When is a lease of land not just a lease of land?
When the land in question, located in the Old City of Jerusalem, is owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, and the other party is an Israeli group which seeks to bolster the Jewish population’s presence in the Old City and east Jerusalem. That’s when.
No matter which side you take, the 15-year-old dispute between Jewish organization Ateret Cohanim and the Greek Patriarchate is a thorny affair, each side having merits and the dealings themselves shrouded in mystery. With the church claiming the leases of three land plots were made without going through the proper process and Ateret Cohanim refusing to back down, the matter took 15 years to be resolved.
However, instead of reporting on this story with the requisite care, Times of London writer Michael Binyon’s piece, titled “Squeeze on Christians in the Holy Land,” (article behind paywall) portrays the upholding of the leases by the Israeli Supreme Court as tantamount to pressuring the entire Christian community in the Holy Land.
Which “Holy Land?”
Speaking of the “Holy Land”, the Binyon’s article refers to its “dwindling number of Christians.” But what does “Holy Land” even mean?
In a piece dealing exclusively with the treatment of Christians by the Israeli authorities, it might seem that the term Holy Land here is to be taken as synonymous with Israel. If that’s the case, then the statement is an outright lie. With a community in excess of 180,000 and growing, the number of Christians in Israel has steadily risen since the inception of the State.
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
The only way in which the statement that the number of Christians in the Holy Land is “dwindling” could be accurate is if areas administered by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are lumped in together with those governed by Israel. In which case, why does the article not make this clear? The persecution of Christians in Palestinian society has no connection to their status under Israeli law. Why would the term Holy Land refer to a mixture of territories governed by different authorities without explanation? Even more pressingly, why should the term be thus employed in an article focusing exclusively on Israel’s treatment of Christians? The sentence is clumsy at best and a glib falsehood at worst.
Beyond these issues, the article altogether fails to report the rationale of the court for upholding its earlier decision not to interfere with the lease of land to the Ateret Cohanim group. The article makes space to detail the feelings of Christians in Israel (who “fear… [the development] could accelerate Christian emigration”), but neglects to mention the concerns of Israeli authorities that literally hundreds of church-owned properties located in Israel’s most impoverished city remain exempt from taxes for decades.
Readers of Binyon’s article would not know that the Supreme Court decision was criticized the Greek Orthodox Church for changing its story. The patriarchate originally claimed that the deals should be considered void as the Holy Synod had not approved them, but later instead alleged – without managing to substantiate the claim – that one if its officials had been bribed to acted improperly. Similarly, readers were not told that the judges spoke out about their unease with the case, but emphasized their reluctance to nullify the lease without sufficient clear evidence of wrongdoing.
Instead of providing this valuable context, the story is framed simplistically as a warning shot to Christians in the “Holy Land.”
(Image: WikiMedia Commons, accessed here)
