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Things must be getting really bad, because in the last couple months Palestinian Christians have come out aggressively in the media objecting to their continued imperiled existence. There were about three articles that I picked up having to do with a pogrom in the city of Taibe. Taibe is in the West Bank. It's an entirely Christian town. It's best known as the source of a microbrewery called Taibe Beer. Apparently there was some kind of romantic relationship between a Christian man and his secretary, who was a Muslim woman from a nearby village. When word got out in her village that she was seeing this guy, she was forced to drink poison. And the following day, men from the village went on a rampage in Taibe, beating people, burning some houses and cars, and raping a local woman. They didn't catch the guy who was in the relationship. He had apparently left town. But they messed Taibe up pretty good. About 1,500 Christians fled.

There is a Greek Orthodox Christian who was so tight with the Palestinian Liberation Organization that during the first intifada, Israel expelled him from the West Bank. Arafat brought him back to the West Bank after the Oslo process began. He ran a TV station that he built in Bethlehem. Despite that connection, he gradually got fed up with what was going on with the Christians. About two months ago, he went public with a dossier that he had previously delivered to Arafat and then Abu Mazen. The dossier gives 70 detailed examples of attacks on specific Christians—beatings, sexual harassment, all nature of theft, stealing land—and 140 cases of land theft where Muslim gangs in cahoots with the Palestinian Authority showed up, poured a slab of cement, built apartment houses, and sold them right under the nose of the land's Christian owners.

Since going public, he's gone abroad for a trip. That's a clue as to how long he would likely be alive if he were to show up in the Middle East anytime soon.

There's a pastor in Bethlehem whose name I haven't used, but one day a couple years ago he came home from work at his church, and as he parked his car, he saw a masked man jump over the fence into his front yard. The man had a pistol and took three shots, hitting the pastor once in the shoulder. The pastor fell to the ground and pretended to be dead, and the man jumped back over the fence and left.

I asked if I could use the pastor's name in an academic article published on the other side of the world. The pastor said, "Well, I'm not sure it's a good time to rub their noses in the fact that they didn't succeed in killing me." But recently I was on a radio talk show about this problem. And who was there being interviewed just before me but the pastor. He was completely upfront with what happened to him and what was happening to Christians. And so I guess it's one of those things at a tipping point. At a certain point, people come out and say, "Look, I can't live hiding this. I'm just going to tell what I've seen and what I know." And that's what I believe is beginning to happen now.

You said earlier that the attacks aren't necessarily ideological. Does Islamic fundamentalism play a role in the hostile environment for Christians?

Nobody could sensibly deny that. The environment is such that if a Christian walks down main street in Bethlehem munching on a sandwich during the month of Ramadan, when observant Muslims fast from dawn until dusk, he'll likely be berated, possibly beaten. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he were arrested and thrown in jail for a couple of days.

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January (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50