WSJ Spotlights Fringe Acts in Israel — While Missing the Region's Real Christian Story

WSJ Spotlights Fringe Acts in Israel — While Missing the Region’s Real Christian Story

JERUSALEM — While Christian communities collapse across the Middle East, Israel’s Christian population has grown more than 400% since 1948, from roughly 34,000 to nearly 185,000 today. It is the only country in the region where that number is still rising.

That is not what The Wall Street Journal reported.

In August 2026, the paper published a piece on spitting incidents against Christians in Jerusalem’s Old City, framing Israel as an increasingly hostile place for Christians to live and worship, while making no mention of the collapse of Christian communities across the rest of the Middle East. The Israeli Foreign Ministry pushed back immediately. So did U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who has visited Israel regularly since 1973 and said the WSJ never contacted him before publishing.

The numbers and the law say otherwise.

Christian ecclesiastical courts hold full legal jurisdiction over personal status matters. The Protection of Holy Places Law (1967) guarantees free access to holy sites. And the Foreign Ministry recently appointed Ambassador George Deek as Israel’s first full ambassador to the Christian world, a position no other nation in the Middle East has created.

Every one of Israel’s neighbors tells the opposite story. In Bethlehem, under Palestinian Authority rule since 1995, the Christian population collapsed from 86% in 1950 to under 10% today. In Gaza, only roughly 1,300 Christians remain among nearly 2 million Muslims; the U.S. State Department found Hamas “continued neither to investigate nor prosecute Gaza-based cases of religious discrimination, including reported anti-Christian bias.” In Iraq, the Christian population fell from about 1.4 million before 2003 to fewer than 250,000 after ISIS destroyed ancient monasteries and carried out public executions. Syria’s Christian population collapsed from 1.5–2.5 million in 2011 to roughly 300,000 today. Saudi Arabia bans Christianity outright. Iran’s Christian population is 0.4%, and Open Doors ranks these countries among the most dangerous on earth for Christians.

The spitting incidents the WSJ highlighted are perpetrated by a small fringe, neither sanctioned nor tolerated by the Israeli state. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Israel is “totally committed to safeguard the sacred right of worship and pilgrimage to the holy sites of all faiths.” President Isaac Herzog called such attacks “a true disgrace.” Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau said, “I strongly condemn any attack on people from any faith and such conduct cannot be attributed to Jewish law.” Perpetrators have been arrested and punished.

On August 6, 2026, Huckabee posted on X: “The @WSJ should have contacted me about Christians in Israel. I am one. Been coming here since 1973. Israel is the ONLY country in the region where Christian population has grown from 34K to almost 200K. @IsraelMFA just appointed a full Ambassador to the Christian world @GeorgeDeek. No other nation has done that. Christians work, worship, and pray freely here. I know of no place where there is much religious diversity as there is in Israel.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry accused the WSJ of taking “radical voices and extreme cases” and turning them “into the face of an entire country, while ignoring nearly 200,000 Christians whose lives tell the opposite story.”

The real regional issue is not the persecution of Christians in Israel. Israel is the striking exception: the one place in the Middle East where Christians are safe, free to practice their faith, and part of a growing community, while across much of the rest of the region, Christian communities have been driven out, decimated, or severely restricted.