Foreign Ministry, Huckabee pan WSJ report on harassment of Christians in Israel

Jerusalem argues story on rise in attacks on clerics ‘took radical voices, extreme cases and turned them into the face of a country’; US envoy: Attacks ‘occasional but rare’

By Lazar BermanTimes of Israel

A Wall Street Journal article about harassment suffered by some Christians in Israel drew a furious response from Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Friday, which called it “disingenuous, misleading and shameful.”

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who is a Christian pastor, also criticized the article.

The WSJ piece, published earlier this week, focused on the rise in harassment of Christian clerics.

Christians in Israel say they are increasingly coming under assault, including in a series of incidents in recent years in which mostly young Orthodox Jews made a habit of spitting on the ground in front of clergy and other Christians, mainly in Jerusalem’s Old City — an act that may be prosecuted in Israel as a hate crime.

There have also been acts of vandalism against churches and cemeteries, and physical assaults, including actions that bear the hallmark of extremist Jewish settler violence familiar from the West Bank.

The publication of the article comes as Israel finds itself in repeated fiascos around its relationship with Christians.

However, the Foreign Ministry is leading a push to change the conversation around Israel’s Christian community and to get ahead of potential tensions.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar appointed Ambassador George Deek as the first special envoy to the Christian world. The ministry’s social media has been highlighting Christian sites and citizens in recent weeks, none of whom, it said, were included in the piece.

The Journal “took radical voices and extreme cases and turned them into the face of an entire country, while ignoring nearly 200,000 Christians whose lives tell the opposite story,” said the Foreign Ministry.

The ministry said The Journal “has now repeated the same formula: find those most willing to condemn Israel, present them as so-called ‘authentic’ Christian voices, and reduce the Christian experience here to the disgraceful actions of a tiny extremist fringe.

“Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is consistently growing,” said the Foreign Ministry, noting Christian representation on the Supreme Court and across the country’s professional industries.

“Churches operate freely. Christians participate at the highest levels of Israeli society,” it said.

Huckabee, an outspoken Christian Zionist, also pushed back on X.

Huckabee acknowledged there were “occasional but rare” attacks that he added were condemned by Israel’s leadership.

“Occasional challenges? Sure,” wrote Huckabee. “I’ve been throughout the Middle East & know of no place where there is much religious diversity as there is in Israel.”

He added, “Israel protects Christian Holy sites & Muslim Holy sites just as they do Jewish Holy sites.”

The Journal’s report documented various instances in which Orthodox Jews harassed and spat at Christian clerics.

“We are supposed to hate them,” one teen was quoted as saying.

Benedictine Abbot Nikodemus Schnabel told the paper that things had become considerably worse in recent years. In 2000, when he first came to the city, spitting incidents were rare, he said, but “now there is no day that people are not spitting at me.”

Yisca Harani, an Israeli scholar who tracks and documents anti-Christian sentiment, said: “This is the reality: Whomever is a Christian — visibly a Christian — is becoming a target. “There are a growing number of religious Jews who do this, and it is not being taken seriously by Israeli authorities. They are turning a blind eye, and that is an encouragement.”

 

Harani also noted that her organization, the Religious Freedom Data Center, had recorded 107 incidents targeting Christians in the first half of this year, more than twice the number for the same period in 2024.

The Journal noted that harassers and attackers were, in the end, “a small number of extremists,” but argued they represent an alarming trend of growing intolerance in local society.