient communities disappear.
Usually there is no single moment when somebody announces that Christianity has ended.
A bullied teenager decides his children will grow up somewhere else. A family frightened about its property leaves. Another follows relatives abroad.
A baptism that would once have been celebrated in Gaza takes place in Berlin, Stockholm, Montreal or Sydney.
Eventually almost everything survives except the people.
The churches survive. The monasteries survive. The icons survive. The photographs of Christmas survive.
What disappears is the living community that gave those things meaning.
That is why Naji’s testimony matters.
A Christian from Gaza should not have to prove that he belongs to Gaza.
He is not a guest.
He is not a Crusader.
He is not a dhimmi whose place depends upon the tolerance of the majority.
He is Palestinian.
And a Christian child sitting among Muslim classmates should grow up in a society that teaches them something much simpler than tolerance: He is their equal.
If that principle is not taught to children and defended against radicalization, Gaza may one day retain its ancient churches and its Christian history.
There may simply be almost no Christians left to inherit it.
Ahed al-Hendi is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Peace Communications.
