The problem with the Palestinian Church
By Giles Frazer, UnHerd.
Tourists almost never find their way to Levanda Street in southern Tel Aviv. Round the corner from the monstrous concrete central bus station, it looks dirty and feels dangerous. Drug addicts, most of them immigrants from east Africa, many stripped to the waist, lie out in the sun in a rubbish-filled children’s play park. Raggedy toothless prostitutes hustle for a few shekels. Most locals pass quickly through this place, many of them young people in army uniforms travelling between home and their base. They don’t stick around for a coffee or lunch. This is not the Bauhaus city many know and rightly admire. This is the arse-end of Tel Aviv. Yet I still find it the best place in the Holy Land to go to church.
Choosing a church to attend on a Sunday morning in Israel can be a surprisingly tricky business. Perhaps I should not be surprised — after all, Christians now make up a tiny minority of the population. But it’s still hard to shake off the romantic idea that, as the place of Jesus’s ministry, this land has some deep affinity with the world’s largest religion. You can go to what I rather disparagingly think of as Disney churches — places that seem set up for tourists, meeting the expectations of those who come on Holy Land tours, looking for some authentic Jesus-feel. Or, for the more intrepid, you can seek out indigenous Arab Christian churches where Palestinians Christians celebrate the ancient liturgies within settled, long-standing communities. But, despite being a Catholic-inclined kind of Christian, I am more comfortable on the second floor of a swelteringly hot disused office block on Levanda Street, with some Pentecostal preacher shouting at me through a loud and rubbish sound system, the only white person in the room.
I often ask myself why I come to Levanda Street, and not to the local Palestinian churches. After all, they do church pretty much the way I like it. And I have contacts, former colleagues and indeed good friends, who work in these churches. There is an Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem with which my own Diocese of Southwark is twinned. But nonetheless, I still find the politics of the Palestinian churches difficult. And things have gotten a whole lot worse since October 7.
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I hold no candle for the despicable Netanyahu. But nonetheless, I now see the world very differently. What is happening in Gaza is a war. Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, dismantling all the settlements that used to be there. Since then, Hamas has built up its military strength, redirecting considerable resources that could have been used for the reconstruction of civil society into tunnels and bomb factories. No society can allow a neighbour, committed to its eradication, to keep firing rockets into its territory. And the massacre of October 7 was a declaration of war — a war that Hamas fights by deliberately putting its own civilians in harm’s way. Israel does all it can to protect its citizens; Hamas does all it can to allow its own to be killed, thus to further their propaganda war in the West. Unlike the leaders of my own Church, I haven’t called for a ceasefire — which I take to be a cynical mechanism for Hamas to gain military advantage over their Jewish enemies. Fellow Christians, especially Palestinians Christians, would think me a warmonger and that I have blood on my hands.
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