All right, you guys on the line.
I've got the great Ramzi Baroud.
He is the editor of Palestine Chronicle.
That's at Palestine chronicle.com.
And he's the author of my father was a freedom fighter, and the last earth, a Palestinian story.
And we run him all the time at anti war.com, including this one, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Christians that nobody is talking about.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing Ramzi?
I'm doing well, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Palestinian Christians, why I thought all of them terrible Arabs were all terrible Muslims, and therefore the alien enemy.
Yes, but it happens that Palestinian Christians are the most ancient Christian community in the world.
And that continued to be the case over the course of thousands of years.
But sadly, we are now seeing this process of ethnic cleansing that happens at a very slow pace, as if no one is interested to have them part of the conversation.
Israel wants to see the conflict or the so called conflict as that between it and Muslims, and therefore fits into the larger global discourse of extremism and radicalism and so forth.
And this is why they are not interested to talk about the Christians.
And that's why we must talk about the Christians.
Because as far as Palestinians are concerned, this is not a struggle for religion.
It's not a war over religious ideas.
It is rather a war over national rights, over human rights.
And the Palestinian and Christian, as much as the Palestinian Muslim is oppressed in all of this process, and they are fighting together, in prison together, killed together at times.
You know, I read a thing about the military commander during the Nakba, the military commander who was ordered to cleanse Bethlehem, refused his orders.
And he was an American, I think an American Christian, who had volunteered to fight with the Zionists and just said, Oh, no, I'm not cleansing Bethlehem of Palestinians.
Sorry.
And that was why Bethlehem had survived the Nakba in the first place.
Why there are Christians there to this day, they would have been all kicked out back then.
Yeah, I mean, if that mindset existed, then it doesn't really exist anymore.
To the contrary, sadly, we see this very strong support.
You know, the old days Zionist support came from liberal circles, and even socialists in various countries, especially in the U.S., they kind of saw Israel as, you know, believe it or not, as some sort of a socialist utopia.
Well, that kind of, you know, that sentiment dwindled out a long time ago when the Israeli project was exposed for what it was.
But now we see the core of the Israeli support coming from, from, you know, evangelical Christian groups who are supporting Israel and advocating Israel's rights and advocating for Israeli weapons and so forth and so on.
And yet celebrating Christmas whenever there is a Christian opportunity to celebrate while their own brethren, I mean, if you are to think of it from a religious point of view, their own brethren in Beit Jala, Beit Lahem, Ramallah, Jerusalem, are being constantly chased out of their houses, their churches, losing their businesses.
They are constantly subjugated and targeted.
And yet somehow that that is OK in the point of view of those so-called Christians.
I also think that we as, you know, Palestinians might have also kind of committed some sort of a mistake here.
And I don't mean Palestinians per se as much as those who support Palestinians within the Arab world, within the Muslim world, where they kind of also kind of were comfortable with this designation that this is about Muslim holy, you know, holy shrines and Muslim this and that and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
In the process of doing so, they forgot that we are actually talking about symbolic, you know, monuments as opposed to, you know, a fight actually over the mosque as a wall and bricks and so forth and so on, to the point that, you know, when I travel in Muslim countries, say, Malaysia, Indonesia, they find it surprising that there are actually Palestinian Christians in Palestine.
And they kind of find it bewildering.
How is it even possible?
And the odd thing about all of that is that at one point, Palestinians were Christians.
You know, Christianity came to Palestine a thousand years before Islam came.
So the roots of our culture is Christian.
And this is why you have a great deal of tolerance between Muslims and Christians in Palestine, because in many ways, we're all affected by each other's ideas and beliefs and values and, you know, spiritual references and so forth and so on.
You know, for example, the keys to the holiest Christian shrines in Jerusalem have historically been entrusted to two Muslim families by the Christian community.
It's a tradition that started a thousand years ago, and it continues until this day.
The symbolic keys of Christian churches in Jerusalem is actually entrusted to Muslim families.
So this is why we have this kind of tolerance in Palestine itself.
But outside, you have all of these misunderstandings and these misconstrued narratives that this is ultimately a conflict over religion.
Yeah, well, I mean, part of this is so wrapped up in race, it really is, and not to sound all social justice-y or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that the Israelis, at least their ruling caste of Ashkenazi Jews, are whiter.
And many of them, you know, like their present prime minister, who went to high school in the United States, and their former ambassador, who is an American, you know, Michael Oren was an American, who went and became Israeli.
They just seem more like the American majority to the American majority, whereas the Palestinians are, I don't know, a horde of orcs from the east or something like that.
But the fact that some of the Palestinians are Christians is like, you know, throwing a monkey wrench in that whole narrative or whatever, you know, that's a terrible way to mix and ruin a metaphor.
It ruins that whole narrative.
It brings up this gray area.
Well, wait a minute.
If we are just on the side of the Israeli Jews against them, the Arab Muslims, then what does it mean when actually a substantial percentage of those Palestinian Arabs actually are Christians, and have the same religion as the American supermajority who supports the Israelis in this case?
I think, you know, earlier when you said somehow this is okay, I think the reality is, is somehow the Americans don't know that there are Palestinian Christians at all.
And, you know, covering up the fact that there are Palestinian Christians is, you know, probably one of the highest priorities of the, you know, Israeli's Hasbara efforts, is to make sure that Americans are under the misapprehension, that every Arab over there is a Muslim, and that these things are the same, and that therefore they can be considered, you know, all enemy aliens somehow of some other civilization.
But if some of them are Christians, well, that just raises all kinds of questions, some of which you already answered.
Like, well, how could there be Christians there?
Well, that's where Christianity was invented, and they've always been there.
They never left.
These are the same people we're talking about.
They're great-great-grandchildren, etc.
And I like to think, Ramsey, I'm pretty sure that if the American supermajority knew that there were, you know, a substantial number of Christians whose rights are also involved in this question, and are on the receiving end of this oppression from the Israelis, along with their Muslim brothers, that that might really change the conversation a lot.
That might, you know, be an entirely new frame of reference, an entirely new narrative about who's Zooming who over there anyway, you know?
I have seen that in action, Scott, as well, because in my last book, The Lost Earth, a Palestinian story, there was a story of a Palestinian Christian woman who really removed the word Christian from there.
She is like any other Palestinian, same sentiments, the same struggles, the same identity issues.
But her references, or the Bible, and her church in Beit Jala, and her identity as a Palestinian living in Australia, and so forth.
And I went, as part of my book tour, to Atlanta to speak to various Christian denominations.
And you could see this kind of almost like a puzzled look on their faces.
Like, how does this even factor into Palestine, Israel?
Now, you would think, but nobody can really be that stupid, with all due respect.
I mean, is it possible that they did not know that Christians existed in Palestine period?
It's not that, precisely.
It's just the fact that we, you know, because Israel finds the Christians inconvenient.
So they try to kind of marginalize them entirely.
And indeed, in the last 70 years, the number of Christians went from as high as 20% of the overall Palestinian population to anywhere between 1% to 2% of today.
So like, more than 10 folds of Christians been wiped out, completely pushed out of Palestine.
So that, the fact that they are inconvenient for Israel, Israel has its own strategy, and they are carrying this out to the letter.
But for many people who are somewhat aware that there are Christian communities in Palestine, they found this kind of also convenient narrative where the Christians were presented as some kind of, you know, caught in the crossfire.
You know, they are Christians, they are not Palestinians, Palestinian Christians, they are not Arab Christians, they are just Christians, Christian communities that happen to be there.
And we need to somehow keep them out of this and keep them safe, you know, because that's the Christian thing to do.
In 2002, when the second intifada was at its height, a group of Palestinian fighters from Bethlehem took refuge in a church, in the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem.
Now, that's what's really interesting how the U.S. media covered this, because for Palestinians, these are Christians protecting fighters, whether they are Muslims or Christians, they are protecting activists that Israel was going to go and execute in the street.
You had monks standing there, taking the beatings of the soldiers day after day.
The siege of the Nativity Church lasted for months.
Eventually, thanks to the monks and the priests in the Church of the Nativity, these men and women were eventually sent out to Jordan to exile and elsewhere, as opposed to them being killed or arrested by Israel.
For Palestinians, this is a usual story of unity among our community.
For the U.S. media, the way they played it out is that these Muslim hooligans invaded the church, held the priests and the monks under, you know, the gunpoint and forced them to do so.
And they created this major inconvenience for the Christian community and threatened the whole Christian community, despite the fact that has been attacked numerous times by Israel, besieged numerous times by Israel.
And many of this city's residents have been killed, wounded and arrested like every other place in Palestine.
But they did not want to see it that way.
They wanted to opt for that more explainable narrative of these Christians were peaceful.
The Muslims came and they ruined everything for everyone.
But that's not how we see it at all.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I hate to say it, but it probably just goes without saying a lot of the times people just assume that, I mean, obviously they know that's the holy land where Christianity originated and so forth, but they probably just assume that the Muslims forcibly converted or killed all of the Christians because isn't that what they do?
Right.
And you know what?
It strikes me as very strange, you know, as a Palestinian living in the States during Christmas when, you know, people create this miniature, you know, Bethlehem's, you know, in under the trees and and Bethlehem could be under siege and people are being butchered in the street.
And I'm thinking to myself, how is this escaping people?
I mean, how can you not see that this is the same Bethlehem that is suffering?
These are the same faithful that you are celebrating today, that you are not even aware of their existence.
This, you know, dichotomy, the psychological dichotomy strikes me as very, very strange.
And I think it's so very important that we come and say, no, this is not the case at all.
Bring the Christians.
You know, our Christians in Palestinian community are not a token, Scott.
And it's so important for that.
You know, my name before it was Ramzi, it used to be George.
And I explain that in my in my book.
My father was a freedom fighter.
Why it was George.
It wasn't George because my father was Christian or anything.
It was George because one of the greatest leaders of the Palestinian national struggle, his name is George Habash.
He was a socialist leader, the main socialist leader in Palestine.
And most of his followers were Muslims.
And nobody ever suggested.
But wait a minute.
How can you be as a Muslim following a Christian leader?
That was never in, you know, the whole concept of Muslim and Christian only dawned on me when I left Palestine.
I would go to Birzeit University in Ramallah for years.
Nobody would ask me about my religion.
I would have friends that maybe a year or two years later, after knowing them, I would see that they are, you know, wearing a cross necklace, for example.
It's like, oh, he must be Christian.
But it's not part of the daily conversation.
But when you leave Palestine, you realize, my goodness, this is so important for people, the whole Muslim-Christian thing.
For us, it actually is quite insignificant.
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Okay.
Now, so can you talk to us a little bit about the cleansing since the Nakba?
You said it was, geez, I didn't really realize, I guess I thought it was still a kind of a constant one fifth of the Palestinians are Christians, but you're saying it's many fewer than that now.
Oh, so much has changed since then.
And again, it happened in, you know, when the Nakba happened in 1948 and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, nearly a million were pushed out of their hundreds of villages and cities and towns.
Christians were mostly living in the cities, in urban areas, in Lidda, in Haifa, in Jaffa and Akko and so forth.
And most of those have been pushed out into the West Bank and elsewhere.
So many of them became permanently exiled outside of Palestine.
And many of them became kind of internally displaced refugees within Palestine itself.
So they ended up joining other thriving Christian communities in Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Jerusalem, Ramallah, and other places.
These are the main areas where they concentrate.
And then Israel once again occupied the remaining parts of Palestine in 1967.
So in 1967, all of historic Palestine fell under Israeli occupation.
And there was another process of ethnic cleansing in 1967, where 300,000 Palestinians were pushed out.
Many of them were also Christian.
But what is actually even equally dangerous, if not slightly more dangerous to this, because at least we know the dates and the numbers when we talk about the Nakba or we talk about the war of 1967.
But what we are not aware of is the slow ethnic cleansing, the slow genocide, as Ilan Papi refers to it, that is happening.
And we don't talk about it because we don't have, you know, it's not a headline news when it happens.
So when a Christian family loses its land, for example, near Bethlehem, and then they lose their house, and then they have to make a choice, where do you go from there?
And if they have a son in the U.S. or in Jordan or in Saudi Arabia, and then the whole family would follow him.
Well, that's part of the ethnic cleansing.
Just to give you an example, the city of Bethlehem was almost uniformly Christian in 1948.
And that continued somewhat to be the case in 1967.
Now, according to Vera Baboon, who is the mayor of Bethlehem, the city's population, the Christian percentage of the city's population is now down to 10 to 12 percent.
That's about 11,000 people.
And that is the largest concentration of Christians anywhere in Palestine.
Now, do the Israelis allow Palestinian Christians to leave more than they allow Palestinian Muslims to leave?
This is really, this is a very interesting question.
And I would say maybe not that they allow them to leave.
It depends on where they are leaving.
Because of the connection that many churches in Europe have to the Palestinian Christian community in Palestine, the chances of them leaving to Europe, to the United States, to Canada, to Australia, to New Zealand, is much higher than that for Muslims whose chances are to leave to Egypt, to Jordan, to Syria.
But you can understand the situation is horrendous in these countries.
So it's far more difficult for them to leave.
So, for example, if you have a son who is a U.S. citizen, you are working through the U.S. consulate, the U.S. embassy, the chances of you being able to obtain a permit to leave is higher, not because you are a Christian or a Muslim, but because of the country in which you are going to.
So that's one of the possibilities of why...
Pretty convenient for the Israelis, I guess.
Absolutely.
But if you look at the Palestinian Christian community in Gaza, it wasn't really ever a significant community to begin with.
There were always three, four thousands living mostly in few neighborhoods in Gaza City itself.
After the siege, however, they have been desperate to get out.
The Israelis do not allow them to go and perform pilgrimage in Bethlehem or in Jerusalem.
Those who are lucky enough to actually, after trying for years to get out, many of them never come back because you go back to a place that is in a constant state of siege and war and it's active genocide happening.
So it's for them, it's quite rational.
Why go back there?
Now you are talking about a thousand Christian living in Gaza.
The number has dwindled so significantly and it could really reach a point because those who remain are usually the older, the elder generation, because they feel like they have less opportunities and they are just tired.
And many of them say, I just want to die and be buried near my home in Gaza.
But there will be a point in which we would say this man or this woman is the last Christian in Gaza, if this continues to be the case.
And sadly, it seems that Bethlehem is heading that way.
It's only the matter of time.
Yeah.
You know, I really feel bad, honestly, for the John Hageeites down there, you know, whichever sort of, and I don't want to paint too broad of a brush.
I mean, there are a lot of evangelical Christians who don't believe in this stuff and certainly would not support sin and crime and murder and oppression of innocent people just to try to force Jesus to come back faster or something like that.
It's a, I don't know exactly what the percentage is, but it's, you know, somewhat of a small cult within evangelical fundamentalist Christianity that even believes in that stuff.
But I've met enough people who are the victims of John Hagee, the false prophets, lies, and heard enough of them, you know, on the radio, for example, around here in Texas.
I know that there are decent people who mean well and who just believe a bunch of garbage.
They have no idea that they're betraying a bunch of, that they're helping to work against a bunch of people who are saved the same way that they are, you know, in favor of a bunch of essentially cynical, secular communist type, or at least certainly, you know, cynical, secular Jewish Zionists who don't care about their religion at all.
As Irving Kristol said back in 1980 or whatever it was, when he was helping to buy Jerry Falwell an airplane, and someone said, hey, you know, Falwell and his people, they'd like to see Jesus come back and kill all the Jews and send them to hell.
Are you sure these are the kinds of people that you want to lie with?
And Irving Kristol said, well, it's their theology.
It's our Israel.
In other words, yeah, we're cynically using them and manipulating them and their stupid idiot flock of sheep followers to help support our politics.
And we don't respect them at all.
And we consider them to be nothing but fools.
And we'll never tell them about the Palestinian Christians they're helping to betray.
And ha, how do you like that?
And just seems like, you know what, I bet if American Christians knew about the cynicism behind, did you know, I only just recently found this out, that Ehud Barak's cousin was the CEO of the Cornerstone Church, or of Christians United for Israel, led by John Hagee of the Cornerstone Church.
And these people are cynically manipulating and laughing at these well-meaning Christians, you know?
You know, Scott, I encourage your listeners to, you know, don't listen to me.
Listen to the Christian, the organic Christian voices in Bethlehem in Jerusalem themselves.
Go to CairoPalestine.ps.
This is the Cairo document that is modeled around the South African Christian document that was a cry of solidarity against apartheid South African government.
And the Palestinians, because they have very strong links with the South African brethren, they formulated their own Cairo document called CairoPalestine.ps.
And in it, you will learn directly what the Palestinian Christians in Palestine are going through.
And if you permit me, there's just one single paragraph that I would like to read from that document, just to kind of convey an idea of what they are expecting from us.
It says, we declare that the military occupation of Palestinian land constitutes a sin against God and humanity.
Any theology that legitimizes the occupation and justifies crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people lies far from Christian teachings.
And it goes on and on.
And so it's so important that we now not only start realizing, yes, our Palestinian Christian community in Palestine, but to actually unearth these voices, give them platforms, allow them to reach out to those people who have been manipulated regarding what is actually happening in Palestine against the Muslims and against the Christians in the Holy Land.
And I'm sorry, tell me the web address one more time.
So it is CairoPalestine.ps.
Okay, cool.
That sounds great.
I'll definitely look that up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, as always, I appreciate your time on the show here.
You know, I always learn so much.
And I know that my audience always really appreciates it too.
You know, as we've talked about over and over again, and including in context of this subject, but also in the broader context of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the American people just don't know what the truth is.
And when they hear it, and when they find it out, they switch sides pretty quick.
You know, the basic idea that American TV watchers understand is that the poor little Israelis are surrounded by those horrible, heathen Muslim Arab orcs who just won't leave them alone and won't stop attacking them and trying to steal their land and all this stuff.
But that's just not true at all.
And once people start learning the first thing about who's stealing what from whom over there, and their role in paying for it all, and that kind of thing, you see people turn right around really quickly, and their support for Israel is based on a bunch of lies.
And, you know, on the premise that the Israelis are the poor underdogs, and that's why we're on their side.
And I think the work that you do is just so important for letting people understand that, giving them a chance, a place to find the truth, that actually the reality is entirely upside down from what you've been told.
And so there's nothing more important going on in the world than that you're right here.
I agree, Scott.
And just really just one final thing I would like to add to this, and I appreciate what you said very much, is that from my experience, traveling, touring, speaking to Americans, and I think I've been to like over 30 states and numerous universities and churches and so forth, is that a lot of the support that Israel has, the vast majority of it is either based on misunderstandings, miscommunications, and lack of access to alternative information.
So it tends to be quite superficial.
And it really is, yes, there are those very ardent pro-Israel that they just have a wall in their minds, and no matter what you do, you can't overcome it.
But the vast majority, if you reach to them, you speak to them in the language of humanity, and you put them at ease that you're not being attacked, nobody is, we're trying to explain certain truths and certain facts, and you could sometimes immediately see the light, you know, just, you know, go off and for people to immediately connect and understand.
And we can never, no matter how powerful this, you know, the Haguean's, you know, followings in this country and the Zionist lobby and so forth, we can never give up on reaching out to ordinary people and to try, you know, to help them say the truth, not for any personal gains whatsoever, except that it is so important for Americans in particular, considering the amount of money and arms that we send Israel, $3.8 billion, mostly going to arming Israel.
So this is not an intellectual exercise.
This is about life and death.
It's about genocide.
It's about the lives of millions of people, about peace in the Middle East and the world over.
Right, absolutely.
And as you say, because America is such a powerful force behind Israel, you forgot to mention diplomatic support at the United Nations and the rest of that too.
None of this would be possible without the USA.
So the knowledge and the opinions of the people of this country really do matter very much on this question.
So absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you again so much for your time, Ramzi.
Really appreciate a lot.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Keep up the good work, man.
All right, you guys, that is Ramzi Baroud.
He's at PalestineChronicle.com.
And he's the author of My Father Was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth, a Palestinian Story.
Check out his great archives at AntiWar.com.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
