STROUDSBURG, PA — While Pennsylvania Christians in the Poconos worship freely each Sunday, their fellow believers in Christianity’s birthplace are under siege. Palestinian Christians — the direct descendants of the first Christians who walked with the apostles 2,000 years ago — have plummeted from 10% of Palestine’s population in 1922 to less than 2% today. Yet most American Christians, including those filling churches across Monroe, Pike, Wayne, and Carbon counties, have no idea these “living stones” of Christianity even exist, much less that they face systematic violence, land confiscation, and forced displacement. The question isn’t whether this is happening — the evidence is overwhelming and documented by everyone from the U.S. State Department to evangelical Christian leaders. The question is why American Christians don’t know about it, and who is responsible.

What the Evidence Shows

The documentation of Israeli responsibility is extensive and comes from sources that cannot be dismissed as biased. The U.S. State Department’s own International Religious Freedom Reports chronicle how Israel granted permits to only 2,500 out of 15,000 Palestinian Christians who applied to worship in Jerusalem for Easter 2011, how Christian clergy are systematically denied residency permits, and how the separation wall prevents Bethlehem Christians from accessing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights documented that Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians (including Christians) increased 150% annually between 2008-2012, with more than 700 incidents in just the first half of 2025 — three attacks per day. In July 2025, settlers set fire to fields next to the 5th-century Church of St. George in Taybeh, the West Bank’s last all-Christian village, spray-painting “there is no future for you here” on walls. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee — an evangelical Christian and vocal supporter of Israeli settlements — visited the village and called it “an act of terror” and “a crime,” though attacks continued even after his condemnation.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarch and Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem issued a joint statement declaring that Israeli authorities “facilitate and enable” settler violence, noting that emergency calls from the Christian community went unanswered as fires burned near their ancient church. German Ambassador Steffen Seibert stated bluntly: “These extremist settlers may claim that God gave them the land. But they are nothing but criminals abhorrent to any faith.” The evidence shows 22 Israeli settlements built on land belonging to Bethlehem — Jesus’s birthplace — surrounding and isolating the city where Christians have dropped from 86% of the population in 1950 to just 10% today. Meanwhile, 80% of Palestinian Christians worked in tourism, a sector that collapsed under Israeli occupation policies and movement restrictions, leaving thousands unemployed. This isn’t speculation or propaganda; it’s documented by Israeli human rights organizations like B’Tselem, which recorded over 1,200 settler violence incidents in 2024 alone, with Israeli authorities prosecuting almost none of the perpetrators.

Why American Christians Don’t Know

So why don’t Christians in Stroudsburg, East Stroudsburg, Milford, and Honesdale know any of this? The answer is uncomfortable: American evangelical Christian culture has been deeply influenced by Christian Zionism, a theological movement that views modern Israel as fulfillment of biblical prophecy and interprets any criticism of Israeli policies as opposition to God’s plan. This framework — dominant in many Pocono-area evangelical and fundamentalist churches — teaches that supporting Israel is a Christian duty, while rendering Palestinian Christians invisible or irrelevant to the narrative. The irony is profound: American Christians send millions in donations to protect Jews in Israel while their own co-religionists — people who literally maintain the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity, and other sites where Jesus walked — are being systematically forced from their ancestral homeland. Major Christian media outlets rarely cover Palestinian Christian persecution, Christian tour groups to the Holy Land often skip meetings with Palestinian believers, and the few Christian leaders who speak out (like the Patriarchs of Jerusalem) are ignored by American congregations who have been taught that Israel can do no wrong.

A Plea From Jerusalem

The Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, and Catholic churches have issued statements supporting Palestinian Christians and calling for accountability for settler violence, but these mainline Protestant and Catholic voices are drowned out in evangelical-dominated areas like the Poconos. The reality is stark: Bethlehem’s Christian population has collapsed under Israeli settlement expansion and the separation wall. Taybeh faces repeated arson attacks with impunity. Gaza’s ancient churches have been bombed. Palestinian Christian families like the Dawabshehs — a couple and their baby who burned to death in a 2015 settler attack — receive little attention from American believers who claim to care about Christian persecution globally. Until American Christians — including those in Pennsylvania’s churches — are willing to look beyond politically comfortable narratives and recognize that their brothers and sisters in Christ are being driven from the land where Christianity was born, the exodus will continue. The church leaders in Jerusalem have made their plea clear: they need international Christians to witness, document, and demand accountability. The question for Pocono congregations is whether they’re willing to listen to the patriarchs and heads of churches in the Holy Land, or whether theological commitments to modern Israel will continue to trump solidarity with the ancient Christian communities who have kept the faith alive in that land for two millennia.