If I drink coffee at every meeting, I’ll kill someone,” His Beatitude Pierbattista Pizzaballa says when I ask him to join me for an espresso while we talk. Who first? I want to ask. But I suspect the patriarch of the 150,000 Latin-rite Catholics in Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, and Cyprus wouldn’t know where to start.
When we met one afternoon in April in the patriarchal seat in Jerusalem’s Old City, Pizzaballa’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction had been at war with itself for six months. The October 2023 massacre in southern Israel had converted two million Gazans into wartime human shields for Hamas. Among them were several hundred Gazan Catholics. Wealthier Gazans escaped to the Sinai desert through Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, and the patriarch tells me some Christians were among them. The rest sheltered in the Holy Family Church compound in Gaza City with Greek Orthodox compatriots.
With some awful exceptions (such as Naheda and Samar Anton, a mother and daughter who were killed last December), the Catholic flock in Gaza has been remarkably safe. They are assisted by the shrewdness of their patriarch, a big, quick-witted, businesslike Italian, fluent in English and Hebrew, with a doctorate from Hebrew University. Of course, Mideast Christians are killed all the time in spite of the efforts of their prelates. The patriarch is more successful for conducting his diplomacy inside (and with) the Jewish state, where Christians generally have found a prosperous haven from the Islamists terrorizing their brethren in the region.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem was founded in 1099, under the protection of the crusader kingdom in the Holy Land. The patriarchate declined and eventually was expelled with the armies of Western Christendom. In 1291, Patriarch Nicholas drowned while trying to escape the Muslim siege of Acre. For hundreds of years, institutional Christianity was represented in the Holy Land by Eastern-rite churches, which maintained better relations than Rome with the Holy Land’s Muslim overlords. Only the Franciscans remained, and in 1342 they were appointed by Pope Clement VI as custodians of the local holy sites: They had full control over the tomb of Mary and later gained access to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and other churches.
After centuries of titular occupants, the residential Latin Patriarchate was re-established in 1847. European states had long maintained interests in the Ottoman Empire. But the 1830s and 1840s were ripe for more general European intervention in politics and in religion. In an embarrassing demonstration of Ottoman decline, in 1831 the governor of Egypt, a fractious satrap, conquered the Holy Land and ruled it for nearly a decade. Various Western powers, including the United States, set up consulates in Jerusalem and maintained them after restoring the Ottoman sultan. Missionaries and pilgrims from all churches flowed to the Holy Land. In 1841, an Anglo-German venture established a Protestant bishopric in Jerusalem. Not wanting to cede the Holy Land to Protestants and the Orthodox, Pope Pius IX reestablished the residential Latin Patriarchate with the papal bull Nulla Celebrior. The Franciscans remained the Latin custodians of the holy sites—which were supervised by the custos, Pizzaballa’s former office—and the patriarchate was frequently occupied by one of their number. The patriarchate and its auxiliaries founded hospitals, orphanages, hospices, and schools (St. Joseph’s in Nazareth remains one of the finest schools in Israel). The Catholic seminary at Beit Jala, founded in 1852, has now taught generations of Arab Catholic priests. Monasteries began to host visitors for pilgrimages or study.
For more than a century, Holy Land Catholics have lived amidst a conflict between far more numerous Muslims and Jews. The conflict began in the first half of the twentieth century, during the first period of Christian rule in the Holy Land in six centuries. The Catholic Church viewed with favor Britain’s seizure of the Holy Land from the Ottoman Empire in 1917. British rule was formalized under the Palestine Mandate in 1923 and lasted until 1948. Less to Rome’s liking was Britain’s ambition to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, announced in the wartime Balfour Declaration of 1917 and later incorporated in the Mandate. Two millennia of hostility and persecution cooled early relations between Catholics and Zionists. Theodore Herzl, whose book The Jewish State inaugurated political Zionism, met with the papal nuncio in Vienna in 1896 but failed to persuade him that a Jewish state was the answer to Europe’s Jewish question. The Vatican worried that a Jewish majority would obstruct Christian access to holy sites, which the Ottomans had guaranteed for centuries. And there were serious theological reservations about agreeing to Jewish custody of the Holy Land so long as Jews rejected Jesus. Latin Patriarch Luigi Barlassina was a public anti-Zionist on these grounds. The Vatican opposed the termination of the British Mandate in 1948, and from Israel’s founding in that year until 1967, the Vatican favored Jerusalem’s internationalization, as opposed to its control by either of the Holy Land’s larger religions. But Israel compensated churches for wartime damages and incorporated the status quo at holy sites into law. Gradually the Vatican reconciled itself to Jewish governance of a united Jerusalem. The Vatican signed a concordat with Israel in 1993, following the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Since then, Catholics in the Holy Land have lived under direct Israeli governance, or else under one of two regimes run by Muslims—the putatively secular Palestinian Authority or Hamas, which expelled the Palestinian Authority from Gaza in 2007 after Israel’s withdrawal.
Prewar Gaza had nearly a thousand Catholics, mostly in Gaza City, where the Catholic Holy Family Church compound is situated. The church has been a wartime shelter for Christians who lack the means or desire to leave the bombarded strip. I asked the patriarch about prewar Gaza. “The relations with authorities there were”—he pauses—“correct, ups and downs. . . . We are respectful, in a way.” I don’t blame the patriarch for his circumspection. Hamas, he said, “had very strong control of the territory.” In an Islamist police state, Christians went to school and worshiped in something like peace. The patriarch compares Gaza favorably to the West Bank. “The Palestinian Authority is weak,” he says, leaving Christians vulnerable to Muslim thugs. Even where the Palestinian Authority’s writ runs strongly, Catholics aren’t at ease. I spoke on the phone with a Palestinian Catholic priest (I omit his name for his safety) who leads a parish in the West Bank. Included in the priest’s ministry is a Catholic school, most of whose students are Muslim. “There is a lot of mythology in [the Muslim students’] heads about Christians,” he says, such as that “maybe [the Christian] is not a real human being.” The tension is worst during discussions of the conflict with Israel, when the school encourages students to substitute the Christian tradition of nonviolent resistance for Hamas-style jihad. Nevertheless, “when the majority of your students are Muslims,” the priest laughs nervously, “we have to be prudent, not to be involved in a confrontation with them.” The word “prudent” occurs a half-dozen times in the priest’s explanation that Christians “have to prove that we are loyal to Palestinian society.”
One man who attempted to furnish such proof was Pizzaballa’s predecessor, Michel Sabbah, patriarch from 1987 to 2008 (the Jordanian Foaud Twal served for an uneventful period between Sabbah and Pizzaballa). The two men are quite different. Pizzaballa is an Italian Franciscan who did doctoral work on Jewish texts and personally knows the pope who appointed him patriarch and created him cardinal; Sabbah, the patriarch emeritus, is a Palestinian Arab graduate of the seminary in Beit Jala, and the first local to be appointed patriarch.
And, unlike Pizzaballa, Sabbah has dedicated his adulthood to the Palestinian national cause. Pizzaballa publicly called the Hamas massacre in Israel’s south “barbaric”; Sabbah’s public statement ten days into the war made no mention of Hamas’s massacre but accused Israel of a “crime” for responding to the massacre. While he was patriarch, Sabbah defended the First Intifada in the late 1980s and supported the transfer of West Bank Palestinians from Israel’s direct governance to the rule of the Palestinian Authority. Though nominally secular, the Palestinian Authority has incorporated Sharia law and been run by Muslims since its inception. After increasing under Israeli governance, the Christian population in the West Bank (especially near Bethlehem) has cratered under PA rule. In 2002, an especially bloody period during a five-year terror war sponsored by the Palestinian Authority, two hundred Palestinian militants forced their way into Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. The IDF surrounded but did not enter the church. Sabbah claimed that the church had welcomed the militants and that the priests inside were not hostages. The Franciscan order, the custodians of the church, publicly contradicted Sabbah’s claim regarding the priests. After the incident, the Israelis found the church filled with rifles, explosives, and booby-traps. Sabbah never condemned the militants.
Palestinian Catholics are a double minority: non-Jews in a Jewish state and Christian members of a mostly Muslim Arab population. Sabbah hoped to ally Christians and Muslims around their shared identity as Palestinian Arabs. But as Pizzaballa tacitly acknowledges, such attempts have failed throughout the Middle East. The patriarch contrasts the Holy Land’s relative hospitality to Christians with Syria and Iraq, where the weakening and eventual defeats of secular autocracies left Christians vulnerable to violent Islamists. (Pizzaballa might have mentioned Egypt as well.)
The attempt by Palestinian Christians to ally themselves with Muslim neighbors long precedes Sabbah. Arab Christians participated disproportionately in the Muslim-Christian Societies that incubated Palestinian nationalism in the early 1920s. But as was the case with other young Arab nations, early Palestinian political victories were led by Muslims with Islamic aims. The 1929 Jerusalem and Hebron riots, for instance, were marketed by Palestinian Islamists as a defense against Jewish encroachment upon Muslim holy sites. This organized attack on Palestine’s Jews, like two milder pogroms a decade earlier, induced the British to restrict Jewish immigration and land development. As Israeli historian Benny Morris recounts in his history of the conflict, Righteous Victims, the most effective campaign of Palestinian national movement during the Mandate was also violently anti-Christian. The leaders of the Arab revolt against the British from 1936 to 1939 understood themselves to be waging an Islamic holy war, and they raped and extorted Arab Christian villagers who stayed neutral.
Christian vulnerability to Muslims complicates the other half of the Catholic identity problem: their existence as non-Jews in a Jewish state. Pizzaballa does not admire Hamas. He even offered to trade himself for Israeli hostages in Gaza. But his patriarchate has also called for a ceasefire since October 7 of last year, when it published a statement condemning the “violence” of unnamed perpetrators against unnamed victims.
Pizzaballa knows the risks to Catholics of public sympathy for Israel. Criticizing Israel, by contrast, wins sympathy from Arab Muslims without eliciting much antipathy from Israeli Jews, who are otherwise engaged. Nor are the Holy Land’s Catholics the only Christians on the patriarch’s mind. According to a Palestinian source inside the patriarchate, the patriarchate did not want Gaza’s Catholics to comply with the Israeli army’s evacuation order from Gaza City early in the war. Apparent Catholic complicity in an Israeli campaign to depopulate Gaza risked setting Mideast Muslims against their Christian neighbors.
The Catholics remaining in Gaza City—the patriarchate insists that the decision was the Gaza community’s alone—have vindicated the patriarchate’s policy of accommodating Muslim sentiment while relying on Israel for security. The patriarchate’s first secretary informed the Israeli Defense Ministry early in the war that Christians would shelter in the Holy Family Church. Sources inside the patriarchate and the Israeli government independently told me that joining the southbound flow of refugees—nearly all Muslims, with any number of militants among them—would be more dangerous for Gaza’s Catholics than staying put in the Holy Family compound. The IDF has facilitated the provision of food and supplies to the compound, which has been kept extraordinarily safe from the violence of the world’s most famous warzone.
Extraordinarily, but not entirely safe. On December 16, 2023, Naheda and Samar Anton were shot in the church courtyard. Pizzaballa accused Israel of killing the Catholic mother and daughter “in cold blood.” The next day, Pope Francis condemned “snipers” for shooting “where there are no terrorists.”
Well, perhaps not no terrorists. Israel confirmed that Israeli soldiers had been operating near the Gaza church—in response to an RPG fired by terrorists nearby using civilian spotters. (No comment as to whether the women matched the descriptions of the spotters.) Hamas situates fighters and weapons near civilian buildings, hoping to gain propaganda victories from Palestinian deaths. And a source inside the patriarchate told me that his superiors were aware of Hamas infrastructure near the Holy Family Church.
We do not know who shot the Antons. It is possible that Hamas did it and possible that the Israelis did it. But it defies reason to say the Israelis did it maliciously. The evidence, at any rate, seems thin. When I called Yusef Daher, Catholic secretary of the Council of Patriarchs and Heads of Jerusalem Churches, he related the following from the priest of the Holy Family parish: “Shots have been heard around the church . . . and we conclude that the [IDF] shot these two women.” Daher cited media reports, the circumstantial “experience of the war that week,” and unattributed reports from inside the church. The Latin Patriarch’s aide echoed these citations and told me in an email that the IDF should investigate the events.
Alas, Pizzaballa’s judgment makes a certain brutal, survivalist sense. He gains nothing by saying nothing and might lose everything by blaming Hamas. But he gains something by blaming Israel: extra protection by the only military in the conflict zone that cares about the safety of Christians. As an Israeli defense ministry official wryly noted to me, you can bet the IDF did everything it could to ensure that there were no terrorists near the church after the Antons were killed. If this was Pizzaballa’s strategy, it seems to have worked, for the incident has not been repeated.
The ongoing depletion of the Middle East’s Christian communities—some of the oldest Christian communities anywhere—is one of the best documented but least publicized religious catastrophes in the world. Pizzaballa assures me that Catholics in the Holy Land are safe from the murderous persecution to which their brethren nearby are subject. This has indeed been true, even under the worst Palestinian rulers, though Christians are steadily leaving the West Bank (mostly for better jobs, but also to escape Muslim thugs). But it has been especially true in Israel, the only Mideast country with a growing Christian population. One of Pizzaballa’s colleagues, Bishop Rafic of Nazareth, told me that he both wants his flock to participate fully in Israeli society and worries that they will find it attractive enough to assimilate. I restrain myself from telling this Levantine Catholic that he sounds like an American Jew, concerned that conditions are too friendly for the good of his coreligionists. Israeli Christian schools have the highest matriculation rates of any schools in the country. Arab Christians have the highest employment rate of any Israeli religious group, and their unemployment and welfare use rates are the lowest. Christian women excel compared to their non-Christian Israeli peers, earning more than six in ten of the doctorates awarded to Christians. (Israeli women in general earn half of the country’s PhDs.) Christian incomes are just below the national average.
Israel’s Arab Christians are often lumped together with Arab Muslims, but they are more instructively compared with the Druze, who number about 150,000 and, like the Christians, largely live in Israel’s north. The Druze, who have lived in the Levant since the religion was founded in the twelfth century, are regarded by Muslims as apostates and frequently persecuted. In the pre-State period as now, Druze who lived in non-Druze towns preferred Christian towns to Muslim ones. Holy Land Christians are wealthier than the Druze and have always been better educated. But whereas Christians benefit from life in Israel, Druze identify with the Israeli project. A Druze unit fought with distinction in the 1948–1949 Israeli war of independence. One of the most senior IDF officers killed in the current war, Col. Ehsan Daqsa of the 401st Armored Brigade, was Druze. There is no comparable tradition of Christian Arab service in the central institution of Israeli society.
That will probably be true for as long as Israel and Palestine’s Arabs are in conflict—unless Israel’s Christian Arabs begin to regard their citizenship as more important than their ethnicity (a development every prelate I spoke to considered unlikely). Then again, the ranking of identities is itself a leisure activity. Politically, the most basic thing is not getting killed—always a concern in this region, and not only for minorities. Christians are not worried about religious persecution by Jews (the occasional bigoted remark from a right-wing rabbi notwithstanding). They are worried—they’ve been worried for centuries—about religious persecution by Muslims. Now they worry about becoming collateral damage in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, whose most popular leaders are Islamists.
Pizzaballa’s two-step—relying on the Israelis in private, excoriating them in public—may have helped his flock avoid some of the worst of the current Gaza war. And his wartime publicity has—it is rumored to have been rumored in Rome—made him papabile. It would be quite a thing for the patriarch to be elected in the next conclave. His principal achievement is not theological or even exactly institutional, but political. Of course there is nothing wrong with that, especially in an age that is more and more hostile to the Catholic message—not only in the Islamic world but in China, and, in different and less brutal ways, Western Europe and America as well.
Whether the strategy of securing endangered Catholics by appeasing violent Islamists with polemics against Jews represents prudent churchmanship is beyond the power of this (Jewish) layman to answer. It may be the best that the Holy Land’s Catholics can hope for, at least in wartime. Whether they can ever hope for anything better depends as much on those they fear as it does on them.
Cole S. Aronson writes from Jerusalem.
Image by Ammar Awad/Reuters, via Vatican News. Image cropped.
