However hard Christians have it in Israel, they are usually safer there than any other place in the Middle East*.
Here’s a universal principle that applies to this story: The more you love your religion and your people, the more likely it is that you will hate other religions and other peoples that threaten you. Christians and Jews have a long history, and for most of it, their fortune went in opposite directions. Since the Enlightenment, however, their fortunes have run in generally similar directions as secularists dominate.
The Washington Post reports:
The assault, recorded by surveillance cameras in broad daylight, shocked many. But not Nikodemus Schnabel, abbot of the Dormition Abbey, which the nun had visited before she was attacked.
Christians today are “hit, spit at, beaten,” said Schnabel, who has experienced it all — and worse. “There was a video in this case, but you can be sure there are so, so many undocumented things.”
“Believe me,” he sighed, “this is not the case of one lost soul.”
Across the Holy Land, Christians are being targeted by a tide of hostility and violence — attacks that risk drawing the ire of Christians in the United States, including evangelicals who are traditionally among Israel’s most ardent American supporters.
In Jerusalem, Christians say they are routinely harassed by ultra-Orthodox Jews and huddle in fear when Religious Zionists rampage through the Old City, destroying property during their processions.
* Iraq’s Christian population fell from about 1.5 million before 2003 to under 150,000. Syria’s Christians dropped from roughly 10 percent of the population to a fraction of that through war and emigration. Egypt’s Copts, the region’s largest Christian community, face periodic church bombings, mob violence in Upper Egypt, and a state that prosecutes the attackers inconsistently. Saudi Arabia bans public Christian worship outright. In Gaza, the Christian community has nearly vanished. Against that field, Israel looks good: Christians there have full citizenship, vote, serve in the Knesset, run schools and hospitals, outperform the Jewish majority on some educational metrics, and their numbers grow slightly rather than collapse. Nobody bombs churches in Haifa on Easter. The harassment the Post documents, spitting, shoving, arson at rural churches, is a different order of threat than what drove Christians out of Mosul.
The first complication is Lebanon. Christians there hold the presidency by constitutional design, command their own political parties and militias’ successor movements, and number perhaps 30 percent of the population. A Maronite in Beirut lives with state collapse and economic ruin, but not with minority status in the Israeli sense. Whether he is “safer” depends on whether you count Israeli airstrikes and general Lebanese dysfunction against him, which is a cost but not persecution for his faith. If Lebanon counts, Israel is arguably second, not first.
The second complication is the West Bank, which the Post article centers. Taybeh sits under Israeli security control. The settlers burning St. George and seizing olive groves operate under Israeli jurisdiction, and the state that could stop them declines to. So the comparison “Christians in Israel versus Christians elsewhere” smuggles in a boundary question. If you count only citizens inside the Green Line, Israel ranks at or near the top of the region. If you count everyone under Israeli control, the picture splits: Haifa and Nazareth on one ledger, Taybeh on another, and the Taybeh ledger looks more like the regional norm of a shrinking community squeezed out.
There is also a trajectory point. The claim is true as a snapshot. The article’s data, incidents doubling since 2023, suggests the gap is narrowing from the Israeli side, not because the region improved but because Israel’s floor is dropping. “Safest in the Middle East” is a low bar that Israel long cleared with room to spare. The story to watch is whether it keeps clearing it with the same margin.
Nationalism is part of this anti-Christian persecution, but the article points to something narrower and more useful than a general rise in in-group feeling. Israeli Jewish nationalism surged after October 7 across the whole society, yet most Israeli Jews do not spit on monks. The perpetrators come from two specific populations, and the two cases in the article have different logics.
The Jerusalem harassment is religious, not national. The spitters and shovers are mostly ultra-Orthodox and Religious Zionist youth acting out an old intra-Jewish tradition of contempt for Christianity, the tradition Itamar Ben Gvir (b. 1976) defended on radio in 2017 as “ancient.” That animus predates the state. What changed is the price. When the man who defended the Church of the Multiplication arsonists in court now runs the national police, a teenager who spits on a nun makes a reasonable bet that nothing happens to him. Harani’s point about education matters here too: a curriculum that teaches gentile hostility as a permanent condition produces graduates who treat visible Christians as legitimate targets. So the driver is less “increased nationalism” than a permission structure. The underlying attitudes were stable; enforcement and elite signaling collapsed.
Taybeh is a different phenomenon wearing the same headline. The settlers seizing Khouriyeh’s olive grove and wrecking Bassir’s cement factory target Christians as Palestinians, not as Christians. The cross on the church gives the story its Western resonance, but the land grab follows the same pattern applied to Muslim villages across the West Bank. If anything, Taybeh’s Christian identity has been a mild liability for the settlers, because it activates a constituency, American evangelicals, that Muslim victims cannot reach. Which is why the Huckabee retraction stung so much there.
Nationalism supplies the atmosphere, but the proximate cause is a government that moved the entrepreneurs of anti-gentile violence from the defendant’s table to the cabinet. Attitudes changed less than incentives did. The doubling of incidents from 2023 to 2025 tracks the Ben Gvir ministry more than it tracks any measurable shift in what ordinary Israelis believe. Demography compounds it over time, since the Haredi and Religious Zionist share of Israeli youth keeps growing, which means the population most likely to hold the old contempt is the population expanding fastest.
The victims are cheap targets. Christians in Israel number under two percent, vote in no bloc that matters to this coalition, and their foreign patrons, the Vatican and European consulates, carry no domestic cost. The only patron who might impose a price is American evangelicalism, and the article shows that lever starting to move through Carlson, Owens, and the questions aimed at Vance. If the behavior ever gets expensive, watch how fast the government rediscovers its founding values.
John J. Mearsheimer argues that the behavior of the nationalists is not an aberration of rational individuals but the predictable output of intense socialization and tribal identity.
Because humans are social beings who define themselves through their groups, individual reasoning plays a minor role in how these actors form their moral codes. The nationalists involved in these attacks were born into a society that shaped their perceptions of threat and belonging before they had the capacity to think critically about their actions. Their moral code is not a product of universalist liberal logic—which assumes individuals will respect the rights of others—but of the specific, intense socialization they received within their tribe.
From this perspective, the conflict arises because the individuals identify so strongly with their group that the survival and dominance of that group supersede abstract concerns for individual rights. They see the “other” not as an individual with inherent, universal rights, but as a potential threat to the tribe’s cohesion and security. When they act against members of other groups, they do so because they are embedded in a social structure that values tribal loyalty over liberal universalism.
Mearsheimer’s argument suggests that liberal attempts to curb this violence through appeals to universal human rights will fail. Such appeals rely on the belief that individuals can set aside their tribal identity and embrace a shared, rational moral code. Instead, he argues that the intense socialization and the tribal nature of the human animal mean that these groups will prioritize their own cohesion. The individuals act in ways that protect the group, and they are willing to make sacrifices—or commit acts of violence—because their identity is entirely bound to the success and survival of that tribe. The moral vocabulary used by these groups is a tool to reinforce this social solidarity, turning the conflict into a necessary struggle for the group’s continued existence.
