They Survived 1,400 Years of Islam — They May Not Survive a Century of Israeli Control

On September 1, 2026, nearly 10,000 children in Jerusalem were locked out of their classrooms. All 15 Christian schools in the city suspended classes because the Israeli government refused to renew entry permits for more than 70 teachers and staff from the West Bank. The General Secretariat for Christian Educational Institutions in Jerusalem said the permits were denied “suddenly and without prior notice.”

It was the second such shutdown of 2026. In January, Israel revoked permits for 171 teachers. Those got restored. So did these — partially. After a one-day protest closure, Israeli authorities renewed some permits: some for a week, some for a month, some through December. None through the end of the school year. Israeli authorities gave no explanation.

This isn’t a labor dispute. It’s the visible edge of a legislative campaign to sever the pipeline that keeps Christian education alive in Jerusalem — one piece of a larger pattern most Americans have no idea exists.

1,400 Years of Survival

The Christian presence in this land is not a colonial artifact. It predates Islam by six centuries. Palestinian Christians are among the oldest continuously existing Christian communities on earth.

When Muslim armies took Jerusalem in 637 AD, the Christian communities were already there. They stayed. Under the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasids, Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty, the Mamluks, and four centuries of Ottoman rule, Christian villages remained. Taybeh, Birzeit, Beit Sahour, Beit Jala, Zababdeh, Ramallah — these were established communities with churches, land, families, economies. The relationship wasn’t always easy. Christians paid the jizya tax and held a subordinate legal status. But the Ottoman millet system treated them as permanent, self-governing constituencies with an institutional right to exist. They endured for 1,400 years.

They didn’t just survive. They built. European and American churches founded Jerusalem’s Christian schools during the 18th and 19th centuries under Ottoman rule. The Sisters of St. Joseph opened theirs in 1847. Schmidt’s Girls College in East Jerusalem opened in 1886. St. George’s Anglican dates to 1899. By the mid-19th century, 45 Christian schools and orphanages ringed the Old City, educating Christian and Muslim students side by side. They became the backbone of modern education in the region and outlasted every political convulsion that followed — the collapse of Ottoman rule, the British Mandate, the 1948 war, the 1967 war, and both Intifadas.

They are not surviving Israeli policy in 2026.

The Villages Already Gone

Everyone talks about Taybeh because Taybeh still exists. Nobody talks about the Christian villages Israel already erased.

The historian Walid Khalidi documented more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed or depopulated during the 1948 war. Several were Christian.

Iqrit was a village of 616 Greek Melkite Catholics in northern Galilee. When Israeli troops arrived in October 1948, the village priest welcomed them with a Bible, chanting in Hebrew. The village didn’t resist. A week later, the military ordered everyone out for two weeks. They were never let back. The villagers took Israel to its own Supreme Court and won. The military ignored the ruling and demolished the village anyway. Iqrit’s descendants — Israeli citizens — still hold Christmas gatherings on the ruins.

Kafr Bir’im was a Maronite Christian village of roughly 1,000 in the Upper Galilee. When the Haganah arrived, residents raised white flags and rang the church bells. Israel expelled them on November 13, 1948, forcing them to flee in the cold to Lebanese villages across the border. The Israeli government later promised them the right to return if Likud won an election. Likud won. The promise stayed broken. Today, Bar’am National Park covers the village land.

Al-Mujaydil, a town of 1,900 southwest of Nazareth with a Roman Catholic church and monastery, got razed and overbuilt by the Israeli city of Migdal HaEmek. Pope Pius XII intervened on behalf of the Christians. Israel offered them the right to return — but only the Christians, not their Muslim neighbors. They refused to come back without the Muslims they’d lived alongside for generations. Israel destroyed the remaining houses.

Eilabun, a Christian village in the Galilee, fell on October 30, 1948. Four priests negotiated the surrender. Afterward, the Israeli commander selected 12 to 14 young men and executed them. Historian Benny Morris confirms those killed were Christians. The remaining residents got marched to the Lebanese border.

Ma’lul near Nazareth is a Jewish National Fund pine forest now, planted over the ruins. The two village churches still stand, used as cow sheds by a nearby kibbutz.

Israeli forests, parks, kibbutzim, and cities went up where these villages stood. The people who lived in them scattered to Lebanon, Jordan, and the refugee camps. The Christian villages under attack today — Taybeh, Birzeit, Beit Sahour, Zababdeh — are the ones Israel hasn’t finished off yet.

The Villages Under Attack Now

Taybeh, the last entirely Christian village in the West Bank, is identified with the biblical town of Ephraim. Its population has dropped from 1,700 to around 1,200. “Insecurity has become a daily reality,” said Father Bashar Fawadleh, the Latin parish priest. Settlers have cut fences, bathed in private water cisterns, blocked workers from reaching their jobs. In 2025, they burned down the village’s historic Church of Saint George. Last June, they torched agricultural fields, opened fire on houses, threw Molotov cocktails. When Palestinian firefighters tried to respond, settlers blocked them.

Joseph Hazboun of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association visited a Christian family’s property near Taybeh in early August. A settler drove up on him at full speed on a tractor, a gun concealed under his shirt. Hazboun has lived in the Holy Land his whole life. He called it “the worst crisis that we have witnessed even since 1967.”

Fawadleh dates the violence to when Ben-Gvir and Smotrich joined the government coalition. Before that, Taybeh had no problems with neighboring settlements. “Our problems are with the fanatic mentality from the settlers created by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who want to create the ‘Kingdom of Israel.'”

The same is happening across the West Bank. Settlers attacked Birzeit in January 2026 — Bishop William Shomali said they’ve been coming “almost every day to threaten people in their own homes.” In Beit Sahour — the Shepherds’ Field — settlers bulldozed a hilltop overnight on November 19, 2025, and placed caravans on it; Finance Minister Smotrich reportedly attended the outpost inauguration. That same day, settlers seized a one-acre parcel deeded to a Christian family Shomali personally knew, and planted an Israeli flag on it. In Urtas, settlers occupied land belonging to a convent of sisters. In Zababdeh, they burned cars, homes, crops, and St. George Church. In the Jordan Valley, they’ve been attacking Palestinian farmers on Latin Patriarchate-owned land.

Peace Now documented more than 1,800 settler attacks across the West Bank in 2025. 838 Palestinians were hurt, nine killed, 22 communities displaced entirely. The UN concluded Israeli authorities are “directly involved,” backing settler attacks with financial and military support while the courts grant settlers impunity.

The Legislation Behind the School Closures

The state’s tools aren’t only bulldozers. In Jerusalem, the campaign runs through paperwork.

On July 6, 2025, the Knesset’s Education Committee approved a bill banning Palestinian teachers with West Bank degrees from teaching in Israel or East Jerusalem. On January 21, 2026, the full Knesset passed the law, 31 to 10. The stated justification was academic standards. The real one came out in committee: at a May 2025 session, a Likud MK said the law was needed because Palestinian-educated teachers “do not cultivate Israelisation” among students. About 60 percent of East Jerusalem’s 6,700 Arab educators hold Palestinian degrees.

On March 10, 2026, the Ministry of Education sent a letter to Christian school directors mandating that only teachers residing in Jerusalem and holding Israeli certificates could be hired — killing a “green card” system that had worked for years. A separate measure in force since February bars Palestinian Authority degree holders from teaching entirely.

Aid to the Church in Need estimates more than 200 Christian teachers could lose their jobs. A General Secretariat representative was blunter: “There are not enough Christian teachers in Jerusalem to take over.” Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel — has challenged the ban before the Supreme Court.

The Harassment Campaign in Jerusalem

The Religious Freedom Data Center, a Jewish Israeli watchdog, logged 181 hostile incidents against Christians in Israel in 2025 — up from 89 in 2023. Attacks nearly doubled again in Q2 2026. Spitting accounted for 56 percent of everything logged. The Rossing Center identifies the perpetrators as ultra-Orthodox ultra-nationalists, yeshiva students, and Hilltop Youth.

In May 2026, a man chased and assaulted a French Catholic nun on the streets of Jerusalem. In April, an Israeli soldier smashed a statue of Jesus with a sledgehammer in southern Lebanon while another soldier filmed it. On Palm Sunday 2026, Israeli police blocked the Latin Patriarch, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, from reaching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate Mass — the first interruption in centuries. Not the Ottomans, not the British, not Jordan, not any war fought over Jerusalem had ever stopped it. Israeli police did.

What Americans Don’t Understand

Most American evangelicals believe Israel protects Christianity in the Middle East. The threat, they’ll tell you, comes from Islam.

The record says the opposite.

Nobody burned St. George Church in Taybeh during 1,400 years of Muslim governance. Israeli settlers burned it in 2025. Iqrit’s priest greeted Israeli soldiers with a Bible and a Hebrew chant, then won his village’s right of return in Israel’s own Supreme Court. The military demolished it anyway. Al-Mujaydil’s Christians refused to return without their Muslim neighbors, so Israel bulldozed the houses and built a city on top. The West Bank’s Christian population has collapsed from roughly 11 percent before 1948 to barely one percent today. Gaza’s Christian population — squeezed for years by Israel’s blockade and multiple wars — stood at roughly 1,000 before October 2023. Church leaders say it’s now about half that. Israel bombed the Roman Catholic Holy Family Church, Gaza’s only Catholic parish, in July 2025.

Palestinian Christianity survived 1,400 years alongside Muslim rule. Israel is erasing it in less than a century.

The Israeli state does not treat Christian communities as allies. Its legislature, ministries, military, police, and courts treat them the way they treat every non-Jewish population under Israeli control: as obstacles to demographic consolidation. The Knesset members who sponsored the teacher ban said so themselves. The goal is “Israelisation.” Finance Minister Smotrich personally attended a settlement outpost inauguration on Christian-owned land in Beit Sahour.

Philip Farah, a founder of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace and a former St. George’s student, drew the comparison Americans should recognize: “Israel’s permit regime — reminiscent of the notorious South African apartheid pass system — greatly limits the ability of Palestinians anywhere under Israeli rule to access the best talent for their schools.”

The story Americans have been told about Israel and Christianity is wrong. These communities didn’t need saving from Muslim rule. They need saving from Israeli rule. Until that fact enters American political conversation, the oldest Christian communities on earth will keep disappearing from the land where Christianity began — while American Christians send money and political support to the government dismantling them.

What Remains Unknown

Whether the 70-plus teachers whose permits were partially renewed will receive full-year authorization is unresolved. Whether Adalah’s Supreme Court challenge will succeed is pending. Whether Israel’s October elections will produce any policy change is an open question — though most Jerusalem Christians, who hold permanent residency but not citizenship, cannot fully participate in that electoral system.

Father Fawadleh said what the numbers and the legislation can’t capture: “Today, perhaps the gravest problem is invisible. Residents are beginning to lose the basic sense that they are safe in their own homes.”

Sources: Religion News Service, OSV News, Aid to the Church in Need, Vatican News, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, CNEWA, Times of Israel, Haaretz, WAFA, AP, America Magazine, Christianity Today, Rossing Center, Religious Freedom Data Center, OHCHR, B’Tselem, Peace Now, Jerusalem Story, Institute for Palestine Studies, Foreign Policy, +972 Magazine.