This Week in Palestine

Wow. Just wow. Zero self-awareness. If you want to understand the massive gap between Israel's rhetoric and its actions towards Christians, listen to George Deek, their Special Envoy to the Christian World. "The Christian world matters to us. Not as a tactical audience, not as a political instrument, but as a family of faith communities." Those words would carry far more weight if Israel’s actions reflected them. Instead, the contradiction and hypocrisy are as glaring as they are insulting. Allow me to explain: - In 2020, George Deek was the Ambassador of Israel to Azerbaijan during the 44 Day War between Armenia and Azerbaijan, in which 5,000 Christian Armenian soldiers were killed with Israeli weapons. Armenia, the first Christian nation in the world, lost that war, which led to the mass exodus of 150,000 Christian Armenians from Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), effectively reducing the Christian presence in that region to zero;a presence that had endured for over 2,000 years. Churches destroyed, graves desecrated. Israel was complicit in that ethnic cleansing. George did nothing to prevent that. In fact, he congratulated Azerbaijan on the "restoration of their territorial integrity." - George Deek's paternal great-grandmother was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Earlier this month when Israeli FM Gideon Sa'ar announced that the Israeli government had unanimously voted to recognize the genocide, not a single word came out of Deek's mouth, he didn't publicly endorse this initiative. If the Christian world truly matters to Israel “as a family of faith communities,” then why was there no visible moral leadership from its envoy when one of the world’s oldest Christian communities was destroyed? And why the silence when Israel finally moved toward recognizing the Armenian Genocide, a tragedy that also touched his own family?

BREAKING: Taybeh, the last Palestinian Christian village in the West Bank, is on fire! Local residents report that Israeli settlers torched the fields.

Today, on Shabbat, over 100 Israeli settlers rampaged through four Palestinian towns in the West Bank, bludgeoning residents and stealing their sheep. It lasted two hours. Zero intervention by the IDF. Call it what it is: Pogroms.