From ritualized spitting and attacks on clergy to cemetery vandalism, settler violence and growing hostility among younger religious Israelis, the treatment of Christians is exposing an uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of Israel’s claim to protect religious freedom.
Something troubling is happening to Christians in Jerusalem, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss it as the behavior of a handful of eccentrics. Christian priests and monks report being spat upon in the streets; nuns have faced harassment and physical assault; crosses and gravestones have been smashed; churches and monasteries have been vandalized; and Christian clergy increasingly describe an atmosphere in which simply appearing visibly Christian can invite abuse. The setting makes these incidents especially striking. Jerusalem is one of Christianity’s holiest cities and a place Israel routinely presents as proof of its commitment to protecting the holy sites and religious freedoms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yet an expanding body of reporting and monitoring data suggests that, for some Christians, everyday life in the Holy City increasingly contradicts that promise.
The most revealing recent episode occurred during Jerusalem Day in May 2026. Young Israeli Jews approached the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Jerusalem’s Old City, banged on the door and asked whether Christians were inside because they wanted to spit at them. One teenager, wrapped in an Israeli flag, described humiliating Christians as a religious duty and referred to them as idol worshippers. Security cameras, witnesses and a Wall Street Journal reporter documented at least a dozen spitting incidents near the Armenian church that afternoon, amid a nationalist march commemorating Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in 1967. The significance of the scene lay not merely in adolescent cruelty. Religion, contempt for another faith and Israeli nationalism had become intertwined: a young Jew carrying the national flag was presenting the humiliation of Christians as compatible with both religious devotion and national identity.
The numbers require careful handling because different monitoring organizations use different methodologies, but they point in the same direction. The Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue recorded 89 anti-Christian incidents in 2023, 111 in 2024 and 155 in 2025. Its 2025 findings described most physical incidents as spitting directed at easily identifiable Christian clergy and noted that priests in parts of Jerusalem had come to regard harassment as almost routine. A separate organization, the Religious Freedom Data Center, recorded 180 incidents in 2025, compared with 107 in 2024, and counted 88 incidents by early June 2026 before the total continued rising. Its cases included vandalism of cemeteries, crosses and statues, as well as spitting and verbal abuse, particularly in Jerusalem’s Old City.
The available evidence also tells us something about the perpetrators. Rossing’s 2024 report found that most appeared to come from ultra-Orthodox and national-religious communities and that clergy or people wearing visible Christian symbols were disproportionately targeted. Its 2025 findings similarly identified teenagers and young adults, including ultra-Orthodox ultranationalists, among those responsible for spitting and other incidents. The Religious Freedom Data Center likewise says young Jewish extremists account for most of the cases it documents. Taken together, the available monitoring data point to a consistent pattern of spitting, verbal abuse, vandalism and physical intimidation involving young religious Jews.
The most important change may therefore be psychological rather than numerical. Benedictine Abbot Nikodemus Schnabel, who arrived in Jerusalem in 2000, says spitting was rare when he first came but has become a virtually daily experience. Attackers also target the cross around his neck and sometimes demand that he remove it. Schnabel attributes part of the deterioration to the growing political confidence of religious extremists. A prejudice becomes more dangerous when its adherents cease to conceal it. When hostility that was once furtive can be performed openly in daylight, in front of security cameras and sometimes amid nationalist celebrations, the question is no longer simply why individual extremists behave badly. It is what has changed in the surrounding society that makes them feel entitled to do so.
The prevalence of spitting is not entirely accidental. It has a history within some Jewish religious traditions, although that history is considerably more complicated than contemporary extremists often suggest. The Aleinu, one of Judaism’s best-known prayers, contains a passage contrasting worship of God with those who bow before “vanity and emptiness.” Among some Ashkenazi Jews, a custom developed centuries ago of spitting while reciting that section as a physical expression of rejection of idolatry. Orthodox Jewish sources trace the practice back approximately six centuries: Sefer Maharil–Minhagim records Rabbi Yaakov Moelin, the Maharil, expectorating at that passage, while the 17th-century Taz explained the custom as an expression of contempt for idols.
Christianity became entangled with this practice because some Jewish authorities historically regarded Christian doctrine and imagery—especially the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, crosses, icons and statues—through the religious category of avodah zarah, or idolatry. Medieval Christian authorities themselves sometimes interpreted the disputed Aleinu passage as an attack on Christianity, leading to censorship of the prayer in parts of Europe. Yet Jewish sources also point out that the prayer predates Christianity and that its language originally referred to pagan worship rather than Jesus.
The danger becomes greater when theological hostility fuses with nationalist entitlement. The teenager outside the Armenian Church was not encountered in a synagogue debating medieval theology; he was participating in Jerusalem Day, one of Israel’s most charged nationalist events. The annual march celebrates the 1967 capture of East Jerusalem and passes through the Old City’s Palestinian neighborhoods. Jerusalem Day marches in recent years have repeatedly featured anti-Arab chants and acts of intimidation, giving the procession an unmistakable dimension of majoritarian power. Within that environment, spitting at Christians acquires a political meaning beyond religious disgust.
It can communicate a hierarchy of belonging: Jewish symbols define the city; Jewish sovereignty determines its character; Christian and Muslim communities remain physically present but are regarded by some nationalists as less entitled to the space around them. The spit then says more than “your religion is false.” It says that the person doing the spitting belongs to the sovereign community and the victim does not belong on equal terms. This is precisely why nationalism can convert old religious prejudice into something more politically consequential.
An Israeli NGO examining the 2023 rise in attacks reached a similar conclusion, linking the problem to a broader shift toward the far right, growing nationalism and an increasingly assertive conception of Israel primarily as a state for its Jewish population.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is the most consequential example. During the 2023 controversy over Jews spitting toward Christian pilgrims, he argued against treating every such incident as grounds for criminal arrest, even while condemning the conduct. More recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that he has described spitting on Christians as an ancient Jewish custom that should not be considered criminal. The distinction between endorsement and minimization matters journalistically, but for Christian victims the political signal remains troubling: the official responsible for overseeing the police has repeatedly resisted treating the humiliation they experience as seriously as they believe the circumstances require.
There is also a revealing historical connection. Long before becoming national security minister, Ben-Gvir served as attorney for Yinon Reuveni, the Jewish extremist convicted of the 2015 arson attack on the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes at Tabgha. Ben-Gvir challenged the conviction and called Reuveni’s four-year sentence severe. Defense lawyers should not be identified with the crimes of their clients; defendants are entitled to representation. But in the broader political context, the episode illustrates how figures once closely associated with Israel’s far-right activist milieu have moved from the margins of politics to control ministries directly relevant to policing and minority security.
Political cultures are built from signals as much as statutes. Who is punished, what is dismissed as harmless, whose fear is treated seriously and whose humiliation is regarded as a nuisance all help define what a society considers permissible. When Jewish extremists can persuade themselves that an “ancient custom” places their behavior beyond ordinary standards of civic respect, the state’s responsibility is not to debate the offender’s theology but to establish unequivocally that religious conviction does not authorize the degradation of another citizen or worshipper.
The consequences are not confined to saliva. In 2015, an arson attack badly damaged the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes at Tabgha, traditionally associated with Jesus’ feeding of the multitude. Hebrew graffiti invoking the destruction of false gods was left at the site. Yinon Reuveni was convicted and initially sentenced to four years in prison; Israel’s Supreme Court later increased the sentence by 18 months because the attack targeted a holy site and was ideologically motivated. In March 2026, an Israeli court also ordered him to reimburse approximately NIS 2.5 million that the state had paid in compensation following the attack.
Israeli courts did punish a serious anti-Christian crime and ultimately imposed substantial consequences on its perpetrator. The stronger criticism is therefore not that Israel never acts but that accountability for the far more common forms of harassment remains inconsistent. Rossing’s 2025 report found that Christian clergy often described police as initially responsive but said many cases were eventually closed without offenders being held accountable.
Christian cemeteries and clergy have also been targeted. A Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion was vandalized in 2023, with stone crosses and gravestones damaged, and police arrested suspects. The same year, videos of ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting toward Christian pilgrims drew international attention and multiple arrests. By 2026, monitoring groups were documenting hundreds of incidents involving Christian property, crosses, statues and people. The pattern is not one uninterrupted campaign directed from above; it is something more diffuse—a recurring stream of low-level aggression punctuated by more serious acts of vandalism and violence, carried out within social milieus in which contempt for Christianity can carry religious or nationalist legitimacy.
Christian clergy are particularly vulnerable because their identity is visible. An Armenian priest dressed in black robes, a Franciscan monk or a Catholic nun cannot easily become anonymous in the Old City. Their clothes and crosses make them immediately recognizable, turning ordinary movement through public space into a test of religious tolerance. The Wall Street Journal reported that Armenian priest Father Vazgen Alekyan’s church cameras have recorded degrading behavior around the church, including graffiti directed against Christians and Arabs, while Schnabel described attackers trying to grab his cross.
Rossing’s reports similarly describe clergy in Mount Zion and the Armenian Quarter experiencing harassment so routinely that stepping outside can itself carry a substantial risk of abuse. This is where official claims about religious freedom encounter their practical test. A country can legally recognize churches and formally guarantee worship while still permitting a social environment in which members of a minority feel compelled to hide their symbols. Religious freedom is not only the right of a church to possess a building. It is also the right of the people inside that building to walk outside without being degraded because of who they are.
Perhaps the most alarming feature of the phenomenon is the age of many perpetrators. The Armenian Church incident involved teenagers. Monitoring reports repeatedly identify teenagers and young adults among those spitting at clergy or attacking Christian symbols. This suggests that Israel is not merely confronting a residue of medieval prejudices among an ageing religious fringe. Some forms of anti-Christian hostility are being transmitted to a new generation.
The Rossing Center’s September 2025 survey of 500 Jewish Israeli citizens was designed to examine attitudes toward Christianity across age, religiosity and political orientation. Reporting on the survey and associated research has found that attitudes are particularly negative in younger and more religious sectors, while resistance to entering churches and the classification of Christianity as idolatry remain significant.
The picture becomes still more complicated because the great majority of indigenous Christians in Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories are Arabs. Their vulnerability cannot be reduced to theology alone. A Palestinian Christian may be targeted because he is Christian, Arab, Palestinian or some combination of all three. Jerusalem’s Christian population is overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab, even though harassment also targets foreign clergy and conspicuous Christian symbols.
This overlap between religious hostility and national conflict makes the treatment of Palestinian Christians an important part of the story. The war in Gaza did not create anti-Christian harassment; the phenomenon was well documented before October 2023. But the broader political radicalization of Israeli society, intensifying Jewish-Palestinian hostility and resentment toward Christian institutions critical of Israeli military policy have created additional pressures. Christian leaders and monitoring organizations have described an atmosphere in which criticism of Israel can reinforce older suspicions toward Christianity, particularly among constituencies that already view non-Jewish presence in the Holy Land through a nationalist lens.
Taybeh provides a stark example. One of the few remaining predominantly Christian Palestinian villages in the West Bank, it has faced repeated confrontations involving Israeli settlers. In July 2025, senior Christian leaders accused settlers of setting a fire near the village cemetery and a fifth-century church and attacking homes, while Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III publicly questioned why Israeli police had allegedly failed to respond to emergency calls. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee—normally a strong supporter of Israel and of Israeli settlements—visited Taybeh and described an attack on its Christian heritage as an act of terror that required prosecution.
The pressure did not end there. In June 2026, Palestinian firefighters and a local priest said Israeli settlers obstructed attempts to put out a large blaze near Taybeh, with settlers allegedly surrounding those bringing a water tanker and firing weapons while the Israeli military temporarily delayed Palestinian emergency access for security coordination. Two months later, the Israeli military took the extraordinary step of declaring Taybeh closed to non-resident Israelis, explicitly saying the measure was imposed because of violent attacks by Israelis in the area.
The West Bank and Jerusalem contain roughly 50,000 Palestinian Christians whose communities trace their presence in the region back to antiquity. For these communities, the long-term threat is not only an individual attack or insult but gradual disappearance. If young Christians conclude that their families have no secure future, emigration becomes rational. Rossing’s 2024 survey found that approximately one-third of Christian respondents contemplated leaving Israel, rising to 48 percent among those under 30. The survival of indigenous Christianity in the Holy Land therefore depends on much more than preserving ancient church buildings; it depends on whether Christian communities themselves can imagine remaining.
Christian unease also extends beyond street violence. Churches and Christian organizations have repeatedly confronted Israeli institutions over taxation, access to holy sites and visas.
The 2025 visa dispute with U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee was particularly revealing. Israel’s Interior Ministry changed longstanding procedures and began investigating evangelical Christian organizations that had operated in the country for decades, requiring detailed questionnaires about their beliefs, activities and assets and holding up clergy visas. Huckabee responded with an unusually severe letter warning that he might publicly tell American Christians that Israel no longer welcomed Christian organizations and consider reciprocal treatment of Israeli visa applicants. The dispute was quickly resolved after intervention by the interior minister and Netanyahu, and Huckabee said the longstanding process would be restored.
The resolution matters because it shows that Israeli institutions can correct problems when sufficient political attention is applied. But the incident remains instructive. Huckabee is not remotely hostile to Israel; he is one of the most explicitly pro-Israel evangelical figures in American politics. If organizations represented by someone with direct access to the Israeli prime minister can encounter enough bureaucratic resistance to produce a diplomatic confrontation, local Christian institutions without comparable political leverage have reason to wonder how easily their problems will reach those capable of solving them.
The meaning of the spit is larger than the physical act. Spitting rarely intends to injure; it intends to degrade. Directed at someone because he wears a cross, it says that his religion is inferior. Directed at a church, it becomes a judgment on a community. Performed during a nationalist march or beneath an Israeli flag, it acquires another implication altogether: that the perpetrator belongs to the sovereign community more fully than the person he is humiliating.
There is also a consequence beyond Israel’s borders that Israeli leaders should not underestimate. Images of Jewish extremists spitting at Christian clergy, smashing crosses, vandalizing cemeteries or invoking religion to justify contempt for Christians inevitably circulate far beyond Jerusalem.
This creates another uncomfortable contradiction. Israel repeatedly warns, often with justification, about rising antisemitism in Europe, North America and elsewhere. Yet when Israeli Jews are filmed humiliating Christian priests, attacking Christian symbols or treating another faith with open contempt, those images undermine Israel’s moral authority to demand universal opposition to religious hatred.
Jerusalem is sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Its claim to holiness cannot rest solely on ancient stones, archaeology or competing assertions of sovereignty. It must also be measured by whether a Jew can wear a kippah, a Muslim can enter a mosque and a Christian can walk through the Old City wearing a cross without fear of humiliation. Israel is right to demand that the world confront antisemitism. But that demand carries a reciprocal obligation: a Jewish state must demonstrate that when Jews hold power, minorities under that power receive the same dignity and protection that Jews rightly demand elsewhere. Religious hatred cannot be condemned selectively.
By: GEOPOLIST – Istanbul Center for Geopolitics
