“I feel like we’re often tokenized, which is the part that gets to me most,” Fadi Handal says of being a Palestinian Christian. “Actually, maybe ‘tokenized’ is not the right word. I would say ‘weaponized.’”
Handal is a Palestinian Christian who lives in Toronto, with his family hailing from Bethlehem.
As a Palestinian Christian like Handal, I too notice how often Israeli and Western leaders claim that Arab Muslims are a danger to Christians in Palestine and Israel, even though that is not something we significantly experience.
Today, about 46,000 Palestinians live in Canada — mostly in Montreal, the Greater Toronto Area and Windsor. Many are Muslim, but an estimated 6.5 per cent of the global Palestinian population is Christian.
Augie Habesch, A Palestinian Christian residing in Toronto, tells me a familiar story. “The other day I went to one of the [Gaza] rallies in downtown Toronto. And I walked into a convenience store just to buy something real quick.” Because Habesch was wearing a keffiyeh, a chequered headdress traditionally worn by men in Palestine, the clerk asked him if he attended the rally, and Habesch said yes.
“He looks at me and he goes, ‘Oh, okay, so you’re Muslim?’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m Christian,’” Habesch says.
“Then he looks at me with this very confused look on his face like, ‘Wait, you’re telling me that Christians are also getting genocided In Gaza right now?’ I was like, ‘Yep.’”
On Oct. 19. 2023, 18 people were killed when Israel bombed an outer building of the St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox church in Gaza City. The church was struck again in July 2024, when a missile penetrated through the roof but did not explode.
And on July 17, 2025 three people were killed when Israel bombed Gaza’s only Catholic church, the Holy Family Church in Gaza City. That bombing sparked worldwide outrage far louder than for the dozens of destroyed or damaged mosques.
Habesch’s parents are originally from Jerusalem. While he identifies as agnostic and is less religious than his parents, he still attends church in the GTA on major holidays like Easter. He says he is “very flexible” and goes to churches of various denominations: Maronite, Chaldean and Greek Orthodox. He sees his identity as more cultural than spiritual.
“I take big offense when [other Christians ask], ‘Oh, when did you come to Christianity?’” says Sandra Shehadeh, a Palestinian Christian living in Mississauga, where there is a large Palestinian Christian population. “I’m like, ‘Palestinians, we are some of the original followers of Jesus.’”
Her ancestors were Palestinian, Jordanian, Turkish and Iraqi-Assyrian.
Shehadeh describes a run-in with an older man at her local Mississauga church: he noticed her keffiyeh and told her, “I’ve been to Israel.”
“He wanted to justify to me, a Palestinian living in the diaspora, how Israel needs to exist and suggested I read a book about how we have to support Israel as Christians,” she says, “and I just wanted to throw up.”
Christian Zionism in Canada
Scrolling through social media, I watch as many of my fellow Christians in the West, including politicians, dismiss the urgency of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, saying that Israel has “the right to defend itself.” Their crowds erupt in cheers and standing ovations.
Why are some Christians so invested in the state of Israel?
Christian Zionism is a belief held by some Christians that to bring the second coming of Jesus Christ, Jews from across the world must all gather in the holy land of Israel and then convert to Christianity. This is also called millennialism.
There are also many Christians who support Israel who don’t believe this biblical prophecy, or at least who don’t say so publicly.
As with the United States, Christian Zionism in Canada goes back to the colonial era. At the time of Confederation in 1867, Canada’s most notable Christian Zionist was Henry Wentworth Monk, a Protestant who took part in one of the first Zionist agricultural settlements in Palestine.
R.B. Bennett, a Baptist and the 11th prime minister of Canada from 1930 to 1935, endorsed the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s declaration of support for colonizing Palestine. In a radio broadcast praising the Declaration, he said that “scriptural prophecy is being fulfilled.”
Today, there are several Christian Zionist organizations in Canada, affiliated with wealthy and powerful Canadians.
The most well-known may be Canada Christian College, a private evangelical Bible college in Whitby, Ontario. The College runs an institute called Christians United for Israel – Canada, which is chaired by the College’s president, Charles McVety.
In 2008, Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of the pro-Israel organization B’nai Brith Canada, was appointed the chair of the College’s new Department of Modern Israel Studies and served as the dean before he left in 2019. The College awarded former Prime Minister Stephen Harper the Israel Allies Award at a gala in 2022, and it is well connected with Ontario Premier Doug Ford, among other Canadian business and political leaders.
There are a few Canadian organizations that collect donations to help Jews immigrate to Israel, mainly from Ethiopia, such as C4I (Christians for Israel), which had annual revenues of $4.8 million in 2023, and the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICE-J) Canada, which had revenues of $1.8 million in 2023. Both reference either Bible passages or “ancient prophecies” as part of the rationale for their efforts to move Jews to Israel.
There are also many prominent Christian supporters of Israel in Canada. These include Jim Pattison, an evangelical Christian Canadian businessman with a net worth of around $11.4 billion who has donated to pro-Israel causes, and Jason Kenney, a Catholic and former premier of Alberta.
But Zionism is not universal in Christian communities in Canada.
In 1998, after several Anglican clergy visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories and were shocked by what they saw, they set up Canadian Friends of Sabeel, which supports the Sabeel Centre in Jerusalem, a Christian liberation theology organization. Canadian Friends of Sabeel also does faith-based education, advocacy and solidarity in Canada.
The United Church of Canada, which has taken pro-Palestine positions for years, called for a ceasefire on Oct. 7, 2023. In 2024, the United Church officially endorsed the boycott, divest and sanctions (BDS) movement.
In February, 2025, the heads of four church denominations — the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, The Presbyterian Church in Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada — called for a permanent ceasefire.
Many Christians in Canada care about Palestine and Palestinians, but when it comes to positions of real power, Christian Zionists have a strong advantage. It is hard to say for sure how powerful they are compared to Christian Zionists in the U.S., who are well-known as a significant force. But they are definitely a factor here.
A Minority in Decline
The land that is now Palestine and Israel is often referred to as the “holy land” in part because it was the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth, whose followers developed the religion of Christianity around 2,000 years ago, during the Roman empire.
Before the third century AD, the dominant religions in the region were Judaism and Canaanite paganism. Christianity dominated from then until between the 7th and 12th centuries, when the majority of the local population converted to Islam.
Since then, subsequent empires subjected the Christian population to varying degrees of religious tolerance or persecution, such as heavy taxation.
From the beginning of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922 to its final stages in 1946, the Palestinian Christian population increased slightly, but dropped as a proportion of the overall population from 11 to eight percent.
Later, from 1967 to 2017, the first 50 years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Christian share of the population dropped from six to just one percent.
“To be a [Palestinian] Christian, in a way, is very interesting,” says Habesch. “Sometimes you are put in positions where you feel like even if you’re not a practicing Christian, you still want to identify as one because it’s an identity that’s being semi-erased.”
A narrative often pushed by Christian Zionists is that Muslims are oppressing their Christian neighbours in Palestine and driving them to emigrate. But the data, and those I spoke to, tell a different story.
According to a 2020 survey by the Palestinian Centre of Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), of those wishing to emigrate, between 81 to 89 per cent of Christians surveyed say neither they or their children have experienced harassment from their Muslim neighbours due to their faith.
80 to 87 per cent cited crime rates and Palestinian Authority corruption as reasons for wanting to leave. Seventy-three per cent cited the Israeli occupation, 67 per cent said they feared Israeli annexation, and 62 per cent said they feared that Israel’s ultimate goal is to expel them.
“It’s very rare to run into any issues with Muslim Palestinians,” explains Habesch. “They know we’re part of the land, there’s no us-versus-them mentality.”
“We are on the same team, fighting the same struggle,” he continued. “It’s more Zionism and the occupation just pushing Christians out.”
Habesch stresses that the issues facing his homeland are political, not religious. Since the beginning of the current war on Gaza, both Muslims and Christians have sought shelter in churches to escape Israeli bombardment, he points out.
“As a Palestinian Christian, I want secularism,” Shehadeh says. “We all have our rights to this land. It’s a holy land for all three [Abrahamic] religions. It can’t be for one more than the other[s].”
Xavier Abu-Eid, a Palestinian Christian born in Chile whose family is from the village of Beit Jala near Bethlehem, speaks to me from his home in Ramallah, in the Occupied West Bank. He was an adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s negotiation team with the Israeli government from 2008 until he left in January of 2024. Today, he is working on a PhD about Palestinian churches.
Abu-Eid explains that his community’s existence is largely ignored because, “It is not convenient for [Christian Zionists]. Our existence quickly kills [the] narrative” that this is being done for Christians.
Abu Eid sums up widespread sentiment among Palestinian Christians in saying, “We are also bad news for Islamophobes because we make people see this not as a religious conflict, but as a national liberation struggle from a setter-colonial enterprise that never cared whether we were Christians or Muslims.”