Source: Pravmir.com
By Archpriest Panayiotis Papageorgiou, Ph.D
Who are the Palestinians? Are they all Moslems? Are they
all violent? Why do they all speak Arabic?
These are the questions I want to raise today as the news
media are broadcasting the conflict, the violence and
bloodshed taking place in the Holy Land.
As the violence between the Israelis and the Moslems of
Gaza escalates once again, here are some thoughts about
the forgotten Christians of the Holy Land sparked by
“recent Pilgrimages and conversations”:
During
the recent visit of Pope Francis and the Ecumenical
Patriarch in the Holy Land, in a private conversation
captured by the media, the Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu made a comment to the Pope that “Jesus
also spoke Hebrew”. The Pope fired back
“Aramaic”. Netanyahu responded:
“Hebrew and Aramaic”. The political
importance of this exchange lies in the effort of the
Israelis to present themselves as the rightful owners
of the Holy Land. Netanyahu wanted to emphasize that
Hebrew was spoken there even by Jesus who was a Jew,
therefore the Holy Land belongs to the Jews. The Jews,
in other words, were here first before the others,
hence the Holy Land belongs to them. There is a serious
problem, however, with the Israeli claim, which has
been ignored and never clearly articulated by the media
(or even by contemporary historians), as they continue
to refer to the inhabitants of the Holy Land as
“Palestinians” with no distinction between
Christians and Moslems, and no historical reference to
the origins of these two groups. In the news we
constantly hear of the political and military clash
between the Israelis and the Palestinian Moslems. As a
consequence, most Americans today correlate
Palestinians with Moslems and terrorism as the conflict
flares up from time to time. In this political and
military clash between the Israeli Jews and the
Palestinian Moslems, the plight of the Palestinian
Christians is completely lost. Furthermore, there is a
serious flaw in labeling the Christians of the Holy
Land (as well as Lebanon and Syria) as “Arab
Christians”. Any serious historian can quickly
affirm that the Arabs who conquered these lands in the
seventh century did not embrace Christianity! So, who
are these Palestinian Arab-speaking Christians? Did
they come to this land after the Arab conquest or were
they perhaps already in the Holy Land when the Arabs
came? Again, any serious student of history will be
able to quickly tell you that these Arab-speaking
Palestinian Christians not only are not Arabs, but they
are the indigenous inhabitants of the Holy Land who
have their roots in Judaism of the first century and
the Early Church and were fully christianized in the
centuries following the destruction of Jerusalem (and
the final expulsion of the Jews from that area by the
Romans in 135 AD), and most especially after the visit
of St. Helena and the establishment of hundreds of
churches and numerous monasteries in the fourth
century. In other words, the people of Palestine were
mostly Christian when the Arabs arrived in the seventh
century. It will be easy to also show, that not only
Aramaic (and Hebrew in the Liturgical setting among the
Jews) but also Greek were spoken in most places of the
Holy Land from the Hellenistic period until the Arab
invasion. My point is that modern Jews may rightly
claim the Holy Land as their ancestral home, but the
indigenous Christians of the Holy Land have been there
continually and uninterruptedly and have their roots
deep in that land, at least as deep as anyone who
claims to be a Jew today. We owe it to these million
and a half forgotten Christians who held the Christian
Faith through so much adversity to stand up for them,
for they are the biggest victims of the unholy, bloody
conflict between the Jews and Moslems in the Holy Land.
24 июля 2014 г.
