Palestinian Christian woman facing daily settler violence speaks with Tucker Carlson

Palestinian Christian Alice Kisiya during an April 22 interview with Tucker Carlson said her people in the West Bank are now facing “daily” Israeli settler violence and appealed to Americans to support advocacy groups like the U.S.-based Catholic apostolate the Vulnerable People Project in their work on behalf of Christians in the Holy Land.

Mentioning the Vulnerable People Project and its “Save West Bank Christians” and “Gaza Walks” campaigns, Kisiya told Carlson, “We're working together in order to help the vulnerable people and the minorities around the world.”

Zeale News spoke with Kisiya in July 2025 as part of a two-part series on Christians in the Holy Land, documenting their growing concerns about efforts by radical Jewish settlers to drive indigenous Christians out of the region.

Zeale News has also reported on the Vulnerable People Project (VPP) and spoken with its president, Jason Jones, while CatholicVote partnered with VPP last year to deliver aid to Christians in Gaza.

>> Exclusive: Vulnerable People Project dedicates Gaza aid truck to Pope Leo XIV << 

>> CatholicVote calls for solidarity with suffering Christians in Gaza <<

‘They don’t like Christians’ 

When Carlson asked about the now-viral image of an Israeli soldier smashing a statue of the crucified Jesus, Kisiya said the incident was not surprising and has drawn attention only because many people are unaware of what has been happening on the ground. 

"This is not the first time," she told Carlson. "They have been vandalizing our Christian symbols multiple times. They have been spitting on our priests and writing bad words on the churches. So I’m not surprised.” 

Kisiya told Zeale last July that conditions for Christians in the region had become "terrifying” and that settlers were “getting really violent and racist."

“No one can stop them,” she told Carlson, adding that even Israeli leadership could not restrain the settler violence.

She said the reason Christians are targeted is simply that the settlers “don't like Christians.”

“They hate us," she said.

She told Carlson that settlers and their political backers use anti-Islam messaging to generate fear in Western countries and justify annexing Palestinian land — but that narrative deliberately erases the ancient and indigenous community of Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land. 

"It's all propaganda," she said. "If U.S. Christians knew how the indigenous Christians from Jesus's bloodline actually live here, they would change their mind."

She also pointed to a material motive: Christians make up less than 1% of the population in her area yet hold, after Israel, the second-largest amount of privately owned land. 

"They want Christians to emigrate from the West Bank in order to take over those lands," she said.

Years-long fight over family land

Kisiya's family built a home and a restaurant on their land in El Makhrour, an Area-C property near Bethlehem — meaning it sits within Palestinian territory but under Israeli military control.

"They demolished it four times," she told Carlson. "Each time, we rebuilt it."

A settler-linked private company called Himanuta — a subsidiary of the Jewish National Fund — claimed to have purchased the land in 1969, citing an entry in a Jordanian-era archive. When Kisiya and her brother went to verify the claim, they found the archive page listed in the company's documents was blank.

"They were filling the empty pages with their own agreements, as if it's in the archive," she said. "It's all forging documents in order to steal more and more Palestinian and especially Christian lands."

After Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel in 2023, settlers moved in alongside Israeli police and soldiers, declaring the area a closed military zone using an order that technically applied to a different location.

"They use another military zone and they stick it to your map, to your area, and they tell you this is a closed military zone," she said. "They keep the settlers inside."

Kisiya said her family ultimately prevailed in regaining access to the land after a 40-day protest, but the property was ruined. The restaurant was destroyed and dozens of olive trees were uprooted.

“We have nothing,” she told Carlson.

Kisiya described several confrontations with settlers, including when a settler stole her dog and likely killed him. She filed a police report with video evidence of the abduction and said the case was closed three days later for "lack of evidence." 

In one physical confrontation, she recalled a settler grabbing and trying to choke her. When she called the police, she and her mother were the ones arrested.

"Even when I was calling the police to come to protect me from settlers, they were arresting me," she said.

'A systematic ethnic cleansing'

Kisiya was clear that what her community is experiencing is not random violence but organized displacement.

"They are helping with their funds, with their taxpayers, with everything," she said of American Christian Zionist organizations, which she accused of encouraging Palestinian Christians to emigrate by offering visas and jobs abroad. 

"We are being ethnically cleansed because of them — and they are not really aware that they are erasing the history of the cradle of Jesus Christ."

After taking over surrounding villages, one settler told her, "We will come to Bethlehem and we will take over everything, because Bethlehem is for us as Jews."

The political force behind it, she said, is Israel Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is funding settler organizations and orchestrating a network of private companies, forged documents, and military designations to seize land in Area C. Young settlers serve as his foot soldiers, she explained, and many of them are from broken homes or foster care and were recruited internationally and trained to be hostile toward Arabs. 

"He doesn't really care for their own kids," she said. "He will send them each time to different places to take over those lands."

Fear of detention

Palestinians who speak out risk years of detention without trial, Kisiya told Carlson — hearings postponed indefinitely, cases never resolved. She cited a Christian Palestinian woman from Ramallah named Lean Noser, who is currently in jail after multiple detentions with no resolution in sight. 

"They claim whatever they want," Kisiya said.

She has been arrested multiple times herself, and told Carlson the only reason she could fight back is her dual Israeli and French citizenship — a rare advantage for a Palestinian. 

"If I was Palestinian with only a Palestinian ID, I couldn't do that," she said.

Another example she cited both to Carlson and, earlier, to Zeale News, was that when her land dispute intensified, authorities revoked her father's Jerusalem work permit. By cutting off her family’s income sources, the authorities were seeking to force them to forfeit the court case, according to Kisia.

She told Zeale News, "They know how to attack people. Even if they don't attack them physically, they attack them with their living.”