Prominent Christians in Gaza told me their friends and relatives, denied access to and from the enclave, want to emigrate. Sami El-Youssef, financial vice president of Bethlehem University, said he believes there is a conscious Israeli policy of getting rid of the Christian minority, whose discomfiture is more politically embarrassing for Israel than Muslim distress.
Holy Week has been particularly difficult for Palestinian Christians. Professors at Bethlehem University (an institution of the De La Salle Christian Brothers) were frustrated by government refusal to permit supervised student trips to the Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem. Throughout the West Bank, Christians were denied travel permits to march in Jerusalem's Palm Sunday procession.
Israeli Foreign Ministry officials asserted to me that Christians in the Holy Land suffer more from Muslims -- a position echoed by Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, head of the Franciscans minding the Holy Land's religious places. But I could not find another Catholic layman or prelate who complained of anti-Christian bias by Muslims.
Beyond cutting to pieces the promised Palestinian state, the security wall imposes an ugly scar on East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In Bethlehem, where the wall is a barbed wire fence at the Emmanuel Monastery, the sisters there and the brothers from Bethlehem University sadly parade in front of the wall saying the rosary once a week.
Israeli government officials argue the wall may not be pretty but saves lives. Retired IDF officers at the Economic Cooperation Foundation, a Tel Aviv think tank, believe the wall creates a climate of hatred. "I think it may be producing another generation of terrorists," Brig. Gen. Ilan Paz told me. That is even worse than driving out the Holy Land's remaining Christians.