For a community whose roots there stretch back nearly two thousand years, that number should provoke a simple question: What happened to Gaza’s Christians? Part of the answer can be found in the testimony of Naji, a Christian from Gaza whom I interviewed about growing up as a member of an increasingly small religious minority.
His story is about radicalization — how ideas transmitted through sermons, mosque lessons, religious circles and everyday social life eventually reached children, classrooms and the Christian kid sitting at the next desk. Naji describes a profound change after Hamas took complete control of Gaza. According to him, Christians increasingly stopped being understood simply as fellow Gazans and began being viewed through religious categories: dhimmi, “People of the Book,” unbelievers destined for Hell.
By high school, Naji was one of only seven or eight Christian students. Some classmates associated Christians with the Crusaders. Others believed Christians “worship the cross.” “They didn’t grasp that we were Gazans just like them,” he told me. “For them, we’re merely guests.” Christianity has existed in Gaza for nearly two millennia.
Yet a Christian child could walk into a classroom and discover that other children had somehow learned that he was the outsider. This is what radicalization looks like before anyone picks up a weapon. We tend to discuss radicalization at its most spectacular stage: a militia, a terrorist organization, an attack. But the process begins much earlier and somewhere far more ordinary. A child learns who is a believer and who is an unbeliever.
Who will enter Heaven and who will enter Hell. Who belongs naturally to society and who is merely tolerated within it. Naji described Christian students being bullied because of their faith. The children doing the bullying did not invent these ideas themselves. They were absorbing an