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Cedar Duaybis, a grandmother of five, al ways swore that she would never flee again. In 1948, when Duaybis was a child, her Palestinian Christian family fled the Mediterranean city of Haifa amid fighting between Arab forces and the newly declared state of Israel, winding up as refugees in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

But recently Duaybis fled again as Israeli helicopter gunships were poised to attack the Ramallah headquarters of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, just 100 yards from her home. Before this reprisal for the Palestinian killing of two Israeli reserve soldiers began, she grabbed her granddaughter and a number of her friends and ran to Ramallah's Anglican Church compound to spend the night.

"The thing I think about most is the children," said Duaybis, the widow of an Anglican priest.

"I remember how I was so scared and frightened in 1948, and no adult had time to explain what was going on. Now I have a grandchild, and she is going through the same thing."

The West Bank's tiny Palestinian Christian community of 45,000 people, including avid proponents of the peace process, has become deeply embroiled in the current disturbances, which are striking dangerously close to home. Most of the West Bank's Christians are concentrated in Ramallah, Arab east Jerusalem, and the Bethlehem district—flash points in the current unrest.

The Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jallah has been drawn deeply into the chaos. Palestinian snipers have used this border village as a staging ground for attacks on Gilo, an outer Jerusalem suburb built on land taken from Palestinians in the 1967 war.

In one of the worst incidents so far, snipers fired for several hours onto Gilo, drawing repeated Israeli retaliatory raids from helicopter gunships. The attacks have sown panic and fear in the middle-class Christian village known for its political moderation.

With their towns and homes under virtual siege and intermittent fire from Israel, Christian religious leaders are both rallying to the Palestinian national cause and issuing pleas for help from the West. "As the Lutheran bishop in Jerusalem, I appeal to you, as sisters and brothers in Christ, do not leave us alone," wrote Lutheran Bishop Munib Younan in a recent appeal to Lutheran communities in the United States.

"Hospitals are lacking medical materials and equipment. High unemployment is prevailing," Younan added. "Christian schools cannot collect tuition fees, and the Israeli shelling of the Bethlehem area is paralyzing the life of Palestinian Christian towns, creating horror and terror in the hearts of families."

War, economic instability, and fanaticism have long been the plagues of Christians across the Holy Land and the Middle East. Fifty years ago, an estimated 15 to 25 percent of the Palestinian Arab community was Christian. Today, in the West Bank, Christians are only about 1.5 percent of the total population. While suffering under attack from Israeli gunfire, Arab Christians have occasionally become the target of Islamic extremists as well. Christian-owned liquor stores in Gaza have been attacked. Radical Islamic preachers occasionally have included Christians in now routine messages of anti-Jewish hate. But the perpetrators of anti-Christian propaganda, unlike those who hate Jews, have been quickly silenced by the Palestine Authority.

According to the Jerusalem Post, an Israeli official has claimed that hundreds of Palestinians, mostly Bethlehem-area Christians who hold foreign passports, have left the country in the course of the recent conflict.

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December 4 2000, Vol. 44, No. 14