When Hate Starts to Rhyme: What Violence Against Christians in the Holy Land Reveals About the Human Person

Numbers rarely generate the same emotional charge as images. Yet numbers carry something images cannot: pattern. The Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue has documented 155 cases of violence against Christians in East Jerusalem and Israel in 2025, a 40% increase compared to 2024. That figure, reported in a ZENIT News interview with Bishop Rafic Nahra, Auxiliary Bishop of Jerusalem of the Latins, does not arrive from nowhere. According to Bishop Nahra, radicalization began in 2023, several months before the October 7th war, and has since combined everyday humiliations with explosive violence into something systematic.

The word systematic matters. It is the difference between an incident and a phenomenon. Phenomena organized around contempt for a group's sacred symbols and physical safety carry consequences that extend beyond policy and geopolitics. They reach the interior life of persons.

The Structure of Dehumanization

Bishop Nahra's interview is striking for its precision. Asked about viral footage of an Israeli soldier smashing a crucifix in the Christian town of Debel in southern Lebanon, and another soldier desecrating a statue of the Virgin Mary, he declines the explanation of isolated incident. His reasoning is methodical: in each case, more than one person is involved. Someone commits the act. Someone photographs it. Someone publishes it. Three roles, three agents, one coordinated gesture of contempt.

Research in moral disengagement demonstrates that violence against symbols precedes and enables violence against persons. Dehumanization rarely begins with flesh. It begins with what a community holds sacred. The 155 documented cases in 2025 are not separate from the hammer blow to the crucifix. They are downstream of it.

Bishop Nahra draws this connection himself. A French nun was attacked from behind near the Cenacle in Jerusalem. The escalation moves from plaster to flesh, from symbol to person. This is a grammar, and grammars have rules. Understanding those rules is prerequisite to interrupting them.

Conscience as the First Line of Resilience

Bishop Nahra notes that even ancient and medieval rabbinic sages understood that certain intolerant verses of scripture could not be applied literally in changed historical contexts. His point is not polemical. It is a reminder that every religious tradition carries within itself the interpretive resources to resist its own radicalization. Conscience, formed within tradition, is not merely a private moral faculty. It is a social one.

Catholic anthropology situates conscience at the center of what makes the human person an agent rather than a mechanism. What Bishop Nahra's account reveals is what happens at the community level when that voice is systematically overridden—not by individual failing alone, but by ideological formation that substitutes fanaticism for judgment.

He acknowledges that soldiers' fatigue may partly explain the drop in moral vigilance, while insisting it does not justify it. Explanation is not exculpation. The person is never reducible to their worst moment, and the worst moment is never without consequence.

Resilience Is Not Silence

The Christian communities of the Holy Land have inhabited a minority position for centuries. They have developed, of necessity, a resilience that is neither naive optimism nor passive endurance—something closer to what psychologists call active coping: the sustained effort to maintain coherence of identity under conditions that press toward fragmentation.

Bishop Nahra does not minimize the threat. He names the structural failures: the weak response of government and police, the normalization risk this creates, the pattern that distinguishes a recurring phenomenon from a rare anomaly. Naming is itself an act of psychological health. Communities that cannot name what is happening to them cannot organize a coherent response.

The Rossing Center's data carries significance beyond the headline number. Counting is an act of witness. The 155 documented cases are 155 acts of witness against the alternative narrative that nothing systematic is occurring. Resilience is not the absence of accurate perception. It is accurate perception held within a framework of meaning large enough to sustain the person through what is perceived.

Toward a Grammar of Restoration

Grammars can be relearned. If there is a grammar of hate—structured across roles of perpetrator, witness, and publisher, organized around the progressive dehumanization of the sacred before it reaches the person—then there is also a grammar of restoration.

It begins with naming, which is what Bishop Nahra does here. It continues with witness, which is what the Rossing Center's documentation performs. It requires accountability at the structural level, which is what Bishop Nahra calls for from government and police. And it draws from the deep resources of tradition—not merely repositories of doctrine but living frameworks through which persons and communities make sense of suffering.

Catholic anthropology offers a vision of the human person as fundamentally oriented toward truth, goodness, and communion, even when the social environment actively works to degrade that orientation. Bishop Nahra's insistence that all religions must today be at the service of peace is also a psychological claim. Peace is not merely the absence of conflict. It is the condition in which persons can flourish because the relationships that constitute human life are rightly ordered.

Source: ZENIT News / Caffe Soria, "The Grammar of Hate: An Interview with Bishop Rafic Nahra, Auxiliary Bishop of Jerusalem," published May 30, 2026.