By Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post Contributor
Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, rejected claims made in a Wall Street Journal report that attacks on Christians are rising in Israel, saying he has lived and worshiped there since 1973 without difficulty.
In a post on X Thursday, Huckabee said he attends church in Israel every week and regularly visits with Palestinian and Israeli Christians. He said Christians work, worship and pray freely in the country and serve in the Israel Defense Forces as high-ranking officers.
Huckabee said the Christian community in Israel has expanded from about 34,000 people to nearly 200,000, a trend he called unmatched anywhere else in the region. He also praised the Israel Foreign Ministry’s recent appointment of George Deek, an Arab Christian diplomat, as its first envoy focused on ties with Christian communities worldwide, calling the move unprecedented.
Huckabee acknowledged what he called occasional but rare instances of people spitting at Christians in Jerusalem’s Old City, calling the behavior repulsive and noting it had been condemned by Israel’s prime minister, president and embassy in Washington.
He said the most recent episode took place at an Armenian Church and that Israeli police arrested six people involved.
“In [New York], kippa-wearing Jews get spat on & viciously attacked. No one blames the entire US for behavior of a few criminals,” Huckabee wrote. “I’ve been throughout the Middle East & know of no place where there is much religious diversity as there is in Israel.”
In a post on X, Israel’s Foreign Ministry accused The Wall Street Journal of building its report titled “Spitting Attacks Show Rise of Anti-Christian Hate in Israel” around a handful of hostile critics and presenting their views as typical of Israeli society, leaving out the roughly 200,000 Christians who, the ministry said, live very differently.
It said Christian citizens sit on the Supreme Court, work as doctors and mayors, and hold senior posts in the military and diplomatic service, and that churches in the country function without restriction.
The ministry called the outlet’s coverage “a distortion of reality disguised as reporting” and said it was “disingenuous, misleading and shameful.”
The episode Huckabee and the ministry were responding to took place in May, when several Israeli teenagers went to the entrance of the Armenian Apostolic Church’s headquarters in the Old City, knocked, and inquired whether Christians were present, intending to spit on them, according to the newspaper.
One of the boys, wearing an Israeli flag around his shoulders, called humiliating Christians a religious obligation.
The teenagers were among thousands of mostly young Israelis marching through the Old City that day, taking part in an annual event that marks the 1967 capture of East Jerusalem.
The newspaper said its own reporter, together with witnesses and security footage, documented roughly a dozen separate spitting incidents near the church that same afternoon.
Israeli scholar Yisca Harani, who has spent years tracking hostility toward Christians, founded the Religious Freedom Data Center three years ago. It counted 107 such incidents from January through June, more than twice the tally for the same months in 2024, with spitting and verbal abuse, including the phrase “Death to Christians,” concentrated in and around the Old City, according to WSJ.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right member of Israel’s government who serves as national security minister, once represented in court the men accused of burning the Tabgha monastery in 2015. He has said spitting at Christians represents long-standing Jewish practice and does not amount to a crime.
Roughly half of Israelis now think stepping into a church is against the rules, compared with one in 10 in 2008, and a similar share regards Christianity as idol worship, according to the findings of a September 2025 survey conducted by an Israel-based interfaith group, the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue.
Rights advocates cited by the newspaper called the Deek appointment a limited response, insufficient on its own to address the wider pattern of hostility.