Remnant Christian communities in Iraq, Syria and across the Holy Land have struggled to continue a 2,000-year witness amid outright conflict, religious persecution and escalating economic and political tensions. In recent years, those communities have been targeted just about every time new conflicts arise between the contemporary West and regional extremist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. That has contributed to an ongoing exodus that has diminished the viability of the Christian presence in the lands where Jesus walked.
Regional tensions have most recently spiked because of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, the ongoing suffering in Gaza and rising settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. On Oct. 23, three men stormed the St. George Greek Orthodox Church in the Jordanian town of Hammud in Karak. Their attack on a funeral service left nine people dead and more than 30 wounded. Does that violence suggest that Jordanian Christians may become the next Holy Land community under threat?
Jordan over the years has endured more than its share of terror attacks, and there is cause for concern, surely. But Sean Yom, an authority on Jordanian history and politics and an associate professor at Temple University, told America on Oct. 29 that the violence in Karak is “one of the rare instances” where terrorists “explicitly targeted a Christian institution and a community of Christian believers.”
“And that’s what makes it so horrifying to Jordanians, including Muslim Jordanians, who are not used to this level of violence in their society because Christians have always been a well- assimilated, protected minority,” Mr. Yom said. “The idea that they could be singled out like this is…heinous and traumatizing for all Jordanians.”
Despite the attack, he remains confident that Christian Jordanians can continue to live in peace and comparable prosperity in a nation of relative calm in the heart of an unpredictable and often violent neighborhood. He believes Jordan will continue to act as a regional redoubt of interreligious tolerance and dialogue, pointing to the strong response from Jordan’s security and intelligence forces in the aftermath of the Karak attack.
The three men believed to have orchestrated the assault on the Christian community in Karak were apprehended on Oct. 26 after a gun battle with security forces. Jordan’s armed forces conducted a retaliatory raid on ISIS camps in Syria the same day. (The Jordanian military claimed that 20 militants were killed in the air strikes, but Syrian officials reported that seven civilians, including three children, were among the dead.)
It is still not clear, according to Mr. Yom, if the men who orchestrated the assault were acting in direct collaboration with the Islamic State or if they were merely inspired by Islamist extremism. Such “lone wolf” attacks are difficult to protect against, he said. The Jordanian air strike in southern Syria suggests that Jordanian officials believe the local men were at least partly acting in connection with Islamic State. How deep that connection goes will be important to discover, Mr. Yom said.
It is telling how Jordanian religious and civic leaders of all faiths loudly and quickly denounced the attack on the minority Christian community, he said. The killing at Karak was also strongly condemned by Jordan’s monarch, King Abdullah II.
“The terrorist attack against Karak will be met with the harshest retaliation,” King Abdullah said on his social media account in the aftermath of the attack. “Those who delude themselves into thinking that they can divide Jordanians with their bullets have no chance in the face of our unity.”
He added: “All Jordanians, from north to south, are partners in land and fate, and nothing stands between them.”
King Abdullah, in military fatigues, visited with the wounded at Karak hospital on Oct. 23. “What happened today was an attack on all Jordanians,” he said. “May God have mercy on the martyrs and protect our country and our people.”
“After God, you are our protection in this country,” one of the wounded survivors told the king from his hospital bed.
On Nov. 2, in an address before the opening of Jordan’s Parliament, King Abdullah attempted to reassure Jordanian Christians and his anxious public. “A few days ago, the treacherous hand of terror sought to test our state’s resilience and our people’s resolve,” he said.
“But we will not back down. We will not allow the terrorists…to undermine the security and unity of this nation. They have no place among us. They have no place in our great Jordanian family. They betrayed it. They have no place in our midst…not now, not ever.”
Political and business leaders in Jordan, Mr. Yom said, will seek to continue what has been Jordan’s role in the Holy Land, standing against extremism and conflict as a buffer of moderation and a convener of dialogue when possible.
Jordan is a “well-run country with a well-armed military and a well-trained intelligence service and one that has created a very stable, safe country,” Mr. Yom said. Its capital, Amman, is the location of choice, he added, for “most major global institutions that work in this corner of the Middle East,” like the United Nations and the World Bank. “They choose Jordan as the base of their regional kind of operations because it’s so safe and secure.”
Jordan’s Christians represent a tiny minority within the Sunni Muslim kingdom—about 2 percent of the population. The kingdom’s constitution declares Islam the state religion but safeguards “the free exercise of all forms of worship and religious rites,” according to the U.S. State Department. Incitement of hatred, blasphemy against Abrahamic faiths, undermining the regime or portraying citizens in a manner that violates their dignity have been criminalized under Jordanian law.
Most Jordanians support Palestinian rights and are upset about the current predicament of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, according to Mr. Yom. Most are unhappy with U.S. aggression against Iran, which has led to Iranian retaliatory strikes against American bases on Jordanian territory. They are equally unhappy with Iranian support for destabilizing and often violent forces in the region like Hamas and Hezbollah. Above all else, he said, Jordanians continue to support peace and coexistence, he said.
As a small nation without the oil riches that Gulf states can tap into, “instability in the region has always been disproportionately felt in Jordan,” Mr. Yom said.
“If there’s a civil war in Syria, guess who gets 700,000 Syrian refugees? It’s Jordan,” he said. “If there’s a war in Iraq, guess whose trade networks get disrupted because of the war next door? It’s Jordan.”
“Jordan’s real regional interest,” Mr. Yom said, “has always been that of maintaining immediate stability in its neighborhood.” Its outlook is not ideological but pragmatic, he said. It continues to press for a comprehensive peace agreement that supports a Palestinian state but also recognizes Israel’s right to exist.
“There’s anger against Iran for retaliating [on U.S. military sites inside Jordan], but there’s also anger against the U.S. for starting a war that Jordan didn’t want,” Mr. Yom said. Jordanians find themselves trapped in crossfire because of decisions made in Washington that they have no control over, he said.
In his address to Parliament, King Abdullah stressed that there “is no place for terrorists among us, neither today nor tomorrow.”
But he also described Israeli expansionist ambitions as the greatest threat to the region’s future and said that lasting security in the Middle East could not be achieved “without upholding the rights of the Palestinian people.”
The attack on Christians in Karak, Mr. Yom believes, will prove an aberration, though of course nothing is certain. What would surely assist the Christian community in Jordan and the viability of their presence in the Holy Land, he said, would be for the Trump administration to better measure how its geopolitical and military strategy reverberates around the Middle East, particularly in vulnerable nations like Jordan.
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