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Will the Holy Land become a theme park of Christian history with most of the Christians gone?

This bleak picture is projected by Christian leaders throughout the region where Jesus walked and taught almost two millennia ago.

"We, as Christians, have become an insignificant part of the population," says 57-year-old Canon Riah Abu El Assal, archdeacon of the Jerusalem diocese of the Evangelical Episcopal Church. In the middle of the century, Christians represented 25 percent of the Holy Land's population, he explains in the small, stone Christ Church, a short walk from the Nazareth site where tradition says the angel Gabriel told Mary she would give birth to the Messiah. Now the Christian population is only around 2 percent.

In less than 30 years, Riah says, the number of Christians in the faith's geographical heart, Jerusalem, has dropped from 28,000 to 7,000. The tale of decline is repeated across the land of the Gospels' story. Jesus' birthplace, Bethlehem, today for the first time houses more Muslims than Christians. His boyhood home of Nazareth, 90 percent Christian not long ago, now is 65 percent Muslim. Ramallah, a town near the place where Mary and Joseph discovered the 12-year-old Jesus had been left by their traveling group in Jerusalem, once had an entirely Christian population; now it is nearly all Muslim.

STEADY PATTERN

The drain of Christians from the Holy Land, little noted by the church in the rest of the world, is part of a general exodus of Palestinian Arabs from a homeland they have found hostile and unpromising. Beginning with the war for independence in 1948, when the new State of Israel occupied vast areas of Palestinian land and began imposing harsh conditions on its Arab inhabitants, steady emigration has scattered the Holy Land's Christian families throughout the earth.

Some 2 million Palestinians—Muslim and Christian—remain in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied following the 1967 Six-Day War with neighboring Arab countries. Another 4 million have left in one of the largest refugee movements in modern times. Departing Muslims have gone to refugee camps within the former Palestine as well as to other Arab countries. Christians have usually settled in Europe, Australia, and North and South America.

Their departure has not been undertaken lightly. Palestinians commonly trace family ties to their land back hundreds of years. Christians often claim roots in the country dating from the time of the apostles.

"We frequently get asked, 'When did you convert?' says Jonathan Kuttab, 42, a Christian attorney and human-rights activist in Jerusalem. "We're Christians from the day of Pentecost. We have lived in this society, we have held the witness, the testimony, all these years."

"They leave because of lack of security, lack of future, lack of jobs, lack of housing, lack of education," says Emil Salayta, 30, principal of the Latin Catholic school in the West Bank village of Bir Zeit. "People are afraid, and they want a better life for their children."

Until the recent and often surprising successes of peace negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Israelis faced constant threat of attack, while Palestinian Arabs in the occupied territories endured a continued military presence in spite of a United Nations resolution calling on Israel to withdraw. With the 1987 start of uprisings known as the intifada—from the Arabic word for "shake loose"—Israeli pressures turned especially intense.

UNDER ISRAELI RULE

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October 3 1994, Vol. 38, No. 11