When Confronted By The Truth

Considering what those demanding an Easter message from the King normally thought of everything that he said and did, then they must want one purely to be annoyed by it. British monarchs have not traditionally delivered Easter messages, and if you want one of those, then go to church. Be grateful that you can, as Peter Oborne writes:

Harassment and violence against Christians call into question their long-term presence in Palestine and Israel, a respected Jerusalem think tank has warned.

In a shocking report, the Rossing Center, which aims to foster Jewish-Christian relations, records a “continued and expanding pattern of intimidation and aggression” against Christians in occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, and Israel.

It finds they are targeted not just as Christians but also – in the case of Palestinian Christians – as a national minority. 

The report blames Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government for what it calls “the recent surge in overt animosity towards Christianity”.

In a carefully worded intervention, the Rossing Center writes that a “renewed sense of Jewish identity finds its most extreme manifestation in right-wing ultranationalism, which has become a significant factor in Israeli society.

“This trend has been particularly evident among members of the current government and has been further intensified by the collective trauma experienced since October 7th 2023.”

The report does not mention Itamar Ben Gvir by name. But these comments will be widely interpreted as a direct reproach to Ben Gvir, who as security minister has responsibility for policing in Israel and occupied Palestinian territories including Jerusalem’s Old City.

In October 2023, following an upsurge in reported incidents of spitting aimed at Christians and Christian holy sites, Ben Gvir defended the practice as an “old Jewish tradition” which did not amount to criminal behaviour.

Early last month, he opened the way for a massive expansion of firearms licences. According to the Times of Israel, more than 300,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem are now eligible to carry a gun.

Christians on Wednesday privately told Middle East Eye that they regard the widely touted prospect of a Ben Gvir premiership as dangerous for Christians and a calamity for Christianity in the Holy Land.

The Rossing Center report documented 155 incidents of harassment in 2025, but warns its figures represent no more than “the tip of the iceberg”.

Clergy harassed

The majority of the cases involve physical attacks, with clergy (monks, friars, nuns and priests) most likely to be targeted because of their “distinctive garments and visible Christian symbols”.

The interfaith think tank reports that “Clergy in areas such as Mount Zion and the Armenian Quarter report that harassment has become so routine that stepping outside can carry an almost certain risk of abuse”.

In a chilling finding it reports that these attacks are unlikely to be prosecuted.

The Rossing Center said it had aided victims in making complaints to the police.

“Most of the complaints were closed, some remain under investigation, and the rate of indictments is very low in relation to the scale of the phenomenon,” it said.

It also noted that “there is no police officer specifically designated to liaise with the Christian community in Israel”.

This religious persecution, it said, had reinforced among Christians “the perception that they are viewed not as an integral part of the land’s social fabric but as outsiders and, at times, unwanted guests”.

The Rossing Center has documented 59 attacks on church property, including graffiti, vandalism of religious statues, arson, garbage dumping and spitting at holy places.

Such attacks, it said, “feed a sense of vulnerability around sacred spaces and reinforces concern over the erosion of respect for Christian religious life in the public sphere”.

It also documented 18 recorded incidents of defacement of public signs.

The attacks, it said, “are humiliating and exhausting, producing a climate in which Christians feel increasingly unwelcome, pressured to conceal their identity, and uncertain about the future of their communities”.

In a powerful conclusion, the report finds that “Christian communities have been proudly rooted in the Holy Land for two thousand years. However, in recent years they have increasingly expressed serious concerns regarding the combination of forces that could drive younger generations away.”

The report highlighted its 2024 survey, which it said showed approximately half of all Christians under 45 were considering leaving the region.

The report was published after Israeli police blocked Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, patriarch of the Latin church, from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to celebrate the Palm Sunday mass.

Pizzaballa’s office said in a statement it had been the first time in centuries that the patriarch had been unable to celebrate the mass marking the start of Easter week in the church, which Christians believe is built on the site where Jesus was crucified, and later buried and resurrected.

The Israeli security presence has been ubiquitous in the Old City throughout Holy Week. An Israeli policeman stood guard outside the locked door of Holy Sepulchre to deter visitors from approaching.

A permanent security post called the “Israeli Police Division of the Holy Sepulchre Church” stands beside the door of the outer courtyard, with an Israeli flag flying beside it.

Worshippers have told MEE that armed Israeli police are in the habit of entering the ancient church intrusively, including the tomb of Christ itself.

They said Palestinian worshippers feel intimidated by their presence. MEE put these claims to the Israeli police, but no reply had been received at the time of publication.

The International Court of Justice ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s security presence in occupied East Jerusalem is illegal, and ordered Israel to end its occupation.

Israel defiantly insists that Jerusalem is its capital. Moreover, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that Israel is the “guardian of Christianity” in the Middle East.

That is very different from the picture which emerges from the devastating Rossing Center report, published in Christianity’s most sacred city in the holiest week of the Christian year.

As Fares Abraham writes:

On Palm Sunday, Israeli police stopped Pierbattista Cardinal Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Francesco Ielpo, the Custos of the Holy Land, on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The church called the decision “manifestly unreasonable and grossly disproportionate,” noting that for the first time in centuries, its senior leaders were prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday at Christianity’s holiest shrine. Only after global outrage did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reverse the restriction.

This event should alarm everyone, not just practicing Christians.

Palm Sunday is Christianity’s great anti-empire procession. Jesus entered Jerusalem without a chariot, legions, or spectacle. He came on a donkey. He did not arrive to flatter power but to expose it. He did not mirror the empires of his age; instead, he unmasked them. Palm Sunday is what happens when the Kingdom of God enters a city and reveals how insecure worldly power really is.

That is what makes this episode so revealing. A modern state with one of the world’s most sophisticated military and security apparatuses found itself threatened by a humble Christian observance. There is bitter irony in that. On the very day Christians remember Christ’s repudiation of imperial theater, armed power moved to police the memory of it.

Israel says this was about security during wartime. But even if one grants the seriousness of the moment, the facts still expose something deeper. The planned Mass reportedly would have involved fewer than 50 participants, within the gathering limits Israel itself was enforcing. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, rarely a critic of Israel, called the decision an “unfortunate overreach” and said it was “difficult to understand or justify.”

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz agreed that the security concerns should not have prevented the patriarch from entering the church. When Huckabee and Cruz are complaining that Israel has gone too far, Americans should pay attention.

Huckabee and Cruz now seem startled that a state they have treated as morally untouchable could trample Christian freedom in Jerusalem. But this is what happens when politicians spend years confusing biblical loyalty with political indulgence. Eventually the idol stops pretending to be holy.

Neither the leaders in Jerusalem nor those in Washington, DC should be romanticized as guardians of religious liberty simply because they wrap themselves in biblical language.

The deeper problem is not one bad decision that was quickly corrected. It is the logic underneath it.

For months, Muslim worship at Al Aqsa was heavily restricted, especially during Ramadan. Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall also lived under wartime limitations, so fairness requires saying plainly that this pressure was not borne by one community alone. But Palm Sunday revealed something that cannot be dismissed as routine.

When Pizzaballa was blocked from entering the church, the world saw how easily a broader security regime can become a mechanism of humiliation and control. It is hard not to see a pattern, or at least a test of limits. If the world shrugs when one holy site is constricted, power learns it may be able to constrict another. If the outrage is manageable, the precedent becomes useful. That is how freedom is narrowed, not always by one dramatic act, but by little steps.

Christians should be especially clear-eyed about what the Church of the Holy Sepulcher represents. It is not merely an ancient building or picturesque stop on a pilgrimage route. Christians have venerated this church for centuries as the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. In the grammar of Christian faith, this is not ornamental; it is the hinge. The church stands or falls on the confession that Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead. To obstruct worship there on Palm Sunday is an assault, symbolic if not yet total, on the public witness of the resurrection itself.

And the man who was barred is not some imported dignitary with little connection to the suffering people of the land. Pizzaballa is the highest Catholic authority in Jerusalem and across the Latin Patriarchate’s territory, which includes Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Cyprus. For Palestinian Christians, he is a shepherd who has gone to Gaza, more than once, to stand with a battered flock. In 2023, he even said he was willing to offer himself in exchange for Israeli hostages. His presence has become a source of hope precisely because he has refused to abandon them.

Jesus wept over Jerusalem, not because the city lacked power but because it did not know the things that make for peace. He wept because he saw the use of sacred language coexisting with spiritual blindness. Two thousand years later, the tragedy remains. Jerusalem still knows how to control a crowd better than how to welcome peace. It still knows how to securitize holiness. It still knows how to mistake force for authority.

Palm Sunday announces that God’s answer to empire is not a stronger empire but a different King—one who rides into the city in a lowly manner but who exposes domination instead of sanctifying it. This King wept over Jerusalem even as its people were preparing to kill him.

That is the final irony here. The men with weapons, gates, and orders imagined they were controlling access to a church. But Palm Sunday has always been about something they cannot control: the public unveiling of a Kingdom that terrifies every empire precisely because it does not need to become one.

If Israel, backed by the most powerful friends in the West, still feels threatened by the memory of a peaceful procession led by the church, then perhaps we are seeing a gripping embodiment of how fragile power becomes when confronted by the truth of a donkey, a cross, and an empty tomb.