Israeli Christians Are Growing in Number, and Are One of the Nation’s Most-Educated Demographic Groups

On Tuesday, a number of Christian leaders in Israel published a statement complaining about the situation of their flocks, asserting that “radical local groups with extremist ideologies” have made their lives “unbearable”—a message amplified by the archbishop of Canterbury. The truth is very different, the Times of Israel reports:

Israel’s Christian community grew by 1.4 percent in 2020 and numbers some 182,000 people, with 84 percent saying they were satisfied with life in the country, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) said in a report released ahead of Christmas.

According to the CBS, Christians make up about 1.9 of Israel’s population. Christians make up 7 percent of Israel’s Arab population, and 76.7 percent of Christians in Israel are Arab. . . . The statistics revealed that Arab Christian women had some of the highest education rates in the country. It showed that 53.1 percent of Arab Christians and 35.4 percent of non-Arab Christians went on to get a bachelor’s degree after finishing high school, compared to 34 percent of the total number of high-school graduates in the Arab school system and 47.2 percent of all high-school graduates in Hebrew education.

The report also found lower numbers of Christians signing up for unemployment benefits compared to the Jewish and Muslim populations. The findings present a contrast to recent statements by Christian leaders.

There is an easy explanation for the discrepancy between these leaders’ public comments and the survey results: given their precarious position in Muslim-majority Arab society, Middle Eastern Christian must make an extra effort to prove their anti-Zionist bona fides. It is of course in Palestinian-controlled parts of Israel, Gaza especially, where they have faired the worst.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Israeli Arabs, Israeli society, Middle East Christianity

 

Universities Are in Thrall to a Constituency That Sees Israel as an Affront to Its Identity

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.

Read more at Dispatch

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel on campus, University