I grew up less than a mile from a shepherd’s field in Beit Sahour in the occupied West Bank. It is the hillside where, according to Luke’s Gospel, the news of Jesus’ birth was first announced. For my family, these were not distant Biblical landscapes. They were the backdrop to our daily lives: the olive groves we played in, the terraces we tended, the land where our faith and identity were rooted.
Today, for the first time in my life, I felt fear that the community that raised me might not survive.
In recent weeks, a new illegal Israeli settlement outpost has been established on the edge of Beit Sahour. Caravans and construction equipment appeared on the site, which the town had hoped to use as a children’s hospital, cultural center and public space. The project is supported by international donors and aims to strengthen Christian communities that have existed for centuries. Instead, those plans have now been canceled, and families living nearby are bracing for uncertainty, heightened tensions, and the very real possibility of further evacuations.
Others have documented the legal and political implications of these settlements. My concerns are more personal and more urgent. What is happening today threatens, not in the abstract but in the concrete, the very continuity of the Christian presence in the Bethlehem region.
Beit Sahour is one of the last Christian-majority towns in the West Bank. Our family is Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical. We worship together, we marry across traditions, and we share a heritage that stretches back to the earliest centuries of the Christian story. But like many Palestinian communities, we are running out of land and, with it, time.
Decades of dispossession, separation walls, and settlement expansion have left only small parts of our cities accessible to Palestinian construction. Many young people are unable to build a house even if they want to. Parents worry about their children’s future. Families who want to stay rooted in their ancestral lands face barriers that make leaving seem like the only viable path forward.
This is how the community disappears. Not because they have ceased to believe, but because the conditions necessary for their flourishing have been steadily stripped away by Israel’s military occupation.
For many Christians around the world, especially in the United States, this situation is causing great confusion. “We support Israel because we care about the Jewish people. We never want to see them hurt, displaced or put in danger again. So what do we do when Palestinian Christians say they too are suffering?”
This is an honest question shaped by conscience and history. Nevertheless, it reveals a painful misunderstanding. The idea is that supporting Jewish security requires condoning the deprivation of others’ property, or that acknowledging the suffering of Palestinians threatens Jewish security.
it’s not. That’s never the case.
Desiring the safety of Jews is legitimate and extremely important. Especially after centuries of anti-Semitism that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust. People of faith should never be indifferent to the vulnerabilities of the Jewish community.
But silence is not necessary to advocate for Jewish safety when Palestinian Christian and Muslim families lose their land, face escalating violence, or see their future diminished. Safety for some cannot be built on the insecurities of others. There is no moral framework, Christian, Jewish, or secular, that asks us to choose between the dignity of one child and the dignity of another.
Rather, a deeply rooted biblical truth is that justice is indivisible. Diminishing the rights of one community to protect another ultimately undermines both.
But when Palestinian Christians speak out, many churches in Western countries too often remain silent. Every December American congregations sing about Bethlehem without recognizing that many families in the Bethlehem area struggle to stay on the land. Pilgrims visit Shepherd’s Field without asking what is going on with the people who have cared for it for generations.
This silence is not malicious. Often it stems from a fear of appearing partisan or from the mistaken belief that talking about Palestinian suffering will undermine support for Jewish security.
But silence has consequences. It sends the implicit message that some lives don’t matter. It weakens the moral credibility of the church. And that leaves communities like mine, Christian families who have lived on the Hill of Bethlehem for over 2,000 years, feeling abandoned by the very global organization to which they belong.
What is happening in Beit Sahour is not just a political conflict. It is a question of human dignity and the future of the Christian witness in the places where the Christian story began. If the Christian community in Bethlehem were to disappear, the loss would not only be felt by Palestinians. It would be a loss to the world church and to all who care about the continuity of the birthplace of the gospel.
I grew up less than a mile from these fields. I know what’s at stake. And I believe that American Christians can hold two truths at the same time. That Jews deserve security, and that Palestinian Christian communities deserve to live in their own land without fear.
This is not an ethnic choice. It’s a choice between justice and indifference.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
