I grew up in Jaffa, going to church every Sunday with my father, the cantor of our Greek Orthodox church. I joined the Christian Scouts as a boy, later became a leader in the movement and even ran our marching band, a serious source of community pride. We marched at Christmas and Easter. We celebrated weddings, baptisms and feast days. We knew which grandmother made the best food and which family was feuding with which other family.
In other words, we were a perfectly normal Middle Eastern Christian community. Our neighbors were Muslims and Jews. We studied together, worked together, argued together and lived together.
I grew up Christian, Arab and Israeli. I felt rooted, safe and happy. Which is why I sometimes wonder whether the Israel I keep reading about is a different country.
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Apparently, Christians here live under siege, Christianity is being pushed out and Jewish hostility is making Christian life increasingly impossible. It is an alarming picture, and a very strange description of the country in which I actually live.
Let me make one thing clear: There have been ugly incidents of religious radicals spitting at clergy, verbally abusing Christians and vandalizing property. Such behavior is disgraceful. Israel should confront it forcefully through law enforcement, education and religious leadership.
But then comes the question that strangely disappears from much of the discussion:
Do those extremists define Israel? Because if they do, we are going to have to rewrite our descriptions of quite a few Western democracies.
In 2025, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States, an average of 17 every day. More significantly, there were 203 physical assaults, the highest number the ADL has recorded since it began tracking such incidents.
Does that make America an antisemitic society? Of course not.
Then there is Spain.
According to Spain's Interior Ministry, hate crimes and hate incidents reached their highest recorded level in 2025, rising 23.6% in a single year. Antisemitic incidents rose 86.5% from 37 to 69 cases.
Should we therefore conclude that Spain itself is fundamentally anti-Jewish? Again, no.
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Extremism exists in every democratic society. Sometimes it grows dangerously. Governments must confront it. But serious people understand the difference between extremists within a society and the character of the society itself.
Except, increasingly, when that society is Israel.
An extremist in Boston, Madrid or London attacks a Jew, and we correctly call him an antisemite. A fanatic spits at a Christian in Jerusalem and suddenly we are invited to diagnose Israeli society.
That is not analysis. It is a double standard.
If you genuinely want to know whether Christians are flourishing in a country, there are better measures than the behavior of its worst citizens.
Start with the most basic question:
Are Christians disappearing?
In Israel, they are not.
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In 1950, Israel was home to roughly 34,000 Christians. Today there are about 184,000, and the community continues to grow.
Then look at what Christians actually do here.
Consider one image that tells you more about Christian integration than a hundred government brochures.
Justice Salim Joubran was an Arab Christian justice of Israel's Supreme Court. He sat on the panel that sent former Israeli president Moshe Katsav to prison. Think about that sentence. An Arab Christian judge helped send the Jewish president of the Jewish state to prison.
And nobody in Israel regarded his ethnicity or religion as an issue. He was a Supreme Court justice doing his job. That is the point.
Christians are physicians and hospital directors, academics and businesspeople, mayors, police officers, soldiers and diplomats.
I happen to be one of them.
The boy from the Christian Scouts in Jaffa eventually joined Israel's diplomatic service and became the first Christian appointed to represent Israel as an ambassador.
Today, I serve as Israel's Special Envoy to the Christian World, a position created specifically to deepen Israel's relationship with Christian communities around the world. Quite an elaborate way for a country supposedly hostile to Christianity to behave.
There are other inconvenient facts. In 2014, Israel formally recognized the Aramean nationality, giving members of ancient Aramaic and Syriac Christian traditions official recognition of an identity rooted in Christianity's earliest history.
Israel is also investing in Christianity's past and future here.
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A few days ago, I visited the excavations at Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, where archaeologists identified what is likely to have been the hometown of the Apostles Peter and Andrew.
I watched Israeli and American archaeologists, Jews and Christians, literally digging the world of Jesus back out of the earth.
There is something wonderfully inconvenient about that image: The country supposedly erasing Christianity is uncovering the village of the Apostles.
And Israel is already preparing for 2030, when Christians will mark 2,000 years since the baptism of Jesus, an anniversary expected to bring enormous numbers of pilgrims to the Holy Land.
Something interesting is happening beyond Israel's borders as well. Recent polling in Lebanon found strong support among its Christian communities for peace with Israel: 77% among Maronites and 72% among Orthodox Christians.
Perhaps Middle Eastern Christians, after watching what has happened to ancient communities in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, are beginning to ask questions that old political slogans cannot answer.
Perhaps Jews and Christians in this region have more invested in one another's survival than generations of conflict allowed either side to admit.
None of this excuses a single act of anti-Christian hatred. A Jew who spits at a priest because he is Christian should be ashamed of himself, and Israel should make sure the law deals with him. Full stop.
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Israel has work to do. Enforcement must be stronger. Religious leaders must be louder. Education must be better. I am working inside government on precisely these issues.
But I refuse to give the extremist a promotion. He is an extremist. He does not get promoted to spokesman for ten million Israelis simply because that makes for a more dramatic story.
And yet that is effectively what some of the current coverage does.
The extremist is representative, while the Christian Supreme Court justice is an exception.
The spitting teenager is Israeli, while the Christian ambassador somehow is not.
How convenient. This works because a distorted picture does not require invented facts. It requires only a carefully chosen frame. Photograph one crack in a cathedral closely enough and you can make the entire building appear to be collapsing. The crack is real. The picture is false.
There is a broader reason this matters.
Christianity was born in this region. Yet across much of the Middle East, ancient Christian communities have suffered war, persecution, political instability, emigration and demographic decline.
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Before Syria's civil war, Christians numbered over two million, and today only a few hundred thousand are estimated to remain. Iraq's Christian community has fallen from more than 1.5 million before 2003 to fewer than 200,000.
So the important Christian question of our age is not whether Israel contains unpleasant extremists. Of course it does. So do America, Spain and every other country.
The important question is:
Where in the Middle East will Christians still be living, worshiping, raising children and building a future fifty years from now?
I want the answer to include not only Jaffa, Jerusalem, Nazareth and the Galilee, but also Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and everywhere else Christians have belonged for centuries.
A few days ago at Bethsaida, standing where Peter and Andrew once lived, I was reminded that Christianity's story began here. Two thousand years later, Christians are still here. Not as archaeological artifacts or pilgrims, and certainly not merely as victims.
We worship. We raise families. We criticize our government. We build schools and careers. We serve our country and shape its future.
Israel has extremists. They deserve condemnation and prosecution. What they do not deserve is a promotion. They do not get to define Israel. And those who are so eager to let them should ask themselves why.
