A

Foreign. Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Aviv Anything. I'm very excited about this episode. A friend of mine, Ambassador George Deke, Israel's special envoy to the Christian world, fascinating and remarkable guy with a lot of fascinating and remarkable things to say is here in the podcast. He was a former Israeli Ambassador to Azerbaijan. He had many other senior, sometimes delicate, interesting roles in the Israeli Foreign Service. He is a Fulbright Scholar. He has an LLM in International Law from Georgetown University, completed with distinction. He has an LLB in Law from Reichman University, the same alma mater of my wife. So they only produce good people over there. But George is and we're going to get into this. He has the story of being born in Jatha to an Arab Christian Orthodox family with deep and profound roots in the city, in the land. He is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, English, has quite good French, and he's here to talk to us about all of the topics, all of the things that relate to Christians Christians in Israel, criticism we've heard from certain conservatives in the United States recently. But first, I want to tell you that this episode is dedicated by Peter Fine of New York to his family, to his in Israel. Peter sent us some of that family story, which is such a wonderful encapsulation of what actually is the Jewish story of the 20th century. These two worlds, this, this just incredible history. Peter writes. Originally my family's name was Zavodnik. They came from Mezrich in today's Northwest Ukraine. My maternal grandfather, Peter continues, was the oldest of five brothers and came to New York via Canada around World War I. He came for many reasons, but the one relayed to me the most was the fear of Cossacks and not wanting to subscribe to the death sentence for Jewish people serving in the Russian army. That's death sentence in quotes. After immigration to the US was essentially shut down for East European Jews, my grandfather's four younger brothers emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s. Most settled in and around Haifa. Name changes to be Balakiva and Zavod followed. They were an incredibly bright, energetic group. They started businesses and kibbutzim while one brother went to Spain in the 30s to fight with the anti fascists and died in battle. I have only a vague awareness of this family growing up in New York as my parents were preoccupied with the daily struggle of making a living raising kids and caring for indigent relatives stuck in poorer neighborhoods in the city. As a student at NYU in the early 80s, I met a cousin, Oded, who was a wandering soul and was working in a cafe in the East Village. He opened my eyes to the treasure of my mom's family in Israel. A backpacking summer in Israel and then Europe in 83 changed everything. I heard stories of the founding of Israel, relatives who had passed, and of course, service in various wars. I stayed with family in a kibbutz near the Lebanon border and the Carmel neighborhood of Haifa. We struggled to communicate in broken Hebrew, some English, a bit of Yiddish. I have traveled to Israel many times since and cherished my relationships with cousins there. Their courage, their intelligence, and deep belief in the Zionist dream is inspiring. I often wonder how these decent, compassionate souls have been transformed into quote, unquote colonialists and imperialists by the mob that dominates the media and public discourse in the United States. It's outrageous. Peter, thank you so much for that dedication. What a fascinating family story. We've heard from so many of you, these kinds of fascinating stories of crossing the pond, so to speak, to the other half of the Jews who are in the end just cousins of each other. So really appreciate that dedication. Also, I would love if anybody who listens to this finds it useful, finds it interesting, and wants to join us and our community on Patreon, our debates on Substack, come meet us there. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's patreon.com askhalive anything or or khavivgur substack.com those links are in the show Notes George, let's start with your absolutely fascinating story because you come at this and this is everything. The Jewish state, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, Palestinian society, the Middle east, the state of Christians in the Middle East. You come to it from a very unique perspective. You are somehow an insider on all of those things from all different angles. And that's also, I think, what makes your voice fascinating. So tell us your story and we'll start there.

B

Thanks for having me on the podcast. I really wanted to do this for a long time and I'm happy that now we have the chance. I come from Jaffa, which is the oldest port city in the world that still exists, and I'm a son of an Arab Christian family that has lived in this land for centuries. In fact, my family has a proven record in the city of Jaffa that we've been specifically in the city for at least over 300 years, which makes us the oldest family in the city. So I always tell everyone that I'm the native of Jaffa and everyone else is an immigrant over There. So that's where I come from. My family has known ups and downs throughout history. Being a minority as Christians under Muslim rule, or being as Arabs in modern history, a and A, what we went through in 1948, my grandparents, which we will. My dive. Dive into that a little bit later, has also shaped my family in a meaningful way. Today I have relatives all over the world, but very few, actually none second cousins. And so in Israel, because all of my family has fled in 1948, including my grandparents who decided to come back. And so I come from a very community driven family. My father was decanter in church and he was the Orthodox, Greek Orthodox Church in Jaffa. And he was actually the leader of the Greek Orthodox community in Jaffa and in Israel more broadly, in Tel Aviv, even named one of the squares in Jaffa after him. And I'm 42 years old, married, with two beautiful boys. And when I grew up, I studied law at the IDC and I became a lawyer because at the end of the day, when you study law, even though I thought, I'm gonna do something else, eventually you end up being a lawyer. And I did the commercial law, stock exchange law and so on. But I felt that something is missing, that I wanna do something with a sense of meaning, you know, since childhood I was always active in the youth movements of the community and coexistence groups between Jews and Arabs. Remember, I grew up in the beautiful 90s where we all believed that peace was just around the corner. I was always very active also in the Arab society in Jaffa, in bringing together people of different faith. So I wanted to do something with meaning. I just didn't know what it was because I was a lawyer and that's what I was doing and I needed to make a living. So one day I see a newspaper ad by the Foreign Ministry opening a Kurst Tsarin cadets training course to recruit new diplomats, basically for the foreign service. So I've never heard about it before. I've never met diplomats in my life, let alone an Israeli one. And so I applied because I thought that sounded cool and interesting. And I was in the process. And then when I started researching and actually talking to people about it, everyone told me how, you know, fantastic that was. But at the same time, a lot of people, especially in my community, even some people in my family, started telling me that, you know, I shouldn't have too high hopes for this because, you know, I don't come from the right circles. I'm. I'm an Arab. I come from a family that is associated with either the Christian community or with Arab nationalism, in a sense, because of the activism. I did not serve in the army. I don't have the right connections. I don't have someone inside who knows me, who would push for me. So, you know, don't get your hopes high. And that's exactly as usual in my life. That's exactly when I started wanting it even more. So I started working even harder and actually putting some effort into the process. And you passed many, many stages. And it takes about a year. And after a year I was in. I became an Israeli diplomat. And since then I served for the past 18 years in the Foreign Service. I was three years a deputy ambassador in Nigeria. That was my posting. And then I went to Norway, to Oslo for three years. Spent two years as a LLM international law student in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C. a few years in the Foreign Ministry, a senior advisor to the Director General who is, you know, overseeing the ministry under the Minister. And between 2019 and 2025, I was Israel's ambassador to Azerbaijan, which made me the first ever Christian to serve as an ambassador of Israel. And two months ago, I was appointed to this newly created position of a special envoy to the Christian world. That's the first time we have such a position. And beyond that, what I recently found out is that there's no other country in the world that had such a position, which baffled me that I have basically no counterparts in other countries. But that's, you know, as usual, uncharted territory. That's the Israeli story, and in many ways it's mine as well.

A

Why does it exist nowhere else? I can think of so many things that an ambassador to the Christian world would do. I mean, there's an ambassador to the Vatican because that's organized as a nation state, basically of a sort of a state, at least an observer state at the un. But there is this Christian world. It's big, it's diverse, it's complicated, but nevertheless it's there. Why do countries not have it? And what is your task as the world's first of the first of the name?

B

It's a great question why other countries don't have it. Some told me that it's because it just doesn't sound politically correct to have a special envoy to the Christian world and not to other worlds as well, to the Muslim world, to the Yazidi world, and so on. So I get that political correctness need. But I think there's genuinely good reasons to have special envoys to the Christian world. And it's not what my colleagues think that, you know, being ambassador to Azerbaijan in a country of 10 million was not enough that I wanted to become an ambassador to our 2 billion Christians around the world. It's actually because there are significant characteristics of the Christian world that justify it. First of all is the structure of the Christian world, especially in the old world, around churches that are either states like the Vatican, the Holy See, or you know, quasi states like the Greek Orthodox Patriarchates, the Armenian Church and others which are not states, but they're not NGOs. There's something in between and basically they transcend the geopolitical structure of the days, which is built on nation states. So there's something very unique in the way that the Christian world is organized. But I think it exists in Israel because we understood that the relationship between us and the Christian world is just too important to be treated as non strategic or to be taken for granted. It just can't be something secondary. And this is true, not for me, only as an Israeli diplomat, but also as an Israeli Christian, that the relationship between us, between Israel and Christians around the world is not just about tourism or holy sites or ceremonies or church protocol. Those things matter and they're important. But underneath it, there's something much, much deeper. History, faith, identity, memory. And also I think the future of the Middle east, considering the fact that this is the birthplace of Christianity. I mean, Israel is not just another country on the map for Christians. It's a place where my faith was born. I come from Jaffa, which is a city where Jonah sailed to be swollen by the whale afterwards. And it's the city where Peter had his vision, which basically created Christianity as a divergent or separate from Judaism. And for Israel, I think the friendship between us and the Christian world has become one of the most meaningful and powerful relationships that we have. Why was it created now? Because I think we live in a moment where old assumptions are collapsing in the Middle East. Ancient communities, ancient Christian communities are shrinking and disappearing. And across the world we see the rise of antisemitism. And at the same time, many young Christians are being exposed to a very distorted picture of Israel, a picture that completely ignores or even slips on its back the story of Christian life in this country, the freedoms that Christians enjoy here, and the fact that Christians here are not just surviving, but we are as a community, we are growing, we are serving, we are leading and we are belonging to. So this role basically has a very clear goal that to send a message that the Christian world matters to us, not as a Tactical audience, not as a political instrument, but as a family of faith, a family of faith communities that we share basically joint values, shared values or shared story and moral responsibility. And I believe also a future. It shows that we understand the importance of this relationship in a way that is unique. The Jewish state, which is also the birthplace of Christianity, is saying, we want to listen. We want to listen to you, even to the critics among you. But we also want to be able to speak truthfully and tell a fuller story about our country and build something that is deeper with the Christians around the world. That's my role. It's to get close. I mean, it's not about the. Only about the church structures and about the politics of the Christian world. That's not the heart of the mission. The heart of the mission is to ask the bigger questions. What does Israel mean to Christianity today? What does Christian friendship mean to us in Israel? How do we protect the truth in an age that we are surrounded with lies? And how do Jews and Christians stand together when hatred is rising both against Christians, especially in the region as well as in Africa and other places, and against Jews? When we see the rising antisemitism around the world? And how do we make sure that the Holy Land and the Middle east in general becomes a place where Christians are not just a remnant of history, something to be remembered or talked about in history books, but to be present, to be free and to thrive.

A

It's such a fascinating point that you make about Christian churches are, you know, in the United States, it works a little differently. And the United States is so loud that everybody kind of in some sense lives in the American sort of mental landscape that they created for all of. They also invented the Internet and the car and the plane and the whole rest of it. So we're all kind of reacting to their assumptions. But the Orthodox Christian Patriarchate in Israel is the oldest institution in this land.

B

The oldest institution.

A

It's Byzantine.

B

That has continuously existed.

A

Yeah, unbroken, unbroken, continuous for, you know, a millennium and a third, a millennium and a half, something like that. And so this is manifestly something Western countries have ambassadors to topics they care about. They have ambassadors to non proliferation. They have ambassadors to various kinds of topics. They have ambassadors to anti Semitism. On anti Semitism. So this seems to me something that should have happened long ago. I never thought of it. So I'm not accusing anyone of not founding it. But yeah, mit bakesh, as we say in Hebrew, something that definitely needs to exist. I want to get to.

B

The best inventions are usually the Ones that when they are invented, do you think, how the hell did we not think about this sooner?

A

It seems obvious, but only the day after. Right? So I want to start with your position and then sort of expand that out to talk about the Christians in the Middle East. Right now you are an Arab Christian Israeli and your family has the experience of a great many Palestinian families to one degree or another. And most Arab Christians in most of this region, at least as they've expressed themselves politically, have been Arab nationalists. And a lot of times, you know, I'm thinking here of 1920s Syria, you know, but many times in many parts of the Middle east, secular nationalism was a way to avoid Islamic domination, Islamic rule over them, which always under Ottoman times and everything that came before the Ottoman times was, was a legal second class status with special taxes and limitations and all of that. So secular nationalism looked to Christians like, like a new, a new potential different world. And so some of the most virulent anti Israel ideologues in the Palestinian context, but also in the Arab world, in Egypt or Syria or Iraq, have been Christian Arabs. And here you are defender of Israel in a world where Christian Arabs are the most intense elites of Arab nationalist movements historically. Is that a weird position to be in?

B

I want to take you a step backwards to something that you said about Arab nationalism and to just say something very simple. Arab Christians were not only joining in to the idea of Arab nationalism, but Arabs. Arab Christians are the ones who, Christians are the ones who basically championed and pioneered in many ways Arab nationalism. Because for us this was a revolutionary promise of equality in a way that the second class status of Dhimmi could not have given us under Islamic rule before. And Christian thinkers are the ones who shape the ideology. Butrous Al Bustani who revived the Arabic language, Nagiba or Nagi Bazuri as the Egyptians would say, and George Antonios from Lebanon, both Christians who gave voice to the Arab nationalism. You know, we all are familiar with the Assad family and with Saddam Hussein who both ruled on behalf of the Ba'ath party. But the founder of the Ba'ath party was Michel Aflaq who was a Syrian Christian, not to mention George Habash and Anton Saadi and others who mobilized people behind them.

A

Everything you've said here hated Israel and Zionism with an abiding, overwhelming passion.

B

I think, yes, it's true. And I think that the reason behind it is that Arab nationalism meant that there is one nation which is the Arab nation and we're all part of that nation. And the fact and, and this is something that is deeply connected to the Christian identity because, you know, Muslims, they have the idea of the Islamic ummah. There is the nation the Jews have, the Jewish people. You know, as a Jew, whether you. For 2000 years, people in the Jewish world kept seeing each other, whether they were in Yemen or in. In Lithuania, as one people, one nation. We as Christians in this land never had this concept. We never had the idea that we as Christians are part of the same nation or the same peoplehood. And I think that meant that being an Arab, part of the Arab people was the only national identity we could have that is a national one and not just a religious and community one, which was something novel. And Arab Christians championed Arab nationalism because it was a vehicle that promised us a seat at the table, whereas before we were outsiders. And it perfectly makes sense because now it doesn't matter if you're Muslim or if you're Yazidi or others. We are all Arabs, we're all the same. But because Jews at the same time had the idea that. And don't forget that the time when Arab nationalism was starting to revive itself, which is as a response to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the last caliphate, that's also the time that Jewish nationalism began its own revival in the land of the forefathers of the Jews in the land of Israel. So it started the same time. And it was a vehicle that could give Arab nationalism and other. And nationalism, that is other, in the same territory. And not just that. And I think you spoke about it yourself many times. The idea of Jewish nationalism here was somewhat humiliating to the. To the idea of Arab nationalism at large, because it's one thing to be dominated by the Brits or the French with their empires, but who are the Jews, this tiny group, to come and take over a land here? So there was something deeply disturbing about the revival of Jewish nationalism in this land. And Arab nationalism put that in the center of it. And I think in many ways that was also the reason why Arab nationalism decayed and basically broke apart afterwards. Because. And I think that's the biggest malaise we have in the Middle east. Because the response we had to the crisis of the. Of the failure of the Islamic and Arab world to be great is because we answered with a culture of blame and victimhood. To say that the reason why we failed is not because we had something that we did wrong or we should do better next time, but it's because imperialism and colonialism and Israel being the tip of the spear when it comes to the expression of the colonialism and everything we blame for the Malays in the Arab world. So I think for that reason also, the Middle east has emptied itself from the Jews in the 40s and the 50s, Jews who lived not in Israel, but in the Arab world, in Iraq and in Yemen and in Lebanon or in Syria and in Iraq and in the Maghreb area. Within one generation, the entire Jewish population of the region, it was basically, you know, evaporated. And these people were not even Zionists. Many of them were even anti Zionists, but it didn't matter. There is a Tunisian writer, Albert Mimi, who later put it. He said that something like, it's not Zionism that caused Arab antisemitism, but it's the other way around. It's the antisemitism that came with Arab nationalism that created Zionism among the Arab Jews. And the Jews basically built their answer, a state, an army, a refuge. And Zionism was never the conspiracy theory that the Arab leaders claimed it to be. It was the only path left for Jews, the answer to a world that has already sealed their fate in blood. But for Christians, by contrast, we double down on nationalism and we double down on integration. And that's why when Arab nationalism, which promised us dignity and brought failure, which promised us victories and brought us military defeats, which brought. Which promised prosperity and success and greatness, brought poverty and corruption and failed states, that's when a new answer started filling the vacuum. An answer that existed before but was comfortable with Arab nationalism for a while. And that is the answer of political Islam. And the difference between them is that while Arab nationalism said that, you know, what held us back was religion. We were too religious, and religion held us back. And therefore we went to secularism. Whether it is not just in the Arab world. In Turkey, it started with Ataturk who turned Turkey into secular state. Then it was Iran with the Shah, who turned Iran into a secular state. And in the Arab world, Abdel Nasser Nijit was the greatest champion of Arab nationalism and political Islam. Said the problem was not that we were not that we were too religious. The problem was that we were not religious enough. In fact, the fact that we strayed away from the real Islam is the reason of our failure. And we see it in the Ayatollah regime in Iran, in Iran. And we see it also in Muslim Brotherhood movements across the Middle east, from Egypt to the Levant, all the way to ISIS and Al Qaeda and those movements. And as Islamism surged, pluralism has faded and the Christian presence in the region basically crumbled. What was Once the source of pride for the Christians, which is our role in shaping the secular and nationalist movements, was now not just not helping us, but it was used against Christians because the same ideologies that we as Christians have championed over the years were now dismissed as being foreign or Western or even subversive to the Islamic way of thinking. And violence against Christian communities became both a tool for enforcement, but also as a punishment for a perceived betrayal of what the destiny of this region is. So if Arab nationalism has once offered Christians a place that is grand, a shared identity, Islamism left us with only two choices in the region, submission or flight. And that's what we see in the rest of the Middle east today. There is only one place in the Middle east where Arab nationalism is really alive and well and kicking, and that is the Jewish state of Israel. And the reason is because here it is still possible to continue and to hold that identity, which gives us a shared. It connects us to everyone who sees himself as Arab. And by the way, don't get me wrong, I don't think Arab nationalism is wrong in its core or it's invented and it's not real. I see myself as an Arab. I'm very proud of my Arab identity. I'm very proud of my heritage, my language, my culture and everything that those represent. But I think that as a political identity, the Arab identity in, in the Middle east has collapsed. Being an Arab is still real and it's a real thing. And it's something we should be proud of in the, in the positive elements of it, not the anti Semitic ones. But we have to say the truth, that in the Middle east today the national identity is secondary or traitory or, I don't know, how do you say it in English, number three or number four in the list of identities that matter. And that's not me saying that surveys in the region are saying, number one is again the religious identities, which has always dominated the identity discourse in the region since whenever you want to go back to. And I think in Israel we still have a place that is democratic. And also it's a place that there's no price to be paid for not switching, for not submitting or fleeing, that you can still live in Israel as a Christian and continue to have Arab nationalism alive and well. That's the reason why even in Israel you have the leaders of Arab nationalist movements like Basilhattas or others who are also Christians, because that's the place where that identity continues to flourish. And that stands in contrast to the rest of the region. From Baghdad to Beirut, from Alula to Mosul, where Christian communities that existed for millennias were basically erased. I mean, just in Iraq, the Christian community went down From, I think, one and a half million in the 90s to less than 120,000 people today. Aleppo in Syria used to be a city with 250,000 Christians. Today less than 20,000 or 25,000. And in general, in the Middle East, Christians used to make 20% of the region, and today it's maybe 3 or 4% at best. So I think that is the contrast between Israel and the rest of the region and the irony that the only place that Arab nationalism is actually thriving as an identity is Israel. Now, I'll tell you, beyond that, the. There was a survey, I think, last month by Tel Aviv University that asked Arab Christians, or that asked Arabs in general, to rank their four identities and asking them which one is the main one that you identify with? The being an Arab, an Israeli Palestinian, or your religious identity in the Christian case, being a Christian. And interestingly, the Christians in Israel responded by saying that 32% said that Arab identity is the most important one, and about 27 or 28%, if I remember correctly, said the Israeli identity is the most important one. Palestinian one was with around, I think, somewhere between 10 to 13%. I don't remember the exact number. And Christian Identity was only 3%, which is extremely low. Which tells you that religious identity in the Christian circles, unlike the Jews, who have Judaism as a peoplehood in addition to religion, and Islam that has the idea of an Ummah, a nation beyond Islamic religion, it shows you that in the. In the Christian case, it's either your Arabic or you're something else that you have to come up with. And that's why in Israel you have either people going to the end of Arab nationalism or people going to the other side, which is, you know, there is a growing trend of Christians serving in the idf. There's a growing trend. There's even a community in the north of Israel, which I don't think a lot of people abroad are aware of, of Aramaic Christians people. Israel, in fact, recognized Aramaic as an identity, as a national or ethnic identity that you could register for instead of being recognized as an Arab, because there are Christians there saying, okay, if we're not. If Arab identity is not our main identity, then what are we? And they said, okay, we've been here as Christians since the days of Jesus. Jesus spoke Aramaic, so we're Aramaics, we're Aramains, and there's actually schools teaching Aramaic as a first language to Christian children in the north of Israel. So it's just like the Lebanese, you know, the Christian Lebanese. When I saw and you know, I follow a lot of them on, on Twitter, on X. And when someone corrects their Arabic, they always respond, what do you care? We're not speaking Arabic, we're speaking Lebanese, which is an interesting way of portraying their language. And also a lot of them, you know, go back to the roots as Phoenicians and others. But that's connected to a different trend. Even Sisi today is connecting Egypt to the pharaohs. But that's very strong among Christians who are looking for an alternative, not because they don't want to be Arabs, but they feel that being an Arab is simply not enough these days when it's not a main identity in the region.

A

What kind of Aramaic? You know, my Aramaic is rusty, but usable because Talmud. But what, where do they, I guess Kurds speak Aramaic? There's some of the Kurds speak modern Aramaic and there's Kurds in Aramaic. They can speak, I mean, Jesus, you know, talk colloquially in Aramaic. But I don't think we have that Aramaic anymore.

B

First of all, you have a Christian community that prays in Aramaic and speaks Aramaic, which is the Syriac community.

A

Right.

B

Which there are not many of them in Israel. There's a few, but most of them are, I want to say most of them are in Syria and Iraq. But I probably today most of them are in the US or Canada or Sweden or wherever they fled to. And so that exists. So maybe that was the source. But it's a great question, how do they teach it? Maybe they use the Talmud, who knows?

A

Aramaic was spoken by so many over so long that there are many kinds and some of them are spoken today, but you'd have to find them.

B

But

A

the story of the Christians in the Middle east, you know, I want to get into the question of your position and your role, which in part is a response, as you said, to criticism of Israel's treatment of Christians, among other things. Right. And before we get into Israel's treatment of Christians, which is important and their real problems. But 80% of the Christians of Syria have evaporated. I mean, fled. Some were killed, many fled. Most fled since 2011, not 80 years ago. Ninety percent of the Christians in Iraq, as you said, the region is emptying of Christians. And there is this, you know, in the anti Israel discourse, the Tucker Carlson discourse way over there on the other side of the ocean. The Christians of Israel are the ones depicted as, you know, the Ones suffering.

B

Look, I think the Middle east went into a crisis when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the last caliphate was brought down in 1922, 1924. And, you know, everyone perceived it as a crisis, at least in the magnitude of the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, I think, by the Mongols. It was a devastation of everything we believed. And there was a certainty, they believed in a certainty that the Islamic world, Islamic empire, will continue to grow because it enjoys God's grace and it's the true religion, and it will continue to be a force of history that is equal at least to the other great forces, and it will continue growing until it will reach domination. And when that certainty collapsed with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there were different answers. And we spoke about this, how nationalism was the answer, and then political Islam. But all of them tried to answer the same question. And that is the question of when you have a crisis, you ask, what went wrong? And the answer to that question decides the fate of your society. And Arab nationalism and political Islam, they gave different answers. But at the core of both of them, there was underlying a same culture, which is a culture of blame, which means instead of looking inwards and trying to take responsibility and to change the reality of our lives by ourselves, you point a finger and you blame others. Now, you can blame colonialism and imperialism, you can blame Israel, you can blame the Jews, you can blame whatever you want. But at the end, blame did not save the Arab nationalism. It corroded it from within. It promised dignity, but it delivered repression. It promised strength and brought military defeats.

A

What do you mean specifically, what should they have done? You're talking about the rise of Arab dictatorships everywhere. I mean, no democracies, antisemitism as organizing ideas in the political life of Egypt and Syria and places like that, that didn't have to happen. Those were cultural choices made by those societies. And you've written about this also in the past. You've talked about this in the past, I've heard you talk about it. But what should have been the Arab response to discovering that the Europeans were way ahead of them, that they were weak, that 400 years of Ottoman rule had left them? I mean, rural, you know, the rural Middle east, rural Egypt was illiterate. I mean, they didn't know how to read, which is insane for Muslims, because you can't be a good Muslim without knowing how to read, like. Like, you know, in the other textual religions. So what should they have done? What could the Middle east have looked like if they hadn't taken these paths,

B

it would have been, it would be very presumptuous of me to say that I would have the answers to what the Middle east should have done. But I'll tell you first of all what it should not have done. And that is to choose blame and victimhood. Because when you do that, you don't even ask the question, what can I do better? I mean, Europe went through a similar crisis after the thirty Years War, and they chose the Reformation as the answer. They didn't say, okay, it's all the fault of others, even though they did for a while. And your people remembers this very well. But eventually they chose to reform. And the Westphalian order that was created was the response of Europe to a crisis, similar crisis that Europe went through at the time. The Jews went through a huge crisis after the Holocaust, and they choose a completely different answer. And I'll tell you more than that. I think it's when you have a crisis and you choose a victimhood and blame, what you're doing is you're ignoring the core problems of your society and why you are held backwards, whether it is in the Arab world, the ones, the technological ones, and others that held the Arab world back. And it's much easier to choose to blame because you don't have to ask what went wrong and what can I do better next? Which is the responsible answer. But you ask who did this to me? And then it's a much easier and more comfortable discourse that avoids asking the, the difficult questions. And I have to say that a, if Jews were the victims of Arab nationalism in the 40s and the 50s because of that finger that was pointed at them as agents a Jewish nationalism today, with the political Islam rising, Muslim Brotherhood movements and others across the Middle East. And by the way, I have, you know, I come from Jaffa. I live among Christians and Muslims and others. I don't think there's something inherently wrong with Christians or with Muslims or with Jews. But there are sometimes political answers that we give to certain realities that take us to a different direction. And political Islam, which replaced nationalism as the leading identity today in the Arab world, as we see it in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere, basically brought to a situation where the same hatred that brought the Jews, took the Jews out of the Middle east, is now being diverted against the Christians of the Middle East. And we see how basically the hate that began with Jews did not stop with the Jews. And today it's again the minorities who are paying the price, Christians, Yazidis, Druze, Kurds and others are Discovering the same brutal truth that when there's an ideology that cannot tolerate difference, minorities become its first victims. And for us as Christians, you asked in the Middle east, the result has been absolutely devastating. I gave some examples in Iraq or we have less than 10% of the Christians who used to live there. Today, even in Egypt that you mentioned, which is the biggest Christian community in the Middle east, about 10% of Egypt, about 9 to 10 million Christian cops live there. But they have also suffered from the violence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. I want to remind you, even 1981, long before the Arab Spring and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood over there, there were riots in Cairo that brought to the killing of anywhere between 17 to 80 Christians and destruction of churches and homes over there in Cairo by the rise of radical Islam. And it happened again in 2013. I think it was August 2013, during. When the Christians were basically blamed in Egypt for the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood government of Morsi. And on one day, basically 46 Christian churches and monasteries were plundered, destroyed or burned to the ground. A dozen of Christian parish halls, libraries, shops, homes, schools and social centers were all attacked. There was even, I'm sorry, there was even a Coptic children's orphanage which was set on fire. It was the worst attack on Egypt's Christians in centuries. And the same hate that drove the Jews out of the Middle east in the 20th century is now driving Christians and other minorities out in the 21st century. And by the way, it's not just minorities who are non Muslim. It can be Sunnis among Shias and Shias among Sunnis. It's always those who are different. The only difference, by the way, between the Jews and the Christians is when both communities were persecuted in different centuries is that when Jews were driven out, they had Israel. When Christians are driven out, all they have is the airport, the only place in the Middle East. And coming to your question about Christians in Israel, the only place in the Middle east where there's actually a rise in the growing community of Christians is Israel. We had in Israel 34,000 Christians in 1950, the first time Israel had the census. And Today we have 180, 485,000 Christians living in Israel, which is a rise of 400%, which not only doesn't have a parallel, but doesn't have anything remotely close to it in the rest of the region. And it's if we had about 100 to 150 churches in Israel when the country was established. Nobody knows the exact number, but maximum 150 today we have over 300. In fact, the biggest church, the biggest basilica in the Middle east is the Church of Annunciation. It's called In Nazareth. And that church was built in the 1960s under the supervision and the help and the assistance of the Israeli authorities. And it's right here in Nazareth for all the world, all the Christians in the world to come and see it. And you rightly mentioned that the Christian community in Israel is not just surviving and somehow existing, but it's actually growing and thriving. Christians are 1.6% of the population of Israel, 184,000 out of almost 10, a little bit over 10 million. But did you know that Christians, for example, make up 4% of the PhD holders in Israel? In fact, you have even the. We all talk about Israel being a startup nation, country that is leading in technology and so on. But one of the most prominent Israelis in the tech world, and maybe the one that has the biggest impact on our lives than anyone else, is an Arab Israeli Christian. His name is Jonas Ruji and he's the chief hardware officer of Apple. He is in charge of the hardware we have in our iPhones. I'm talking to you now from an iPhone. And an Arab Christian from Nazareth, from Haifa, basically built it. He studied in the technion who grew up in Israel and he even brought Apple later to open their R D center in, in Israel. And the Christian population in Israel is also the most law abiding, the least levels of crime, the least levels of, of unemployment in the country. And we even had Christians who are completely integrated. I mean the Christian community in general is quite integrated into the society from business to tech and others, but also in government. You have Christian ambassadors. I'm the first, but hopefully not the last. And you have Christians who served in the Arab Christians who served in the Supreme Court of Justice. And what I always like to tell people who say that Israel in an apartheid state is that we have a president, a former president of Israel who was sent to jail for, I think it was rape, Moshe Katav. And he was sentenced by the Supreme Court of Justice. A three sitting judges. Like three judges

A

panel.

B

Yeah, a three judge panel. And the presiding judge over that panel was a George Cara who was an Arab Christian. So basically an Arab Christian sent a Jewish Israeli president to jail. That doesn't exactly hit me like discrimination and apartheid in that sense. And people are also not aware that Christians, just like other religious communities in Israel, have their own Christian courts. Autonomy. I can get married and I can baptize my children and I can do all my religious duties and be registered legally in Israel. If the church gives it and there are God forbid couples out there who are getting divorced, then they will do it under the church rule, unless they choose to go to a civilian court. In Jordan, for example, just last week or two weeks ago, they celebrated the fact that for the first time, inheritance law among Christians would not be ruled by the Sharia law, which is, you know, something completely wild that, you know, Christians have to decide their inheritance not based on Christian law or civil law, but actually on Islamic law. So that is the reality of Christian life in Israel. And as you say, it's not without challenges, not without difficulties. But I think it's important to provide this context, especially when we compare it to the realities of Christians across the region. And I think that's also why Christians in Lebanon today are supporting, I think 78% in the last survey of Lebanese Christians said that they want peace and normalization with Israel. Some of them even want more than that, according to some statements made by some of our leaders lately, because they understand that Israel is a place that actually provides Christians with opportunities and safety that doesn't exist elsewhere in the region.

A

I really appreciate that you walked us through all of that because it raises the question of the critique of Israel that is explicitly framed in defense of Christians to the level of just. It isn't that it's hypocrisy. There's no political movement on earth that doesn't have hypocrisy. There's no political argument that it's not somehow to some slight degree hypocritical. It's that it's anti Christian. If you ignore the Christians of Syria in order to come after the Jews of Israel while pretending that in the Arab world things are fine, then you actually hate Christians and you're pretending not to hate Christians in order to have a chance to hate Jews. And that's the tragedy to me of a lot of this conversation. So how did they get away with it? How do they do it? What the hell is this conversation that's happening? Specifically, I'm talking about Tucker Carlson. Specifically, I'm talking about the people airbrushing the treatment of the Christians in Qatar who are non citizens. You want to talk about slavery and apartheid and just these Gulf countries where only 10% of the population will ever be allowed to be citizens. They don't even pretend that it's anything other than that. And they don't have the churches they need and they don't have the protections they need, and they don't have any civil rights of any kind and you will launder that in order to come after Israel. So I don't know if you noticed, but I have a view on this question. But by the way, am I wrong? And do you think I see Tucker on X? Do you think there's a much larger conversation and some of it is much more serious and legitimate than that? And then my next question is, tell us about the problems faced by the Christian in Israel, including, by the way, discrimination, including not enough policing, real problems, deep problems that I've written about in the past.

B

I always feel a little bit uncomfortable talking about Christians in the region and then Christians in Israel or vice versa because it always feel like I'm trying to tell people, hey, maybe the situation in Israel for Christians is not good, but look elsewhere in the region, it's really much, much worse. And that's not the kind of conversation I want to have. But you know, you can say a lot of things about Tucker Carlson, that he's malicious, that he has hateful views towards certain groups and he is, he has an agenda. But I don't think you can say he's stupid or at least not completely stupid. But I have to say the comparison to Qatar was on the borderline of stupid. Because to compare a thriving community in Israel to a community in Qatar that forget about their legal status as citizens or not, but you know, Christians, churches in Qatar are not even allowed to put a cross on the top of the towers. You can't have a cross publicly in Qatar. You can't publicly show yourself as a Christian in Qatar. In fact, churches are not even allowed to have bells to ring in Qatar, let alone to build them freely everywhere because they have to be contained in a specific quarter of the country. And not to mention that Qatar, just like basically, I think every country in the region has laws against converting to Christianity that include the death penalty. So this comparison really did not serve him well in his agenda. And I think there's a campaign that is aimed at, we know there's a campaign. It's even funded. It's organized to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States. And they do this by trying to drive a wedge between Israel and its biggest core supporters in the US which are in addition to the Jewish community. It is the Christian community. And by the way, they're not all evangelical. They're basically, let's call them Bible based Christians in the U.S. all kinds of streams in the U.S. who are Israel's greatest friends in that country. And Tucker and His friends are trying to drive a wedge by using three tactics. One is going after a American Jews by labeling them as dual not loyal enough to the US that they have dual loyalty. Their fifth column, do you care more about Israel or about the United States? Why do you care so much about Israel when you're an American citizen, etc. Second line is showing or telling people how Israel is lying and manipulating and using the US either to suck away its money. And I'm intentionally using the word suck because it brings back the blood labels of sucking blood and how Israel is manipulating the US into wars and manipulating the US into giving it more money in the defense mou and how Israel is stealing or taking the money of hardworking Americans, et cetera. And the third line of attack is to say, hey, you're Christians and you're friends of Israel. Why are you so close to the Jews? Why do you think you should be friends with the Jews when Christians like us in the Middle east are being persecuted by the Jewish state? So in addition to attacking Jews as not loyal to the US And Israel as the manipulating Jew, they're also saying that that Jewish entity is actually persecuting the Christians in the Middle east and in Israel. Now, obviously all these three lines are effective, even though they are very far from reality. And I think that touches something deeper. And if you would allow me to say something that troubles me about the direction that Western society is going. I spoke before how the Middle east has chosen a culture of victimhood and a culture of blame over a culture of responsibility. And I am afraid that the west is standing today in front of a similar decision. And those forces are pushing it to the same direction that the Middle east went to a hundred years ago. Because I think the west today is facing a very similar crisis to the one the Middle east went through. If in the Middle east it was the certainty of Islamic dominance that collapsed in the West. I remember I grew up in the 90s and you know, we all read Francis Fukuyama, the End of History and the Last man, and we all heard Obama's speech about the arc of history always bends towards justice. And there was the idea that the world is becoming that liberalism and Westernism want, and the world is becoming more secular, more Western and more democratic. And I think we live in a world where those certainties are collapsing, or even collapsed, some of them. The world is not becoming more secular. The world is becoming more religious. By the way, even in the west, it's becoming more religious, whether it is because there is a Christian Revival in the us, which I'm very happy to hear about it, but also in Europe, the fact is that Christian religious people bring much more kids than secular people, which means that statistically there are more religious people every day in Europe, which is a very, very secular continent. But obviously outside the west, secularism is not a real thing. And religion is taking over. The world is not becoming more Western. You have global towers, regional towers, ancient civilizations raising their heads, countries like Russia or Iran or China who are telling the west the future doesn't necessarily belong to you. And the world is not becoming more democratic. In fact, we see more and more tendencies towards non democratic regimes throughout the world. And I think the Western world is today facing the same question that the Middle east faced 100 years ago. And that's the question, what went wrong? And the answer to that question is going to decide the fate of where the Western world is going. Because I think this is the future of the Western world and there are forces that are trying to push it towards the culture of bling. There are three forces. One is Islamism itself, which is growing inside the Western world. And by the way, I'll just say that I saw the warning signs when I lived in the US a decade ago and I, I don't even know if they were warning signs or process already happening. I remember I went to UC Davis to give a talk to students about the Middle east. And it's on YouTube. You can see a group of students disturbing and disrupting my talk. And they started shouting about globalizing the Intifada. And they carried the sign that said 1948 equals 1492. Now at the beginning I didn't understand, you know, I'm not American. I thought they were mourning from Spain. I thought that's what I thought. I thought they were mourning the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. And I thought, wow, comparing it to the Naku.

A

Columbus. They meant Columbus. Exactly.

B

At the beginning I thought it's about the exposure in those Jews. And I said, wow, not every, you know, campus protester remembers the Sephardic history and the fate of the Jews in Spain. But obviously they meant the discovery of America because they were comparing what they saw as two original sins, the creation of Israel and 1492, the discovery of America. What they did over there was not a criticism of Israeli policy. It was a worldview. It's a worldview in which the west is reduced to guilt, America is reduced to oppression, and Israel is reduced to colonialism. And the Jewish people, whether you call them Zionists or Israel or Just Jews are cast as a symbol of everything that is wrong in this world. Now, at the time I remember after what happened, people told me not to worry. They are, you know, young people. They grow. They will grow out of it. It's just campus politics. These are just students. But they didn't grow out of it. And in fact, after October 7, and before Israel had even buried its dead, demonstrations against Israel swept campuses across the West. And the target was already chosen at the time. It was the Jews. It was Israel and the Zionists, not Hamas. And that is the culture of blame on the far left that the west is guilty and Zionism is its worst expression. But it's not only in the left. Today we see the sickness appearing in the far right, or, you know, with the blind right, the. The one that wants America to be blind to everything happening in the world. And there the story is different. What they're saying is not. The west is corrupt from its core. They're saying, no, you are fine. We are fine in the West. You are innocent. Things aren't going well, but you don't need to change, you don't need to restore. You're not responsible. It's all someone else's fault. And more and more openly, we hear that sentence by Tucker and others. It's all the fault of the Jews. The Jews lied and manipulated. The Jews control the elites. The Jews betrayed the West. That is the old poison in the. In the new packaging, basically. And this is where I think Islamism, the far left and the far right begin to sound strangely alike because they disagree on almost everything, maybe everything, but they all agree on one thing, and that is the escape from responsibility. The far less the far left is saying the west is guilty and Zionism is its worst expression. The blind right is saying the west was betrayed and the Jews are behind it, and the Islamists are saying the Muslim world was humiliated and the Jews are to be blamed. Three stories, one sickness. And that is why I believe, and that's why I took upon myself also this position, because I don't think antisemitism is a Jewish problem, at least not only a Jewish problem. It's a warning sign. It tells you that resentment is becoming a substitute for.

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For courage.

B

I'm not from the West. I'm from the Middle East. I come from a Christian community, but that lived in the Holy Land, where, you know, our Lord and Savior Jesus lived, taught, died, and resurrected. But I say this not as a Western, but as a friend of a West. I say this as someone whose freedoms and whose security in this region depend on the west remaining strong and confident. Because if the Middle east crisis emptied churches, towns and communities, the Western crisis is emptying identity, meaning, and purpose. Because blame cannot build families. Blame cannot restore communities. It cannot heal loneliness, and it doesn't create courage. Blame cannot give young people a reason to marry in the west or have children, like some governments are trying to promote, to serve their country or believe that tomorrow can be and will be better than yesterday or today. All blink can do is point the finger. Responsibility is the answer that builds. And responsibility, you know, it's built from two words to respond, response, and the ability to believe that we are able to do that, that we are not helpless, that we can act, we can learn, we can change, we can build. And that is the choice that is facing the west today. And I pray to God that the Western world, with its greatest hope, which is the United States, will be able to respond to this crisis by choosing responsibility and not blame. And this is something that I've learned from the story of my family. And if you'll allow me, I'll just share here that, you know, I come from a Palestinian family. My grandparents lived here as Palestinian Christians in Jaffa. And in 1948, my grandparents were asked to leave the land together with the rest of the Arabs in the Palestinians in the region and go somewhere else. And they were told by the Arab leaders, just give us a few days, we'll come, we'll win the war. The Arab armies are coming, and we'll wipe out the Jewish state. And then you can go back to your home safely. My grandparents, who were engaged at the time, they brought a priest to the home and got married because, you know, being killed in a war is one thing. It's not nice. But God forbid, having the gossip of a couple fleeing, unmarried, to a foreign land. So they got married and they started their journey by foot from Jaffa all the way to Lebanon. And they reached Lebanon and they stayed there. And you can imagine. I don't know if your audience knows this, but it's quite a long distance between Jaffa and Lebanon by foot. I think it takes three hours to drive just to the border, let alone to Beirut. So they ended up there in a Palestinian refugee camp, and they lived there for a few days. And, you know, they found themselves in this refugee camp for months and almost a year, and the war was over. And they realized that they were lied to, that, you know, the war ended, but the Jews actually won the war. And they cannot go back to the home that they left behind. And meanwhile, while they were living in the refugee camp, they even had a baby who was born there. And up to this day, my uncle is registered as a place of birth, Lebanon. So my grandfather looked around him and saw nothing but a dead end life of a refugee over there. And the rest of his family, they all tried to find for themselves a future. Some of them stayed in Lebanon, some left to Syria, some to Jordan, some to the Gulf countries. Some are today in Canada, the us, the UK and other places. But my grandfather had a different idea in mind. Before the war, he used to work for Rutenberg Electricity Company, which was a Jewish owned electricity company. And he even had Jewish friends who taught him Yiddish, probably making him one of the few, if not the only Palestinian to ever speak Yiddish, at least on some level. So he did not have this phobia of Jews. And he decided he wants to go back. And you know, his entire family thought he was completely insane. I mean, who wants to go back and live among those who were, you know, your enemy? It doesn't make any sense. We lost the war, we cannot go back. But he refused to believe that. One day he just got up, told his wife to get up, they took their baby and he told her, we're going back. So they walked all the way from Lebanon to Israel and they did it by going to Syria, Jordan, west bank, and from there into. And you can imagine doing this alone as a couple with a baby on foot. And they went inside Israel. And the Israeli police actually arrested my grandfather when they caught him. And you can imagine my grandmother being alone with a baby with no brother or sister or father or mother or cousin or even a neighbor to, to. To ask for help. And so she did the only thing she could think of. She went to what now became the National Israeli Electricity Company, the which is the new generation of the Rutenberg Electricity Company. And she started knocking on doors until she found someone who remembered my grandfather from the days they used to work together. And that person not only got my grandfather out of jail, but he even gave him his old job back in the Israeli National Electricity Company, making him the first Arab to work in that company. And the reason, you know, in my family today we have doctors and nurses and lawyers and scientists and accountants and even ambassadors is because my grandparents took that decision to come back and live among those who are supposed to be their enemies and to make them their friends and make them their neighbors and make them the people they share their neighborhood, their city and the country with. It wasn't an easy life, to come back and live here, not speaking the language, not knowing the culture. But they decided to do it because they believed that living in a refugee camp, in a culture of victimhood would lead them nowhere other than exactly where Palestinian refugees live today. In a place where victimhood becomes a vehicle for more resentment and more hate and less progress. They chose to come here and to take responsibility and to build a life for their own and to rebuild the Christian community in Israel, the only one that is growing and thriving in the Middle East. And that's the story that inspired me to believe that we are agents of our future. We're not just the result of our past. And I'll tell you more. A lot of people are saying that the Arab story or my story or our story and the Israeli story collide. But I disagree. I think basically they're the same story if you just tell it right. Just like my family went through all that and chose responsibility, took to, took to take the hard choices and to come and live in Israel among the Jews, it was also Jews who made the same decision. My music teacher, Avraham Nov survived the Holocaust only because he refused to give up his violin. When he was nine years old, when the Nazis put all the kids in a line to go to the train, the reason he had this violin is because his mother gave it to him and she told him, don't let anyone take it from you before they parted ways. So he refused to give his violin to the Nazi officer on the line to the train. And then he asked him, okay, can you play? So Avraham played. And that violin, that little and fragile instrument in the hands of a frightened nine years old kid, saved his life because while his family was being wiped out and totally murdered, he survived because he played the violin to entertain that officer and his guests at his home. A man who lived through that could have lived the rest of his life asking one question, who did this to me? And no one could have judged him. But Avraham did something else. He came to Israel, he married, he raised a family, and he taught music to thousands of children, including Arabs and Christians like me. He was my teacher in Jaffa. A Jewish Holocaust survivor taught a child, an Arab child like me, a survivor of the journey of my grandparents, music. And through music, he taught me the hope that he was raised with. And I think this is what ties our fates. Because when the world we know collapse, we don't just hand hatred to the next generation. What my grandparents gave us was rootedness. And Avraham gave us music and through it, the hope and the belief that tomorrow can be better. And that's the lesson that memory can become a prison or it can become a calling, that only by building a future for ourselves and for our community can we somehow mend or heal the difficult past that we went through. And that's the lesson I think the Western society knows very well because it went through such crisis before, whether it is after the 30 years war or the American story itself is a story of agency, of responsibility, of building a new world carved in a covenant, in a belief that we are the agents of our future. And that is the hope and the renewal and the resilience that I hope that our world and the Western world will choose.

A

Tell us about the problems of the Arab community in Israel, and that includes Palestinian Christians. There are reports of various ultra Orthodox or Khagdal Nikim, you know, very right wing religious Zionists spitting on Christians, attacking Christians, vandalizing Christian institutions, sometimes physically attacking Christian people. Just the people themselves, not just a building. What is the state of the Christian community? They are achieving higher rates of, as you said, educationally and professionally in many ways than the average Jews. And their schools are doing better than the average Jewish majority schools. So in that sense, you know, extraordinary success story. But they still face real discrimination, real problems, sometimes from these narrow bands of extremists, but also structural things. Tell us their story in Israel. Anything you want to say about Palestinian Christians as well? I think that's an important piece to plug in here to this larger story.

B

Anyone who would say that being a Christian in Israel or anywhere in the region, but also in Israel, comes without problems and everything is fine is not telling you the truth. And both things can be true. Israel should not deny or minimize or cover up for incidents or problems that happen here with the Christians. And also we should not turn into every misconduct and every bad behavior of extremism into the full picture of Christian life as a whole. Both things can be true at the same time. There are, I mean, Israel remains one of the only country basically in the region where Christian communities are free and growing and visible and able to participate in the highest levels of society. But at the same time, there are serious incidents that require enforcement and education and institutional responsibility, and we cannot shy away from it. And part of my position is also my role is to find a way in which we can face those problems. And in the last few months, we have seen several incidents taking place in our region and specifically in Israel, in which Christians were the target. We had the soldier in Lebanon who desecrated the cross with a sledgehammer, another soldier who put a cigarette in the statue of the Holy Virgin Mary. And we had the spitting incidents in Jerusalem, as well as a nun in the streets of Jerusalem that was pushed and kicked. These are all serious incidents that are actually taking place. And these are abhorrent and unacceptable behavior that should not have room in the State of Israel at all. And nobody would condone such behavior in our country. And as a government official, I tell you that this is a clear cut line across every ministry and every office in this land that this goes. It's not only an offense, by the way, to Christians who live abroad, it's an offense to Christians who live in Israel, Christians who serve in the idf, Christians who serve in the government, and just random Christians in the street who pay taxes and live as good citizens, or study and contribute to the Israeli economy, society in any other form. And more than anything, I think it's an insult and an attack on the values that our country stands for and should strive to continue standing for. Now, obviously, incidents against certain groups happen, you know, in every country. In the US we had two of our diplomats who were killed out of an anti Semitic attack. If you remember last year, just last week, by the way, there was a train of anti Semitic incidents against Jews in Spain, including a demonstration calling for the destruction of Israel. But we'll put that on the side. I mean, desecrating Jewish cemeteries, attacks on Jews in the streets of London and others. I don't think that Spain or England is inherently anti Semitic because of that. I think the country should be judged by its reaction to it. And that is how you test a real society and a country. You don't judge it by what happens, but how it responds and how it makes sure it doesn't happen again in the future. And I think in this sense, in our case, all these attacks were condemned by the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and others. And all the perpetrators were punished and quite severely. The soldiers were sent to jail. The guy who pushed the nun in the streets of Jerusalem was also punished and he's now in custody and the police standing trial for assault. And I can tell you that I'm part of a larger inter agency committee in the government of Israel. We're bringing together everyone from the Ministry of Justice to the Attorney General to the police and the security agencies in the foreign ministry, etc. And we're all cracking our heads how to solve the issue of the spitting in Jerusalem, for example. And one of the main challenges there by the way, is that usually the perpetrator doesn't spit on the person or on the door of a place, but right next to it. And then there's a problem in the criminal code how you prove intent, because they just say, oh, I didn't even know. I didn't notice. It was a coincidence. So how do we solve this? Intent issue is a serious legal problem, and we take it very seriously, and we're trying to find solutions to overcome it. And obviously, a big part of the solution is education, education with. Especially among those groups where we see a higher tendency to carry out such an attacks. Now, while all this is true, I do want to give a certain context that we have seen a rise in violence in Israel over the past three years, not just in the Christian context, but, for example, we have seen a rise of over 70% in domestic violence against women. We have seen a rise in organized crime, which also, by the way, targets Christians and Jews and others, especially in the north of Israel. And I think that. I'm saying that because I think it relates to a larger problem that we have, which, you know, there's a big body of research in the world about how crime levels and violence levels rise when a country is in a state of war. We saw that the research shows to the US during the Vietnam War today in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe, in the Balkans, when they had war. And it's also true for Israel today. We see a rise in violence in general, not just towards Christians, but in other cases as well in organized crime, which is also affecting Christians in Israel that are prone to such organized crime, especially in Nazareth in that area. But also domestic violence. 70% rise in violence against women in the Israeli society at large. So there's something to be said that when countries are engaged in war, there's a tendency to see a rise in violence. That's not an excuse to say, okay, when the war will be over, whenever that will be, then we'll go back and everything's gonna be fine. We have to fight this phenomenon hard, and we have to take it seriously. And that's what we're doing. And my appointment to this position, to this role as a special envoy to the Christian world is also part of the effort of the state of Israel to try to solve some of these problems and build a better dialogue between us and churches and the communities and the leaders in the Christian community. And obviously, you know, when I talk about the situation of Christians in the Middle east, it also includes Israel, but it also includes the Christians in the West. Bank and in Gaza, who are also facing a lot of hardship, maybe more than anyone else. And I don't think they are outside my concern. My formal mandate is to strengthen Israel's relationship with the Christian world and to speak about Christian life in the Holy Land and in the region. And Palestinian Christians are part of that story. And there are issues concerning Palestinian Christians that are deeply troubling. Some of them relate to the threats and to the pressure that they're experiencing from their own societies. Especially in the Muslim societies we see, whether it is in Bethlehem or it is in Gaza, when the Christian community has basically disappeared, a few hundreds left in Bethlehem. It went down from over 80% of the population to less than 15% today. But part of the challenges are also related to Israeli policies. And that's something that we will look into. And that's also something that I think is important to address as an Israeli official. So I think that we should prioritize and think seriously about the situation of Christians in the region. That's why, you know, they appointed me for this, to have someone who dedicates himself to this task and to remember that even two things can be true at the same time. There are real challenges that need to be addressed and we need to be here in order to provide a solution for all these phenomenas. Whether it is my work with the military or the police on education level, for the soldiers on the front line to make sure such incidents do not happen. Whether it is in the task force in the intra agency governmental task force for Jerusalem, the spitting incidents, or if it is the situation of Christians in the west bank, in Gaza, in Israel and elsewhere, whenever there are incidents. And at the end of the day, Christians are not a bubble. We live in our societies. When Arabs are discriminated in Israel, Christians could be discriminated too. When Arabs are mistreated somewhere else and so will Christians. And when Israelis are mistreated abroad and when they suffer anti Semitism and hate hate toward Israel, Christian Israelis will suffer that too. We are part of a larger story or larger stories. So that's something to take into consideration. And as I said, two things can be true at the same time. The Christian community in Israel is growing and thriving. It is one that is an integrated part of the Israeli society. And at the same time, there are real challenges which need to be put in their right proportions and have the right solutions to those issues. And hopefully I will be able to achieve that in my position.

A

George, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You have been an ambassador, spoken of very highly in all kinds of strategically vital places like Azerbaijan. But and now you're going to be the ambassador to the Christian world. But I have known you for a few years now and you have been and I think people got a little bit of that taste of that in this conversation. You've been an ambassador to the Jews for the Christians. There are so many divides. It's a community that's liminal in so many ways, that is in between so many things, a minority in three different directions all at once. And I know the Christian story in Israel better because of you and there are many others who do as well. So thank you for everything that you do to make us wiser. Not just you know, now you're going to take Israel's story out there into the world as you've done for years, but you've taught us. So thank you for that and thank you for joining me.

B

Thank you for having me.