Christians in Palestine are crying out to their spiritual siblings worldwide for solidarity and support as they face death, displacement and genocide. 

“We’ve witnessed our church members being bombed in Gaza, we have witnessed our brothers and sisters being arrested. My family has received death threats,” John Munayer, a Palestinian Christian, told a room full of Mennonites, Anglicans, Lutherans, United Church members, Muslims and Jews who gathered at Canadian Mennonite University for a two-day conference on the plight of Palestinian Christians earlier this month. 

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John and his brother Samuel Munayer had planned to travel to Winnipeg for the conference, but the war in Iran made travel unsafe, so the brothers addressed the room via Zoom from their home in Jerusalem. 

“We are the sons and daughters of the first church,” said John Munayer. 

Christians in Palestine, descended from the very earliest Christians, make up a small minority in the region — less than two per cent of the population of the West Bank and less than one per cent of Gaza. Among them are Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Copts and other Protestant denominations. 

That number is constantly shrinking. Before the Israeli military’s expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, 12 per cent of the population was Christian. 

Since Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s retaliation, Israeli forces have bombed churches in which people were sheltering and Palestinian Christians have watched Israeli soldiers shoot family members in front of their eyes. 

Like their Muslim neighbours, Palestinian Christians have been physically assaulted by Israeli........

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