Foreign Ministry, Huckabee fire back at WSJ article on harassment of Israeli Christians

A Wall Street Journal article about the mistreatment of Christians in Israel draws a furious response from Israel’s Foreign Ministry, which calls it “disingenuous, misleading and shameful.”

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who is a Christian pastor, also criticizes the article.

The WSJ piece, published earlier this week, focused on the rise in harassment of Christian clerics.

Christians in Israel say they are increasingly coming under assault, including a series of incidents in recent years in which mostly young Orthodox Jews made a habit of spitting on the ground in front of clergy and other Christians, mainly in Jerusalem’s Old City, an act that may be prosecuted in Israel as a hate crime.

There have also been acts of vandalism against churches and cemeteries, and physical assaults, including actions that bear the hallmark of extremist Jewish settler violence familiar to the West Bank.

The Foreign Ministry is leading a push to change the conversation around Israel’s Christians, in a bid to get ahead of potential tensions. The ministry’s social media has been highlighting Christian sites and citizens in recent weeks, none of whom, it says, were included in the piece.

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

The ministry says the WSJ “has now repeated the same formula: find those most willing to condemn Israel, present them as so-called ‘authentic’ Christian voice[s], and reduce the Christian experience here to the disgraceful actions of a tiny extremist fringe.”

“Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is consistently growing,” says the Foreign Ministry, noting Christian representation on the Supreme Court and across the country’s professional industries.

“Churches operate freely. Christians participate at the highest levels of Israeli society,” it says.

Huckabee, an outspoken Christian Zionist, also pushes back on X.

Huckabee acknowledges there are “occasional but rare” attacks that he adds are condemned by Israel’s leadership.

“Occasional challenges? Sure,” writes Huckabee. “I’ve been throughout the Middle East & know of no place where there is much religious diversity as there is in Israel.”

He adds, “Israel protects Christian Holy sites & Muslim Holy sites just as they do Jewish Holy sites.”