Aramean Christians, Israel, and Gaza: An interview with Shadi Khalloul

Shadi Khalloul vividly remembers the moment his “American dream” died.

It was the moment a teacher at the University of Nevada Las Vegas described Aramaic as a dead language. The class was studying the Bible as literature, and had encountered the Aramaic words spoken by Christ, Talitha kumi.

Khalloul raised his hand to explain that the language is not dead; it is in fact alive and well in the Middle East, where Maronite Christians still pray in Aramaic and sometimes use it in daily life.

He left the classroom with a surprise assignment: to give a presentation on Aramaic.

An Israeli of Lebanese descent, Khalloul was studying for a degree in international business and finance. He planned to leave Israel to pursue a career in the United States.

A week later, he took the class on a tour of the Aramaic language, its biblical roots, its significance to him as a Syriac Maronite Christian, and how his community struggled to maintain their identity. He was astonished by the rapt attention of his American audience.

He ended his presentation by teaching the class the Lord’s prayer in Aramaic. Ulo Tellan lanisyana Ello Fatzey lan min beesha… Amin. As he finished, he was surprised to see students with tears in their eyes.

Khalloul had found his calling. “The Bible changed my life and drove me back home,” he says.

An Aramean Christian in Israel

Instead of pursuing a career in the United States, he went back to Israel, to his hometown of Gush Halav, in Northern Galilee. For over two decades, he has worked tirelessly on behalf of the Aramean Christian community in Israel.

I spoke to Khalloul about what it means to be an Aramean Christian, about his work to preserve his heritage, and how he feels about the Israel–Hamas conflict.

Israel has just 15,000 Aramean Christians. For generations, they have been considered a minority within a minority: a subset of Israel’s Arab population, which is mostly Muslim.

Khalloul, 48, aims to change that. He has established programs to teach Aramaic to Christian youth, and lobbied the Israeli government for the rights of Aramean Christians. He has run for the Israeli Knesset five times. He quit his job in high-tech marketing to focus on the project full time, as President of the Israeli Christian Aramaic Association (ICAA).

Thanks to Khalloul’s efforts, Aramean Christians in Israel no longer have to carry ID cards identifying them as “Arab Christians.”

It’s a hugely important distinction for Israel’s 15,000 Aramean Christians, whose identity is rooted in a language that goes back to the 11^th century BC, and who consider themselves linked to the Jewish people through cultural bonds. The majority of them are Maronites—Eastern Catholics in union with Rome.

“Arab Christian” is a misnomer, Khalloul says, for a people who are not ethnically nor historically Arab. Like most of Israel’s Aramean Christians, his ancestry can be traced to the Fertile Crescent, not the Arab peninsula—in his family’s case, to Mt. Lebanon and the Aleppo region of Syria, which was the early Aramean state of Aram Soba.

Early Christians spread the Gospel—and the Aramaic language—in all directions. Travel the geographic map of the Aramean people and you’ll go from northern Israel to the Lebanon mountains, and from northern Syria to Iraq and part of Turkey.

The Aramaic church in the east became known as “Syriac”—“from Syria,” the Greek word for “Aram.” Syriac and Aramean are two words for the same language, with Syriac generally used in church contexts and Aramaic usually describing everyday life.

Most of the Syriac communities split from Rome at the time of the Great Schism. Eventually some Syriacs came back to union with Rome, including Lebanon’s Maronites.

As successive Muslim waves conquered the Middle East, Aramean Christians adopted the Arab language and assimilated for their own protection. Arabic “was a language that was imposed” under Islamic rule, Khalloul says. “Unfortunately, we lost a culture. It was a cultural and linguistic genocide.”

Khalloul views the revival of the Aramaic language—and the consequent reinforcement of an Aramaic Christian ethno-religious identity—in the context of education and Christian culture. In Israel, a nation where public schools are divided between Hebrew speaking and Arabic speaking curricula, Christians often learn in Arabic and from an Islamic perspective.

He hopes that being acknowledged as a distinct ethno-religious group will lead to Aramean Christians having their own educational curriculum. His efforts have borne fruit in Gush Halav (known as Jish in Arabic) where the public elementary school became the first in the country to teach Aramaic.

Kafr Bir’im

Although there is an affinity between Israel’s Aramean Christians and Jews, the relationship has sometimes been difficult.

Khalloul’s family is originally from the Maronite village of Bir’im, about two and a half miles south of the Lebanon border. In 1948, during the Arab–Israeli War, the people of Kafr Bir’im (Kafr means “village”in Aramaic) were ordered to evacuate their village. Many of them resettled temporarily in nearby Gush Halav. In 1953, that became permanent. After repeated appeals to be allowed to return—and a Supreme Court ruling in their favor—Bir’im was razed to the ground by the Israeli Air Force, on the grounds that a Jewish settlement in its place would deter infiltration from Lebanon.

Although most of those who remember life in the little village are now dead or elderly, the issue remains contentious.

Despite the rocky relationship, Khalloul is a firm supporter of Israel. Like his father and grandfather, he served in the IDF. Today the former paratrooper is a reserve officer, tasked with encouraging Christian youth to join the IDF. To that end, he runs a pre-military leadership program where Jewish and Aramaic youth live and train together for seven months.

Since the October 7 Hamas attack, Khalloul has been widely quoted in global news media: the Wall Street Journal, UK’s Daily Mirror, Daily Wire, The Christian Post, the Los Angeles Times, just to name a few. We took a break during our interview so he could meet with a reporter from the New Yorker. Much of the coverage focuses on his work on behalf of Aramean Christians or on the danger of a Hezbollah attack from Lebanon. Just a few outlets have focused on his support for Israel.

As I interviewed Khalloul, I was looking for more than a soundbyte. I wanted to do a deep dive on why he supports a country that has not always treated his people well.

A shared heritage

Khalloul tells me his support goes back to a heritage shared by Israel’s Aramean Christians and Jews, stretching back thousands of years. Before Abraham was an Israelite, he was Aramaic—from the land of Aram, in what is today Mesopotamia. He quotes Deuteronomy (Deut. 26:5): “A wandering Aramean my father was, and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous.” When Isaac and Jacob needed wives, they returned to the ancestral home in Aram. (Gen 24:10, 28:2)

“Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Lea, Rachel, Sarah, Rebecca, all the mothers of the Jewish people, all the fathers of the Jewish people, were of Aramaic origin,” Khalloul tells me.

When the Israelites settled in Canaan, the Hebrew language eventually evolved from Aramaic. Later, as a result of the Babylonian exile in 597 BC, and the Assyrian conquest in 720 BC, they adopted Aramaic—the lingua franca of the near and middle east at the time. Aramaic was the language of daily life in Israel at the time of Jesus, although Hebrew remained the sacred language of the Jews.

Hebrew and Aramaic are similar—Khalloul speaks both, as well as Arabic and English.

For Khalloul, Aramaic is an ancestral language. However, he is quick to emphasize that the bond between Aramean Christians and the Jewish people is cultural more than racial. “We’re not talking about genetics; we’re talking about culture and civilization. We’re talking about culture, we’re talking about a civilization that was preserved in our Aramaic Christian churches in this region.”

A map of persecution

His work is focused on Israel’s Aramean community, but through it, he hopes to call attention to the plight of Aramean Christians elsewhere in the middle East.

The geographic map of the Aramean people is a map of persecution.

Aramean Christians have been persecuted in Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria for more than 1400 years, starting in the early Islamic period. Massacred in Lebanon in 1860, starved by the Ottoman Turks from 1915-1918, at the same time that they were facing genocide in northern Syria and in the south of Turkey … the list goes on to the present, perhaps the most infamous atrocity being the massacre of Christians in Damour, Lebanon, in 1976.

Khalloul’s surname is a constant reminder of that history. His great-great-grandfather, Khalloul Jacob, was mayor of Bir’im in 1860, a time of historic violence in the region. Muslim forces raided Bir’im and burned the mayor alive in front of his wife and family. To honor his memory, the family changed its surname from Jacob to Khalloul.

The personal connection fuels Khalloul’s passion to draw attention to the plight of Aramean Christians in the Middle East.

During our conversation, Khalloul frequently references the situation of Christians in Lebanon, just over two miles away from his hometown. The Islamic militant group Hezbollah, which is shelling deeper and deeper into Israel’s north, has embedded weapons on Christian farms and around churches near the border.

“Hezbollah is firing at Israel from around the Christian community and churches in Lebanon, aiming to destroy the Christian community and get them to leave this area,” he tells me.

He is acutely aware that in Israel he has a freedom that Christians just a few miles away do not enjoy. “I need to speak out on this issue because they cannot speak it on the other side. I speak it in Israel freely. I am also speaking on behalf of my fellow Christians on the other side of the border,” he says.

Israel is not perfect, he acknowledges. “Let’s call it imperfect. Because like any other democracy in the world, nothing is fully, 100 percent perfect … It’s a new country that’s struggling with a lot of problems. But the wisdom is to know how to deal with things and achieve them in a positive Christian way.”

Many Christians support Israel for biblical reasons; some do so out of brotherhood with the Jewish faith, and some because Israel is a functioning democracy, a rare thing in the Middle East.

Khalloul’s support for Israel comes from a different perspective. It’s extremely personal, and while it includes sympathy and solidarity with the Jewish cause, it is given a deeper context by the suffering of Christians in the Middle East.

It is also based on a visceral connection to the land itself. “I’m not Jewish,” he says, “I’m a proud Christian, Aramaic, native to the Galilee and to the region, before anyone came here and conquered our land, and imposed their language and the ideology of the Islamic Jihadi. We were here before them. This is our home.”

Gush Halav, just over two miles from the Lebanese border, is now virtually on the frontline.

The village is about 40% Muslim Arab, about 60% Christian. In peacetime,“there are Jews around us as well,” Khalloul told me, calling it “a good model for the rest of Israel.”

Residents of communities in the region were evacuated at the start of the war, along with anyone who lives between Gush Halav and the Lebanon border.

Khalloul sent his family away, but he did not leave. “We didn’t, and we will not,” he says. “We are here to stay. We belong to this land, and whatever they plan for all of us, we should stay here and defend our homes and our community and our land.”

 

“A non-Muslim issue”

When the October 7 attack happened, he was in shock, he says, but not shocked at the violence.

“I am not shocked by the brutality,” he says. “It’s not about the brutality of Hamas. We know those people. They did this in Lebanon with us before. We saw Christian kids being thrown from the third floor of a building and Palestinian terrorists shooting at them.”

“I was not surprised by the brutality,” he says again. “I was surprised by its success.”

When the attack happened, he adds, “people finally understood what I was talking about and warning about” for years. Prior to October 7, many had dismissed his concerns by saying “they are fighting for the Palestinian national goals.”

“No, no, no, no. You don’t understand,” he had responded, citing the persecution and massacre of Christians all over the mid East: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and specifically Egypt, where the persecution of coptic Christians by Egypt’s Muslim majority has led to mass migration.

“What, do you need more until you understand this is not only against Jews?” he asks.

Despite the popular narrative that portrays the Hamas attack as the culmination of long pent up grievances at Israel on the part of Palestine, he says the conflict is not about the Jewish people. “It’s a non-Muslim issue.”

In other words, he says, those who are not Muslims are potential targets even if they are not currently the focus of attention.

“If you are a non-Muslim, they don’t care [what religion you are, whether] it’s Jewish, it’s Christian, it’s Buddhist, it’s atheist … if you are not Muslim, that’s your destiny here. You will deserve the same treatment of being infidel, of being persecuted, of being oppressed, of being under threat of annihilation in this land, because you are non-Muslim.”

The solution to the conflict, he believes, “is not about giving up territories. We gave up territories. We gave up Gaza for them. We gave them money. The world gave them money, and instead of using this in Gaza to build schools, universities, factories, high tech companies … they turned it all into a big terror base, with people being brainwashed, kids being brainwashed, and this ideology that is aiming to wipe out another people and annihilate another people in this region.”

Of Gaza’s Christians, who are often portrayed in the media as victims of Israel, he says “the Christians of Gaza suffer.” When Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, there were 3,500 Christians in Gaza. By the time the Israeli-Hamas conflict started, there were barely 600 left, “not because of Israel, but because of Hamas.”

A year after Hamas was elected, the last Christian bookstore in central Gaza was firebombed, its owner (who had received death threats from jihadis for years but refused to close his shop) kidnapped, tortured and murdered.

Gaza’s civilians, both Muslim and Christian, are not free to speak their minds, he reminds me. Although some Gazans have started speaking out against Hamas in recent days, many speak against Israel out of fear.

“In the news, you see Christians speaking out against Israel from Gaza,” he says. “Unfortunately, to protect their existence, they need to obey the order of Hamas, and these orders are to speak against Israel and to pay lip services by speaking against Israel.”

“The Christian world is sleeping”

During our interview we discussed at length the oft used phrase “the world’s largest open air prison” (he has no patience for the term and asks why Egypt doesn’t open its borders), and the overwhelmingly pro-Gaza media bias.

Case in point: a lone article in Newsweek this March, in which John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, wrote, “In my long career studying and advising on urban warfare for the U.S. military, I’ve never known an army to take such measures to attend to the enemy’s civilian population, especially while simultaneously combating the enemy in the very same buildings.”

How does one reconcile that with the term “genocide,” used over and over to describe the same military operation?

Khalloul speaks with the familiarity and emotion of one who has long lived close to the issue. Frustration with what he views as western naivety is never far from the surface.

“The Christian world is sleeping,” he tells me, “in very deep sleep, allowing others to control their countries, allowing their countries to be taken by foreign agendas, even by very, very liberal agendas that are against their own values.”

Foreign powers—he specifically calls out Qatar and Turkey—that represent the Islamic Brotherhood Movement are working to influence world policy by lobbying inside the United States, starting with the media, he says.

He points to Qatar’s heavy media investment, which includes Al Jazeera, now one of the world’s top ranked news sources. Al Jazeera was founded by the Qatar government, which remains its primary source of funding. U.S. lawmakers have called for the news outlet to register as a foreign agent, yet it remains the source where many Americans get their news on the Israel-Hamas conflict.

He also cited CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, which has close ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, as an example of outside forces “acting to control you and to control your values” in the United States.

Qatar, while officially an American ally, has also poured billions of dollars into Hamas. Most Americans don’t realize that the wealthy Arab nation is also pouring billions of dollars into American schools and universities—the same universities now experiencing waves of pro-Palestinian protests. That funding is influencing American education.

In one notable example earlier this year, a New York City public school was found to be using a map on which Israel had been removed and replaced by “Palestine.” The map was part of a Qatari funded “Arab Culture Arts” program.

Parallels to Lebanon

Throughout our interview, Khalloul drew parallels between what is happening in Gaza and Israel and what happened in Lebanon.

Israel’s northern neighbor has a long history as a place of refuge for persecuted Christians in the Middle East. Khalloul showed me a letter to the United Nations High Commissioner, dated August 5, 1947, from Archbishop Ignace Moubarac, the Maronite Catholic archbishop of Beirut. The letter calls for “two homelands for minorities: a Christian home in the Lebanon, as there has always been [and] a Jewish home in Palestine.”

“Lebanon was aimed to be a homeland for refugees, a refuge for Middle Eastern Christians to feel protected from the persecution of Islam and Arabs around them,” he said. “It was once the Switzerland of the Middle East … where Christians could at least have some type of freedom and liberty and freedom of worship.”

Today, however, “Christians are oppressed, they fear for their lives” in Lebanon.

The power of the world press was used against Christians in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War, described in an April 1976 AP story as “a vicious battle for supremacy between Christians and Muslims.”

Not so, Khalloul says: “My brothers and sisters from our nation in Lebanon” were defending themselves as “all the Islamic and Arab world came to fight the Christians in Lebanon.” Yet in the eyes of the west, Christians who took up arms in the Lebanese Civil War “became the ones who were racist and right wing,” he says, citing Arab money and media influence.

In Israel, he sees more unity among Christians and Jews since the Hamas attack. Christians in Israel are realizing “that if Hamas, God forbid, would take over here, their Christian existence here is at risk.”

His message for Western Christians: “You’re next.”

A hopeful vision

Despite the dire warning—and despite the increasing danger in northern Galilee as missiles from Lebanon fall in ever greater numbers—his vision for Israel, and for his own people, is hopeful.

It’s a vision of a town where Aramaic Christians can preserve their heritage—a town with an international Aramaic center where people from all over can come to learn about the language Jesus spoke.

“Whatever happened in Bir’im, sadly, happened. It doesn’t destroy my faith and my vision and our forefathers’ vision. I still implement what my forefathers wanted me to do, to have a peaceful life here between Jews and Christians, and to live together … if something happened, it doesn’t mean now I throw everything and I go and be an enemy for the Jews. No. I want to build this vision of my forefathers.”

There are others from the razed village who feel the same way, “who still believe in Israel and doing their duties toward the state, because at the end, we have no choice. We must build a reconciliation in a good positive Christian way in order to get our rights.”

Their history of persecution has given them an understanding of the war’s context that even many Jews lack, Khalloul says. They support Israel out of a conviction that in doing so, they are helping to ensure their own survival.

“I will keep doing what I’m doing until I reach my goal to build this town. It’s in the interest of Israel, it’s in the interest for us, as Christians, as Jews, as people who want to live in their forefathers’ land here, with the same origins, same language, same heritage.”

His town would be a hub for “people who would come to see this in the Galilee, how we live it,” he adds.

He spoke excitedly, his words tumbling over each other. “We have achieved things. I have proved I can get my needs in a positive way. We are agents of hope and peace in this region.”

“This is the dream, the vision. And I tell you, I will build this town.”