In the first installment of this series, CatholicVote introduced readers to the lives of Holy Land Christians Nadim Khoury, Father Bashar Fawadleh, and Bassem Khoury — each offering a window into the growing anguish of the Christian minority in the Holy Land. Now, the testimony continues through the voice of Alice Kisiya, a young Christian woman from Bethlehem where she is fighting to preserve both her family’s land and her people’s legacy.
Currently living just outside the historic city, Kisiya runs the advocacy organization Save al-Makhrour. She told CatholicVote that the attacks last week were no surprise but a reminder of the frightening increase in illegal settlements that are hemming in more and more towns around Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
“If Church leaders in the US would really know what’s happening” to Christians in the Holy Land, Kisiya said, they would temper their support for Israel’s actions and investigate injustices against Palestinian Christians. She described the conditions in the West Bank, even from the vantage point of Bethlehem, as “terrifying.”
Like the others CatholicVote spoke with, Kisiya knows of many people who have given up on their ancient homeland and emigrated. “The Christians in the Holy Land are less than 2% of the population” now, she pointed out, “and these are indigenous Christians to the land” who once were almost the sole residents of the region.
But in addition to violence, settlers and their political and military allies have other ways of pushing Palestinian Christians out, she said.
“Like my father,” she said, “they took away his license to work in Jerusalem. So they know how to attack people. Even if they don’t attack them physically, they attack them with [threats to] their living. It’s a way of making people emigrate easily.”
Kisiya herself has been physically attacked by settlers, along with her mother and other relatives. “It’s really getting worse, especially after the Israeli-Iran war, they are getting really violent and racist,” she said.
Kisiya recalled that a group of settlers once told her, “After we finish taking” surrounding villages, “we’re taking Bethlehem. We are taking everything, because it’s ours.”
That may sound like an empty threat, she said, but they take the land by forcing locals to emigrate.
Asked how Catholics in the United States could join her in prayer, Kisiya offered an impromptu prayer of her own. And it was not a prayer for her community, but for those oppressing it.
“I pray for the people who fund this madness to open their eyes, and I pray for those evil souls they have in them to be healed from darkness,” she said. She prayed for those “spreading the false narratives and ideologies with those kids,” adding “because those settlers are kids and they are being abused by their own system.”
“So I pray for peace for everyone and equality for everyone,” she concluded, “but the people who most need prayers are the ones who are oppressing others. Because they are blind, they are controlled by evil, and I pray that this would come to an end soon.”
Kisiya’s friend Jason Jones, founder and president of the Vulnerable People Project (VPP), also called for greater awareness of the plight of Christians in the Holy Land among Christians in the United States. Speaking to CatholicVote last week, his message too was about prayer.
VPP, a Catholic apostolate, has been working closely with Christians and other victims of Israeli aggression in both the West Bank and Gaza.
“As Pope Leo keeps reminding us, it’s important for Catholics around the world to be praying and advocating for their persecuted brothers and sisters, especially in this region, where Christ founded His Church,” Jones said.
There is relatively little coverage of the situation in the Western press, however, and Jones said he believes “we Christians of the West need the humility to think of ourselves as the younger siblings – even the servants of this ancient community.”
“There’s a beautiful prayer called the Litany of Humility, and it asks God to deliver us from the desire to be honored and praised, approved of rather than suspected or despised,” Jones said. “If we let ourselves be controlled by that desire, we’ll never stick up for Christians under Israeli occupation, ‘cause there’s nothing in it for us. It can get us in trouble. And we’re still stuck with that desire to be honored and approved of — and not by God or His saints, but by the world.”
Before hanging up the phone, Kisiya rushed to add something she said was important.
“As long as the Holy Land is suffering,” she said, “the whole world will suffer. So to Christians who [profess] that they care for the Holy Land or the [place of the] birth of Jesus Christ, it’s about to be gone forever if they don’t act quickly.”
Those interested in financially supporting Christians in the Holy Land, can give to the Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), an official pontifical institution.