However, changing attitudes towards the international significance of Christianity are underlined by the growth of Jewish religious antipathy and anti-Christian feeling within important segments of Israeli Jewish society and government. While difficult to gauge the prevalence of religious-based hostility in any society, analyses which have mentioned this factor with regard to Christianity have usually distinguished between historical and local contributing factors.
The historical dimension of modern Jewish anti-Christian feeling is understood, first and foremost, to be a reaction to the tragic plight of Jews in Europe. Identifying the roots of modern “anti-Semitism” to be not just in European racist and nationalist thought but in the theological core of Christianity itself, there has been a tendency to associate, or blame, the historically-disconnected local Palestinian Christians, who are themselves “Semites”, of these European sins.141 Tsimhoni, for example, describes this attitude as being rooted in the minority complex of Israel’s Jewish majority.
The Jewish experience of hundreds of years of persecution in Christian Europe still reflects on the Jewish attitude towards the Christians in Israel despite the very different historic role of the Christians in the Middle East. Modern anti-Semitism, partially rooted in the medieval Christian church attitudes towards the Jews, and the extensive missionary activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to convert them, just added to the feeling among Jews that the Christians will always try to eliminate them.142
141 Mansour (2004: 217-218) 142 Tsimhoni (2002: 142)
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Within this historical perspective, the experience of Jews living in Christian Europe is compared with that in the Muslim Middle East, with the latter, quite reasonably, receiving better coverage.
Jewish experience under Islam was much more favourable until the twentieth century. Despite the disabilities of their position as Dhimmis, they were allowed freedom of worship, vast measures of autonomy and security of life and worship. Hardly any pogroms or attempts to convert the Jews to Islam occurred.143
In a paradoxical shift from contemporary analyses of the two communities, Muslim treatment of Jews is, therefore, perceived in a far better light, while the historically-disconnected local Christians, who also suffered substantially from European Christian bigotry, become permanent reminders of this past. This irrational transference of European guilt to Palestinian Christians is frequently encountered within the literature. Moroccan-born historian Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was later appointed Minister of Internal Security for the Labour Party, revealed the full extent of this antipathy in an interview he conducted in the run-up to the 1999 national elections.
No doubt, Christianity is the eternal enemy. With Islam it has been easier. It [Islam] did not emerge from us. Its relations with us have not been ideal or without hate. I do remember pogroms... on the other hand, Muslims and Jews visited together tombs of Jewish holy men.144
Within this context, instances of Christian political activity, whether by individual Palestinian Christians or by their churches, as well as public demonstrations or expressions of the Christian faith, are often viewed with an undertone of scepticism and hostility. However, historical grounds alone do not explain modern Jewish anti-Christian sentiment in Israel today. The rise of Jewish fundamentalism and the increasing role of Jewish religious parties in Israeli politics also represents an important contributing factor.
Dumper observes a significant deterioration in Jewish-Christian relations in Israel parallel with a general drift towards right-wing religious politics since 1977. He describes the appointment of “officials patently less concerned about maintaining good relations with the Christian communities” as “souring” relations not only between the state and the various churches, but also between the state and its Christian citizens as a whole.145 To this he notes an increasing number of arson attacks and incidents of vandalism against church property
143 Tsimhoni (2002: 142) 144 Tsimhoni (2002: 142) 145 Dumper (2002: 53) 110
conducted by “Israeli militants and Jewish fundamentalists”; as well as the open support provided by the government to Jewish settler groups, particularly in Jerusalem, which share a common desire to “Judaise” Christian sectors of the city as well.146
Even pro-establishment sources have acknowledged this growing Jewish religious antipathy towards Christians. Describing an emerging political consensus between Jewish and Islamic fundamentalist groups, Israeli observes how opposition to Christian interests has unified them even further. He mentions, in particular, their mutual distaste and rejection of the 2000 millennium celebrations in Israel as symbolic of Christian rather than of either Jewish or Muslim values.
For the non-nationalistic ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel, whose record of loathing the Christians and acting violently against their missionaries is long-standing, would conceivably feel as threatened by the millennium as the Islamists do. They can envision the physical turmoil, the spiritual torment and individual unrest that would grip Israel under the pressure of the millions of tourists and pilgrims who would be literally flooding the country. Everything would be Christian, about Christianity, of Christianity, by Christianity, and the entire land would appear to yield to this orchestrated invasion by foreigners whose omnipresence, backed by the omnipotence of their Christian countries, would dictate an alien pace of life and a strange sequence of events to this land. The ghetto-minded ultra-Orthodox, just like their Islamist allies, are not equipped to deal with this reality, they are afraid of it and would do everything in their power to stifle it, thwart it or make sure it never happens. Thus, Islamists and ultra-Orthodox Jews, who see eye- to-eye on so many social and state affairs, and share a suspicion and fear of Christianity, find themselves to be ideal partners in this joint endeavour, strange bed-fellows as they may be.147
Thus, anti-Christian religious feeling hovers over both Jewish society’s and state’s attitude towards, and relationship with, Palestinian Christians in Israel.
3.11 Conclusion
While the majority of sociological analyses of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel have either overlooked or only briefly attended to issues relating to Palestinian Christians, this chapter has sought to isolate various accounts and descriptions of them in order to address what factors, if any, are deemed significant or relevant by Israeli academic scholars with regard to this community. This approach was guided by contributions made by various sociologists regarding the critically important role of scholarship and its relationship with both prevailing and countervailing political forces. A thematic approach was applied as it
146 Dumper (2002: 53, 64n4) 147 Israeli (2002: 81-82)
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united analyses from across the ideological divide and provided a broader perspective on the role and importance of each theme. What can each of these themes, therefore, say about state-minority relations with regards to Palestinian Christians in an ethnocratic Jewish state? To begin with, all accounts accept the problematic nature of Palestinian Christians’ Arab ethnicity with regards to the Jewish nature of the state and their competing national priorities, as confirmed by their common experience of exemption from military service in the IDF and patterns of land expropriation. This negative association is compounded by the important role of Palestinian Christians in Palestinian opposition parties and nationalist movements. The Arab Communist Party emerged as the first internal political threat to the Jewish establishment. That this party was traditionally dominated by Palestinian Christians is, therefore, deeply significant and indicative of the state’s general attitudes toward this community. More recently, Balad, which has also demonstrated pronounced involvement on the part of Palestinian Christian citizens of the state, continue to uphold the association of internal Palestinian politics with political “disloyalty” to the state.
By contrast, it has been shown that other factors, such as their small size, westernised outlook and their significance as a non-Muslim minority, have reduced the degree of “threat” associated with Palestinian Christians. This diminished sense of threat is primarily rooted in their small demographic weight relative to the rest of the Palestinian Arab minority, but is also based on their wider minority status in the region. It would be expected that these factors would diminish the distance between both groups and, thereby, also the necessity of state control over them. However, their small size has also increased their irrelevance to the political establishment, particularly during election campaigns when political courtship and allegiances with numerically stronger communities is sought, suggesting the hollow and functional nature of state attitudes towards the minority. Other factors have also complicated the state’s practical ability to either effectively control this community or to administer a preferential policy successfully. On the one hand, the significance of the local churches, and their connection with powerful religious centres abroad, have increased the state’s suspicions of the political capabilities and powers of its local Christian population. On the other hand, the absence of a single and centralised communal structure within the Christian community has seriously impeded the state’s ability to successfully co-opt a representative and malleable Christian leadership. In addition, elements of anti-Christian antipathy from within both the Jewish majority and the political authorities have increased the level of stigma associated with this community.
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The picture formed from the literature reviewed in this chapter paints a complicated and uneasy relationship between the Israeli state and its Palestinian Christian citizens. In some senses, this relationship is much the same as that experienced by the remainder of the Palestinian Arab minority. However, in other senses it is quite different. While some analyses question the applicability of systemic control theories to this community, it is surprising is that, beyond the level of rhetoric, there is little sociological evidence to support the existence of a preferential state attitude towards this community. On the contrary, the literature suggests that Palestinian Christians represent a unique dilemma to the state. The manner in which the state has responded to this dilemma will form the subject of the following chapters.
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Chapter Four:
Fieldwork Methodology
4.1 Introduction
This chapter lays out the methodological approach applied to the period of data collection which was undertaken by the author between 2006 and 2008. A qualitative approach was followed which was primarily based upon semi-structured interviews but also, to a lesser extent, upon archival work. An analysis of the two main field locations where the author was located during the period of her fieldwork – Nazareth and Jerusalem – is provided, together with a personal account of the importance of each of these locations to the research, as well as of their limitations. Also provided are descriptions of the author’s archival work and issues encountered with regard to its applicability to this thesis. The remainder of this chapter describes the interview process itself, discussing important topics such as the decision-making process behind the selection of respondents; the representativeness of these respondents; issues of bias and transparency; the presentation of both the research and the researcher herself; the particular line of questioning and the use of strategic follow-up questions.