As we approach Christmas, millions of Christians will sing about Bethlehem and picture a quiet town where shepherds once heard angels, and a young Jewish mother laid her son in a manger.
Almost none of them realize that the city where Jesus was born has been steadily emptied of Christians and turned into hostile ground under Palestinian rule.
In 1950, Bethlehem and the surrounding villages were roughly 80–86% Christian, the most heavily Christian area in the Holy Land. By the last serious counts, Christians in and around the city are down to roughly 10%, and some studies now speak of “demographic erasure,” with Christians making up about 1 percent of the population living under Hamas and Palestinian Authority control overall.
The reasons are not a mystery to the people who actually live there. Reports from Christian clergy and research centers describe a steady pattern: intimidation by powerful Muslim clans, land grabs, property confiscation, extortion, murder, rape, and a police and court system that rarely comes down on the side of a Christian family in a dispute.
Pastors talk about believers being “left to the mercy of street gangs and other criminal activity, with no protection,” while PA security forces look the other way.
Economics makes it worse. Bethlehem’s economy depends on tourism and pilgrims. When war or unrest hits, the hotels empty out, businesses die, and anyone who can get a visa gets on a plane.
Reuters reports that by 2017, the Bethlehem area had about 215,000 people and only 23,000 Christians, with locals saying the pace of emigration keeps rising as jobs vanish and violence and corruption become a permanent way of life.
Meanwhile, the same Western elites who lecture Americans about “Islamophobia” have almost nothing to say about this slow‑motion cleansing of Christians from the birthplace of their own faith. When a mosque somewhere gets tagged, it is international news and a State Department statement.
When Christian families in Bethlehem lose their land to a connected Muslim clan, or a priest is beaten and police shrug, it barely rates a footnote.
Inside Israel proper, the Christian population has grown in absolute numbers, and the share of Christians who stay and raise families is stable or rising modestly, even with all the usual regional tensions.
In PA‑run Bethlehem, the Christian share has fallen from over four‑fifths to around one‑tenth in a few generations, and the trend is still down. Demographics do not lie. When Christians are treated as a protected minority under the law, they remain and grow. When they are treated as second‑class citizens, harassed, and economically strangled, they leave.
So as churches in the West set up nativity scenes and talk about “peace on earth,” Bethlehem itself is being stripped of the people who kept the place Christian for nearly two thousand years. That is not an accident of history. It is the direct result of PA corruption, Islamist intimidation, and a world that finds it easier to blame Israel for everything than to face what Muslim majorities are doing to Christians in the very cradle of Christianity.