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The Palestinian
Christians is a historic community that is facing the risk of
disappearing in the Holly Land. The British census of 1922 placed
the Christians Palestinian population in Jerusalem at just over 51
percent. The majority of the well educated.
With the UN partition
vote of 28 November 1947 the effect of refugees being expelled from
their ancestral lands was devastating.
The Palestinian
population with between 725-775,000 people was expelled from the
Holy Land. Over 50 percent of Jerusalem’s Christians were expelled
from their west Jerusalem homes.
In
Jerusalem a higher proportion of Palestinian Christians who became
refugees after 1949, a ratio of 37 percent of Christians to 17
percent of Muslims.
The
higher ratio of Christians was due in part to the fact that the
majority lived in the wealthier western Jerusalem district seized by
Israel during 1948-49.
Palestinian Christian churches owned the 34 percent of the land
seized by Israel and they were taken by force with no compensation
given to the owners.
The
Palestinian Christians population declined to 13 percent of the
total Palestinian population in East Jerusalem, West Bank and in
Gaza from 18-20 percent that had held until 1948. However following
the 1967 war and until the signing of the Oslo Accords (1993), the
population decline was more dramatic.
The
reason of the decline was the severity of the Israeli occupation,
the lack of an economic, educational, vocational and secure life in
East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank.
The
Palestinian Christians represent 1.6 percent of the Palestinian
population in Gaza Strip, Jerusalem and the West Bank. Palestinians
and western Christians scholars said that the Palestinian Christian
population will be on the verge of extinction within a generation.
The
fundamental crisis for the Palestinian Christians is the same as
that for all Palestinians-the occupation, the Israeli measures
against the entire population.
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