Palestine: Between the Mediterranean coast, central highlands, and Jordan Valley, Palestinian home cooking, olive harvests, schools, poetry, and ancient churches continue amid separation, occupation, blockade, displacement, and political division. Understanding this land requires rejecting antisemitism, anti-Palestinian dehumanisation, and the direct conversion of biblical promises into modern state policy. Keys to the culture: صمود · بيت · حارة · كرامة. Geography and history, the church, films and books, and prayer for this land.
Between the Mediterranean coast, central highlands, and Jordan Valley, Palestinian home cooking, olive harvests, schools, poetry, and ancient churches continue amid separation, occupation, blockade, displacement, and political division. Understanding this land requires rejecting antisemitism, anti-Palestinian dehumanisation, and the direct conversion of biblical promises into modern state policy.
This page uses Palestine primarily for the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The United Nations and the International Court of Justice's 2024 advisory opinion regard both as parts of one Occupied Palestinian Territory. Gaza is a narrow Mediterranean coastal plain; the West Bank descends from the central highlands around Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron toward the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea lowlands. Rainfall decreases from west to east, and water, farmland, grazing, urban growth, and climate pressure are closely linked.
Palestinians have no continuous route between the two territories that they can use freely. In the West Bank, settlements, military areas, roads, checkpoints, the separation barrier, and different civil and military administrative zones divide cities, villages, fields, and relatives. Israel has long tightly controlled Gaza's entry and exit by land, sea, and air, while Egypt controls the Rafah side. Israel's 2005 removal of settlements and permanent ground forces from inside Gaza did not end legal debate over duties arising from effective control. Neither ‘withdrawal ended occupation’ nor ‘occupation makes every fact unnecessary to examine’ can replace legal inquiry.
At the end of 2025 the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics revised its estimate to account for wartime deaths, missing people, departures, and lower births: about 5.56 million residents in the State of Palestine, roughly 3.43 million in the West Bank and 2.13 million in Gaza. This is not the worldwide Palestinian population. Refugees and diaspora communities in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gulf, the Americas, Europe, and elsewhere preserve distinct family memories. Arabic is the main language; English, Hebrew, Armenian, and others serve particular communities. Most residents are Sunni Muslim. Christians are a very small but deeply rooted community of several traditions, and Samaritans continue near Nablus. Population, refugee registration, nationality, residency rights, and political identity are different measures and cannot be added into one simple ethnic table.
The land passed through Canaanite city-states, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine rule. Ancient communities cannot be drawn in an unbroken bloodline to Palestinians or Israelis today. Jesus was born, ministered, died, and rose under Roman rule, and Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Gaza had Christian communities from an early period.
After the seventh-century Arab Muslim conquest, Arabic and Islam gradually became the majority culture over centuries, while Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan communities continued. Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods reshaped cities, land, and religious institutions. In the late nineteenth century, local Arab identity, Ottoman reform, and Zionism developed at once. European antisemitic persecution drove Jewish immigration and deepened local Arab fears over land and power.
Britain assumed the Mandate after the First World War. The 1917 Balfour Declaration supported a Jewish national home while stating that the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities should not be prejudiced. Conflicting commitments, migration, land transfer, British repression, and the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 deepened confrontation. The Holocaust made Jewish refuge and security undeniably urgent without cancelling Palestinian people's home and political rights.
The 1947 United Nations partition plan proposed Arab and Jewish states and a special arrangement for Jerusalem. The Jewish Agency accepted and Arab leadership rejected it. Israel was founded in the 1948 war; hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled and hundreds of villages were lost in the Nakba. Palestinians who remained inside Israel later gained citizenship but lived for years under military rule. Jordan controlled the West Bank, Egypt administered Gaza, and refugees dispersed across countries.
After the 1967 war, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza and developed settlements. Military rule, dispossession, attacks, and Palestinian armed resistance took civilian lives. After the first intifada, the Oslo Accords created limited Palestinian Authority self-rule without resolving borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, or security. Hamas won the 2006 election and took Gaza by force in 2007; the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority remained in the West Bank. Political division, authoritarian practice, and corruption also harmed Palestinians. The Israeli and Egyptian blockade and repeated wars compressed ordinary life in Gaza.
Palestine received United Nations non-member observer-state status in 2012. On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led attackers killed civilians and took hostages in an indefensible crime. Israel's ensuing Gaza war caused mass civilian death and injury, hunger risk, destruction, and displacement; violence and detention also increased in the West Bank. After a ceasefire framework was announced in October 2025, military action, restricted aid, and a housing crisis persisted in 2026. Honesty must name antisemitism, hostage taking, occupation, settlement expansion, collective punishment, abuses by armed groups, and oppressive government without using one people's trauma to erase another.
The first church in Jerusalem, traditions of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, and early Christians in Gaza show that Palestinian Christians today are not a small foreign remnant left by modern missionaries. A Church of the Nativity existed in the fourth century, and the main sixth-century rebuilding continues today; history also records Bishop Porphyrius of Gaza. Greek-speaking, Aramaic or Syriac-speaking, and increasingly Arabic-speaking Christians continued through Byzantine, early Islamic, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods amid conflict and demographic change.
The Crusades established a Latin hierarchy but never represented all local Christianity. Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, and other traditions had their own continuity. The Ottoman millet system protected aspects of community life while placing identity under religious leaders. In the nineteenth century Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Protestant missions built schools, hospitals, and congregations. After its resident restoration in 1847, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem trained Arabic-speaking clergy. Education and health care brought public benefit, while European protecting powers also contested property and influence.
The Nakba of 1948 displaced Muslim and Christian Palestinians together and reshaped Christian life in many cities. Occupation after 1967, land and residency pressure, war, and economic instability continued to drive emigration. Most Palestinian Christians today are concentrated in East Jerusalem and around Bethlehem and Ramallah, with communities elsewhere in the West Bank and a very small community in Gaza. Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian, Anglican, Lutheran, Evangelical, and other traditions coexist. Small numbers do not make them vanishing museum artefacts.
Church institutions run schools, hospitals, universities, disability services, relief, and dialogue and can also face clericalism, overseas-funding pressure, partisan politics, gender inequality, and property disputes. During the Gaza war, churches sheltered displaced Muslim and Christian neighbours. The community's witness may be public; the names, routes, capacity, and security arrangements of particular people must not become website content.
Palestinian Christian documents speak through faith, hope, love, nonviolent resistance, and calls to end occupation. Christians disagree over boycotts, state arrangements, theology, and strategy. Opposition to occupation or Israeli government policy is not opposition to Jews. Antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and collective accusation that Jews killed Christ are sins. Likewise, equating every policy of the modern State of Israel with biblical promise erases Palestinian Christians from their own biblical land. The church must hear both Jewish concerns for security and Palestinian claims to freedom and equality, letting Christ's cross judge every form of dehumanisation, revenge, and religious privilege.