A Wall Street Journal article about harassment suffered by some Christians in Israel drew a furious response from Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Friday, which called it “disingenuous, misleading and shameful.”

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who is a Christian pastor, also criticized the article.

The WSJ piece, published earlier this week, focused on the rise in harassment of Christian clerics.

Christians in Israel say they are increasingly coming under assault, including a series of incidents in recent years in which mostly young Orthodox Jews made a habit of spitting on the ground in front of clergy and other Christians, mainly in Jerusalem’s Old City — an act that may be prosecuted in Israel as a hate crime.

There have also been acts of vandalism against churches and cemeteries, and physical assaults, including actions that bear the hallmark of extremist Jewish settler violence familiar from the West Bank.

The publication of the article comes as Israel finds itself in repeated fiascos around its relationship with Christians.

However, the Foreign Ministry is leading a push to change the conversation around Israel’s Christian community and to get ahead of potential tensions.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar appointed Ambassador George Deek as the first special envoy to the Christian world. The ministry’s social media has been highlighting Christian sites and citizens in recent weeks, none of whom, it said, were included in the piece.

The Journal “took radical voices and extreme cases and turned them into the face of an entire........

© The Times of Israel