Wall Street Journal: Israel's Christian Awakening

Teresa Neumann : Dec 30, 2013
Adi Schwartz – The Wall Street Journal

"We were dragged into a conflict that wasn't ours. Israel takes care of us, and if not Israel, who will defend us?" -Rev. Gabriel Naddaf

(Israel)—You've heard it here-and-there in various Christian circles, and sometimes in the Israeli press, but in a surprise opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Adi Schwartz, senior editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, lays out his explanation for Israel's increasingly patriotic Arab Christian community.

Writes Schwartz: "An informal grass-roots movement, prompted in part by the persecution of Christians elsewhere in the region since the Arab Spring, wants to cooperate more closely with Israeli Jewish society—which could mean a historic change in attitude toward the Jewish state.

"Israel is my country, and I want to defend it," says Henry Zaher [for example], an 18-year-old Christian from the village of Reineh who was visiting Nazareth. "The Jewish state is good for us."

Statistics show that of Israel's 8 million citizens, 130,000 are Arabic-speaking Christians and 1.3 million are Arab Muslims.

Rev. Gabriel Naddaf, the former spokesman of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem said, "We were dragged into a conflict that wasn't ours. Israel takes care of us, and if not Israel, who will defend us?"

Some Israeli Christian leaders, Schwartz writes, are now demanding that their history and heritage be taught in state schools and some have recently established a new political party called B'nai Brith—or "Children of the Covenant."

Read Schwartz's entire article by clicking here.