Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Israeli squatters on Palestinian land in the militarily occupied West Bank conducted a pogrom against the Christian-majority village of Taybeh, setting fires and desecrating the ruins of the ancient Christian Church of St. George that dates back to 400s CE, to only a century after Roman Emperor Constantine began backing Christianity. Taybeh, in Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, has a Christian majority. Americans for the most part don’t realize that a substantial number of Palestinians is Christian even if the majority is Muslim.
No greater supporter could have been found of Israeli squatter-settlers of the sort who have been stealing Palestinian land, burning their crops, and conducting pogroms against indigenous Palestinian villagers than former preacher and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, now Trump’s ambassador to Israel. Another irony is that the squatters have become increasingly brutal in their attacks on local Palestinians, with many, many pogroms committed in recent months.
Here’s the irony. Huckabee may have been all right with the daily predations against Muslim villages, but he is a Christian nationalist and the Taybeh pogrom was a bridge too far.
On Saturday, he actually went to Taybeh and saw the damage to the venerable church himself, and said, “To commit an act of sacrilege by desecrating a place that is supposed to be a place of worship, it is an act of terror, and it is a crime. There should be consequences, and it should be harsh consequences because it is one of the last bastions of our civilization, the places where we worship.”
He doesn’t want an apology. He wants the perpetrators prosecuted. He thundered, “Not just reprimanded, that’s not enough. People need to pay a price for doing something that destroys that which belongs, not just to other people, but that which belongs to God. That is a sacrilege. It’s against the Holy.”
I don’t think that the militant religious Zionists who now control West Bank policy believe that Christian churches are holy. They routinely spit on Christians in the street in places like Jerusalem. (This is not a general Jewish but an ultra-Orthodox custom with origins in eastern Europe.
The Syriac press says of Taybeh that it
- “remains predominantly Christian to this day. The population is predominantly Greek (Rûm) Orthodox, Melkite Catholic and Latin Catholic.
French explorer Victor Guérin visited Taybeh in 1863 and reported around 800 residents—60 Catholics and the rest Orthodox Christians. An Ottoman list from around 1870 recorded the village population at 283 males, reflecting its Christian character even then.
Near the village stands the ruined Church of Saint George, as well as remnants of a destroyed fortress.”
Huckabee’s surprisingly vehement reaction to this routine squatter-settler pogrom points to one of the downsides of the current Israeli government’s attempt to cultivate white Christian nationalists as allies. Ultimately, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu wants to ethnically cleans all Palestinians, including the Christians.
“Huckabee Preaches Hellfire,” Digital. 2024.
In the past, people like Huckabee haven’t seemed to count Palestinian Christians as “real” Christians. But it seems that is changing.
At the same time, some white Christian nationalists, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, want to DOGE Israel just as the Trump administration has made deep cuts for other aid recipients. Greene said in a letter to her Republican colleagues,
- “Israel bombed the Catholic Church in Gaza, and that entire population is being wiped out as they continue their aggressive war in Gaza. My amendment would strike $500m in funding for nuclear-armed Israel’s missile defence system. The US already provides Israel with $3.8bn annually in foreign aid. 3.8 billion. That’s a lot of money.”
As the Christian Right becomes more powerful and self-assertive under Trump, its leaders increasingly have reason to criticize the policies of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which includes hard line Jewish fundamentalists who deeply dislike Christians.
It remains to be seen if this week’s fissure will become a canyon. One thing is sure: the longstanding Israeli government tactic of allying with and supporting virulent white Christian nationalists could easily boomerang not only on Israel but on Jews more generally. Historian Melani McAllister once suggested that Americans idolized Israel for the same reason they liked the Rambo films. In a time when America was losing wars in the global south, Israel was winning them, and so the Israelis could be adopted as symbols of white nationalist dominance. But now that the white Christian nationalists are in the catbird seat, they may decide they can embody hegemony quite well on their own, and don’t need Israel.
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