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When a foreign nun was the victim of violent physical assault in Jerusalem last month, local activists and clergy say they were shocked but not surprised. In the past few years, anti-Christian incidents have surged in Israel – illustrating how a small minority of insular and mainly ultra-religious nationalist or ultra-Orthodox Jews are becoming increasingly emboldened to act out their anger and hate.
Issued on: 15/05/2026 -
FRANCE24
On Wednesday evening, Yisca Harani spent several hours at a local police station.
“I got a report about a ‘spitter’,” the Jewish activist said over a patchy phone line from Jerusalem, explaining that a Christian monk had been the latest target of such humiliation.
Harani, who heads the Religious Freedom Data Center (RFDC) – an Israeli NGO that documents anti-Christian incidents and help victims report them to authorities – said there are so many cases now that she and her roughly 100 volunteers are kept busy “24/7”.
“The most common is spitting,” she said. “But it can also be graffiti on [Christian] signs with crosses on them, vandalism or different forms of harassment.”
The perpetrators, she said, belong to a very tiny part of Israel’s population of 10 million – “most Jews would never do this” – and mainly identify as ultra-Orthodox, Shas-style Sephardis or nationalist religious Jews.
“They all wear kippah [traditional Jewish skullcaps]. I’ve not seen one secular Jew misbehave toward Christians.”
In 2024, her organisation recorded 107 incidents. Last year, the number jumped to 181.
“There isn’t a month that goes by without at least ten incidents reported,” she said, but noted that in reality, the numbers are likely much higher. This is in part because victims either do not know how to report, or do not want to “make a fuss” over less serious offences like spitting.
The question of spitting takes us centuries back through the history of Jewish-Christian relations, throughout which Jews, as a minority, suffered immensely at the hands of a Christian majority – from anti-Semitism and persecution to attempts at extermination.
In the 11th century, Jews (then being persecuted during the Crusades) were accused of spitting at the cross in an act of religious contempt, Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein explained in a Times of Israel blog post. Some Jewish communities then adopted this gesture to show resistance and defiance. Over time, “the spitting Jew” became a negative stereotype for Jews.
When the state of Israel was created in 1948, Jews became a majority group for the first time, with Christians in the minority, and the spitting became even more symbolic.
Goshen-Gottstein wrote that the problem is that some insular Jewish communities have not followed modern developments in the Christian world, and do not know that many churches have since revised their theologies, legitimised Judaism, issued apologies and are even fighting anti-Semitism.
“The spitters and attackers are, of course, clueless,” Goshen-Gottstein said.
Far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir added fuel to the fire in 2023, when he, as Israel’s sitting national security minister, told Army Radio that spitting at Christians was not a crime, and that not everything “justifies an arrest”.
‘Think twice about going out’
The brutal physical assault of a French Dominican nun in East Jerusalem on April 28, however, sent new shock waves throughout the Christian community. In CCTV footage capturing the attack, an Orthodox man is seen running up behind a Christian nun, shoving her to the ground, and returning to kick her once before bystanders intervene.
“This is the most extreme case we’ve seen. During the three years since I founded RFDC, there may have been three or four physical interactions,” Harani said, but stressed that none of them had been this violent.
Since then, her NGO has been called upon to “escort” Christians through Jerusalem. While accompanying the faithful, the RFDC volunteers keep their phone cameras open at all times, ready to film any potential assaults they may be targeted by.
On Wednesday, the Knesset held a special committee session on the attack against the nun and the way Christians are being treated. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu firmly condemned the incident, but critics say the meeting was mainly called because the footage went viral, embarrassing the Israeli government on the international stage.
Several of the Christian representatives present at the hearing recounted routine harassment on the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City, the Haaretz newspaper reported, and cited incidents in which Israeli security forces had prevented devotees access to prayer sites or in which Christians had been the victims of stone-throwing or kicking.
"I call on the Israeli government to call these acts by their name: hate crimes," Father Aghan Gogchian, the chancellor of the Armenian Patriarchate, said.
Neighbours staging protests
According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, some 185,000 Christians were registered in Israel at the end of 2025, accounting for about 1.9 percent of the population. Most of these are Arab Christians – a minority that is often overlooked, rarely talked about and whose Arabic heritage makes them especially vulnerable in a Jewish state like Israel.
Hana Bendcowsky, program director of the Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations at the interreligious Rossing Center, said there had been incidents where local demonstrations had been staged in front of Arab Christian homes because their Jewish neighbours did not want them living there.
“Maybe because they are Christian, maybe because they are Arabs. It is not clear.”
Another group that is regularly targeted are those who wear visible Christian symbols or religious clothing, such as pilgrims, nuns and monks.
“Every priest you talk to will tell you that spitting is almost a daily experience,” Bendcowsky said.
Some, especially after the attack on the nun, have therefore become more careful in showing their religious affiliations.
“They hide their crosses in their pockets and so on, or avoid wearing their habits when they go to certain places.”
Father David Neuhaus SJ, who has lived in Jerusalem for almost five decades and for several years served as superior of the Jesuit community at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, said that after the assault on the nun “there are people who think twice before going out unless it is absolutely necessary”.
Although he refuses to give in to the fear himself, he said: “There is now an awareness that you need to look around you, think about where you are going, think about how you dress. There is a feeling that at any moment your life could suddenly take a turn for the worse.”
‘To be Israeli is to be Jewish’
All three interviewees FRANCE 24 spoke to said the intolerance against non-Jews in Israel – whether Christians, Muslims or others – has spiked in recent years, fuelled by new government policies, war, and of course, the October 7, 2023 terror attacks.
Father Neuhaus said it did not help that Israel has been an extremely militarised state from the start and has been “built on settler colonialism”.
“We’re a very violent society,” he said. “Take a bus, take a train, walk down the street – everyone is armed. That already is an incredible violence.”
Harani, of RFDC, said the 2018 “Nation-State Law” marked the real first turn for the worse in Israel’s religious intolerance.
“This law is the epitome of this whole psychosis: that to be Israeli is to be Jewish – religiously and nationalistically.”
The law defined Israel as national home of the Jewish people and encouraged the use of Jewish symbols in Israeli society. Critics say this quickly forged a climate of religious nationalism and contributed to religious minorities feeling increasingly marginalised.
Since then, Harani said Netanyahu’s government shows “absolute disregard for certain behaviours in the radical sector. Their behavior is tolerated, and therefore gives them the green light. It’s passive encouragement.”
And, she said, “they [the perpetrators] are becoming more and more audacious”.
Father Neuhaus agreed. “When lower-level incidents like spitting are ignored, the message is that violence is OK.”
The trauma, anger and frustration linked to the October 7 attacks led some insular Jewish groups to start “dehumanising the other”, Bendcowsky said. She pointed particularly to the uptick in settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. She noted that many of them are either in denial of, or have no knowledge of, the death and pain Israel has brought to civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
WATCH MORE Settler violence surges in the West Bank
“So what we see with Christians is just one symptom of the general atmosphere,” she said.
However terrible the aggression on the nun might have been, Harani said it did serve at least one meaningful purpose: shining a light on the Israeli government’s treatment of Christians.
“I’m in almost daily contact with the nun and visited her yesterday,” Harani said. “I told her: ‘In a way, you were chosen to be the stop sign for what is happening’.”
FRANCE 24’s correspondent in Jerusalem Noga Tarnopolsky contributed to this report.
The Assault on a French Nun and the Forgotten Story of Palestinian Christians
The video is horrifying, though it is the kind of horror now synonymous with the behavior of Israel, its military, its armed settlers, and society that has been conditioned to see the ‘other’ as subhuman.
Yet, this was not the typical viral video that emerges almost daily from occupied Palestine. The victim, this time, was not a Palestinian. She was an elderly French nun.
On May 1, footage surfaced from Jerusalem showing a 36-year-old Israeli man running behind a French nun – a researcher at the French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research – and shoving her violently to the ground.
In a chilling display of cruelty, the assailant did not simply hit and run. He walked away a few paces, then returned to the fallen woman to kick her repeatedly and mercilessly as she lay helpless.
What was most astonishing was the sense of normalcy that followed. The assailant remained on the scene, conversing with another man who appeared entirely unperturbed by what should have been a devastating event in any other context.
The video briefly imposed itself on the mainstream media scene, garnering perfunctory condemnations. Many explained the event as part of the larger landscape of Israeli violence, highlighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza as the most obvious example of this unchecked aggression.
But even the context of general violence does not fully explain why a French nun was targeted. She is not dark-skinned, she is European, she is Christian, and she holds no historical or territorial claims that would typically trigger the ‘security’ paranoia of the Zionist state.
Still, the incident was anything but ‘isolated,’ despite the rush by Israeli officials to label it a ‘shameful’ exception. To the contrary, the nun was attacked specifically because she is Christian.
This raises the question: why?
To answer this, we must acknowledge how Palestinian Christians have been systematically written out of the history of their own land.
Palestinian Christians are not merely present in the land; they are among the most historically rooted communities in Palestine. They are anything but ‘foreigners’ or ‘bystanders’ caught in a supposed religious conflict between Jews and Muslims.
In fact, the Christian Arab presence in Palestine predates the Islamic era by centuries. They are the descendants of historic tribes who shaped the region’s identity long before the advent of modern political labels.
The marginalization of Palestinian Christians is a relatively new phenomenon, deeply linked to Western colonialism. For centuries, European powers used the pretense of ‘protecting’ Christian communities to justify their own imperial interventions.
Consequently, this framed the native Christian not as a sovereign Arab with agency, but as a ward of the West – a narrative that effectively stripped them of their indigenous status and alienated them from their own national fabric in the eyes of the world.
Zionism added a lethal layer to this erasure. It has often projected itself as a ‘protector’ of Christians to avoid raising the ire of its Western backers.
In reality, Palestinian Christians have been subjected to the same policies of ethnic cleansing, racism, and military occupation as their Muslim brothers and sisters. How else can we explain the catastrophic dwindling of the Christian population?
Before the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian Christians made up roughly 12% of the population. Today, that number has plummeted to a mere 1%. During the Nakba alone, tens of thousands were expelled from their homes in West Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa, their properties looted and their communities dismantled.
A quick look at the map of Jerusalem and Bethlehem today tells the story of an ongoing erasure. Jerusalem is being systematically emptied of its native population, both Christian and Muslim. Christian properties and houses of worship are restricted, and the ‘Little Town’ of Bethlehem has been swallowed by a ring of illegal settlements and an 8-meter-high Apartheid Wall that has transformed the birthplace of Christ into an open-air prison.
Yet, despite this, we rarely hear about the struggle for survival of Palestinian Christians. Instead, the world occasionally glimpses ‘incidents’ – like the common habit of Jewish extremists spitting on foreign pilgrims and clergy in Jerusalem. This behavior has become so normalized that Israeli ministers, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, have previously defended the act as an “ancient custom” that should not be criminalized.
The reason the Palestinian Christian story is rarely told is that it fails to factor neatly into the convenient narratives used by Western governments. They are keen on presenting the ‘conflict’ as a Jewish state fighting for its identity against a monolithic ‘Islamic’ threat. Israel is heavily invested in this same ‘Clash of Civilizations’ trope, positioning itself as the vanguard of “Western civilization” against Arab extremism.
But some Palestinians – Muslim and Christian alike – are, to a lesser degree, also guilty of falling into this trap. The former often frame the Palestinian resistance as an exclusively Muslim struggle; meanwhile, some Christians participate in the very discourse that led to their marginalization in the first place.
The Gaza genocide, however, has proven this logic not only erroneous but unsustainable. Throughout the slaughter, Israel has destroyed over 800 mosques, but it has not spared the Christian sanctuaries.
On October 19, 2023, an Israeli airstrike targeted a building within the compound of the Church of Saint Porphyrius – one of the oldest churches in the world.
In that massacre, 18 Palestinian Christians were killed, their blood mixing with the dust of a sanctuary that had stood for 1,600 years. It was a devastating reminder that the Israeli missile does not distinguish between a mosque and a church, nor between the blood of a Muslim and a Christian.
The story of the French nun is worth every bit of the attention it received, as is the targeting of pilgrims. But as the headlines move on, we must remember that Palestinian Christians endure a suffering that is collective and rooted in the very soil of Palestine. They are now an endangered community, and Israel is the culprit. Without them, Palestine is not the same.
The Palestinian homeland is only whole when it is the cradle of religious coexistence, and Palestinian Christians sit at the very heart of that history, dating back two millennia. Their survival is not a ‘minority issue’ – it is the survival of Palestine itself.
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