These Israeli Christians Now Officially Recognized as Aramaeans, Not Arabs

Aimee Herd/News Staff : Sep 18, 2014
Ido Ben Porat-Israel National News

"In contrast with the region's countries, in which Christians and other minorities are systematically murdered, churches are destroyed and people are forced to hide their identities just because they are defined as Christians—while with every decade that the world progresses, the Arab countries go a decade backward—the state of Israel has made a giant lead forward."

Israel Today reports that local Israeli Christians are now being recognized as an independent minority, and can register now as a distinct ethnicity, following a ruling by Israel's Interior Minister Gideon Saar. (Photo via Israel National News)

"Lumped together with the Arab population for centuries," said the report, "Israel's Population, Immigration and Border Authority (PIBA) has been instructed to now recognize the bulk of the country's Christians as Aramaeans, the actual ethnicity of most of the region's Christians prior to the Arab Muslim conquest."

Father Gabriel Nadaf, leader of the Aramaean (Christian) minority in Israel commented on the decision, on his Facebook page saying that the decision "corrects a historic injustice that wrongly defined Israel's citizens of eastern-Christian descent as 'Christian Arabs,' although other than their spoken language, they have absolutely no connection to the Arab nationality."

According to an Israel National News report, Nadaf thanked Saar in a letter, for the Israeli society's "pluralism and its openness to absorbing religious and ethnic minorities out of love and acceptance, without any discrimination, according to the principles of democracy, individual freedom, freedom of conscience and freedom of worship."

Father Nadaf said that the Christians wish to become "an inseparable part" of Israeli society make their voices heard "in the social, economic, academic and political sphere in the state of Israel."

He went further and said that the decision is even more meaningful in a regional and historic perspective.

"This is the first time that a Middle Eastern state recognizes the Aramaean-Christian minority as a legitimate nationality and acts to preserve it, the teaching of its language and its absorption in society," he wrote.

"In contrast with the region's countries, in which Christians and other minorities are systematically murdered, churches are destroyed and people are forced to hide their identities just because they are defined as Christians—while with every decade that the world progresses, the Arab countries go a decade backward—the state of Israel has made a giant lead forward."