The end of 2021 brought renewed reports of the persecution of Christians in India, with the New York Times warning of “a growing anti-Christian hysteria that is spreading across this vast nation” and of attacks by “anti-Christian vigilantes” who “in many cases” are being helped “by the police and members of India’s governing party.”

Doubtless aware of the symbolism, on Christmas Day itself, the government of India informed the missionary group established by Mother Teresa that it was henceforth barred from accepting foreign donations, with the Wall Street Journal noting that the move came “amid what some Christian leaders call an increasingly hostile environment for their religion.”

The reaction from Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, so far as I can find, has been silence. That’s fine in theory, if the archbishop doesn’t consider the plight of India’s Christians his responsibility. When he visited India in 2019, he said nothing about persecution of Christians there. When asked before the trip whether he would challenge the Indian government on behalf of Indian Christians, his top advisers told journalists that, “He is not going as a political leader — he is going as a religious leader. What we don’t want to be doing is lecturing another country.”

But this fastidiousness and solicitousness for not “lecturing another country” entirely evaporate when it comes to the world’s only Jewish state — an especially egregious double standard in the context of Christianity’s steep decline in most of the Middle East. 

As an article in the Atlantic put it in 2019, “The graph of the religion’s decline in the Middle East has in recent years been transformed into a cliff.”

In Iraq, where “during the war years, insurgents consistently targeted Christian towns and churches in a campaign of terror,” the Christian population has fallen from well over a million to 250,000 or fewer. Lebanon used to have a Christian majority and that has shrunk to just a third. In Turkey, the Christian population was above 20 per cent in the early 20th century; today it is under one per cent. In Syria, 30 per cent of the population was Christian a century ago and even in 2000 nearly 15 per cent of the population was Christian; today, the Christian population is estimated to have fallen below three per cent.

In Egypt, Copts and other Christians used to be 10 per cent of the population but are now down to half that. 

The story is similar in the  Palestinian territories. The Christian population in Gaza has declined from about 4,500 when Israel ruled Gaza down to 1,000 now under Hamas rule. As an article in Foreign Policy in October, 2021 put it: “In Gaza, it is partly the result of the economy and the siege, but it is undeniably made worse by life under Hamas. In 2007, one year after Hamas was elected, the last Christian bookstore in Central Gaza. . .was firebombed twice...Its Christian owner, Rami Ayyad, a deeply religious and kindly man, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by extremists.”

In the West Bank, the Christian population is steadily declining and the State Department reports that, “According to local Christian leaders, Palestinian Christian emigration has continued at rapid rates.”

The condition of Christian minorities in the Middle East is grim — but there is an exception. A Times of Israel report on a new statistical study of Israeli Christians noted that Israel’s Christian population, which is more than 75 per cent Arab, grew by 1.6 per cent in 2019 and 1.4 per cent in 2020 to reach 182,000 people. A remarkable 84 per cent said they were satisfied with life in the Jewish state. 

A higher percentage of Arab Christians than of Israeli Jews go on to get a bachelor’s degree after high school” 53.1 per cent of Arab Christians . . . went on to get a bachelor’s degree after finishing high school, compared to . . . 47.2 per cent of all high school graduates in Hebrew education.” Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported that “Christian students comprised 2.6 per cent of all university students” in a country where Christians are two per cent of the population.

One could cite many more statistics that make the obvious point: Christianity is in steep decline in the Middle East except in Israel, where Christians and Christianity are doing fine.

And that is why the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent attack on Israel is so disgraceful.

On 13 December, a group of Christian clergy in Jerusalem issued a statement, The Current Threat to the Christian Presence in the Holy Land. In full support, on 19 December the archbishop (joined by a Palestinian Anglican bishop in Jerusalem) wrote an article for The Times, “Let us pray for Christians being driven from the Holy Land.” At his own website, archbishopofcanterbury.org, we find the headline “Archbishops warn of ‘concerted effort’ to drive Christians from Holy Land”. The archbishop does acknowledge that “Christians in Israel enjoy democratic and religious freedoms that are a beacon in the region” and that “in Israel, there is some increase in the overall numbers of Christians.” But he supports and endorses a statement by “leaders of local churches in Jerusalem” that “raises an unprecedented and urgent alarm call” claiming that “Christians throughout the Holy Land have become the target of frequent and sustained attacks by fringe radical groups.” What’s more, the statement says there have been “countless incidents” of physical and verbal assaults, “holy sites regularly vandalised,” and “ongoing intimidation.” 

He goes on to quote, and thus lend credence to, the claim that this is all part of “a systematic attempt to drive the Christian community out of Jerusalem and other parts of the Holy Land.”

What is perhaps most remarkable about this statement is the context. First, acts of vandalism and assault by “fringe radical groups” would seem to be matters that should be handled by law enforcement. As Robert Nicholson of the Philos Project put it, “If the prelates are vexed by issues within Israel, they might consider lodging a complaint with the local police instead of the international press.” There is no possible argument that the government of Israel encourages any such unlawful conduct, far less in the way that the New York Times and others report the ruling party and authorities in India do.

Second, the archbishop acknowledges that the Christian population in Israel is growing but ignores the implications. How can one reconcile that with the archbishop’s headline about Christians “being driven from the Holy Land”? How can one square all these assertions about constant assaults and attacks with the fact that 84 percent of Christians in Israel report being satisfied with life there?

Last summer, Archbishop Welby announced that in 2022 the Church of England would apologise for the treatment of Jews in, and their expulsion from, England 800 years ago. The apology is a bit odd, given that the Church of England as such would not exist until several hundred years later.

This is not the archbishop’s first foray into rhetorical excess. In November, he had to apologise for predicting that politicians who fail to stop global warming will in the future be condemned “in far stronger terms than we speak today of the politicians of the (19)30s, of the politicians who ignored what was happening in Nazi Germany.” 

Criticised strongly for this remark, the archbishop then said, “I unequivocally apologise for the words I used when trying to emphasise the gravity of the situation facing us at COP26 [the international climate summit]. It’s never right to make comparisons with the atrocities brought by the Nazis, and I’m sorry for the offence caused to Jews by these words.”

I noted Archbishop Welby’s remarkable reply when asked some years ago whether the UK should take more Christian refugees from Iraq. “The last thing we want to do is empty the Middle East of Christians,” he said, and then added that “Christians have been there for longer than anyone else, which needs to be remembered.” 

The archbishop might consider revisiting his Gospels, because Jesus came from somewhere and was preaching to someone. Nebuchadnezzar brought Jews from their historic homeland into the Babylonian captivity 600 years before Jesus, and many of their descendants lived there continuously until being expelled after the creation of the State of Israel. Apparently that is not something “which needs to be remembered.”

A pattern emerges. The Christian population appears to be rising in Israel but dropping in the West Bank and Gaza. Why, then, blame Israel rather than the Palestinian Authority and Hamas? Surely a comparison of the archbishop’s comments on Israel with his silence on India suggests he is holding Israel to a standard he does not widely apply. 

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism includes “applying double standards by requiring of it [the State of Israel] a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

Archbishop of Canterbury Welby should understand that his apology for the church’s actions regarding Jews in England 800 years ago is of far less importance to Jews everywhere today, including in Britain and especially in Israel, than treating the Jewish state fairly. 

If he can’t manage that, no apologies will ever be sufficient.

Elliott Abrams served as the US special representative for Iran and Venezuela in the Trump administration. 

He was previously deputy national security advisor in the George W. Bush administration, and assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs and for inter-American affairs in the Reagan administration.