Long identified as part of the country’s minority Arab population, Israel’s Christian community has recently begun asserting its own unique identity—one that is deeply tied to the Jewish State of Israel. Meet the Arameans.
By Aryeh Tepper-Tower Magazine
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strode into a banquet hall in the northern Galilee town of Upper Nazareth on a mid-December evening in 2014, approximately 1,000 people rose to their feet and gave Netanyahu a standing ovation. Was this typical election-year enthusiasm?
It was enthusiastic for sure. But it was hardly typical. The crowd consisted of Arabic-speaking Christians who insist that they are not Arabs. Instead, they consider themselves “Arameans,” and the event, hosted by the Forum for Christian Enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces, was a Christmastime coming-out party for a community that is celebrating a recent Israeli decision to legally recognize their old-new identity.
Thanks to that recognition, Israeli-Arameans are now on the same footing as other Israeli minorities, such as the Druze and Circassians. And like them, Aramean Christians want their sons to join the IDF. Indeed, Arameans who spoke at the Upper Nazareth event (only a minority of whom actually speak Aramaic, although the aspiration is to revive the language) repeatedly emphasized their desire to defend what they believe is the one state in the Middle East that protects Christians and allows them to practice their religion in peace.
The movement to recognize a separate Israeli-Aramean identity is not new. It began modestly enough in 2007, when a member of the Maronite Church from the Northern Israeli town of Gush Halav, IDF Major (res.) Shadi Chaloul, met with a soon-to-be Knesset member from the Likud, Yariv Levin. Chaloul persuaded Levin that Arameans should be considered a distinct minority in Israel. Until then, almost all Israeli Christians simply self-identified and were considered to be “Arabs.”
Their argument in favor of a distinct Aramean national identity was surprisingly easy to make, and seized with greater urgency in the Christian community, as Israeli Christians have seen the fates befalling their co-religionists and other minority groups across the Middle East as the promise and peril of the Arab Spring has unfolded. From Copts in Egypt, and Christians and Kurds and Chaldeans in Syria and Iraq and beyond, nowhere are Christians and other minorities of all faiths more secure or free, than in the Jewish State.
Aramaic-speaking Christians have lived in the Middle East since the dawn of Christianity itself. Indeed, Jesus himself was an Aramaic-speaking Jew. Things changed, however, when Arab Muslim armies exploded out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century CE and conquered much of the Fertile Crescent and North Africa. The empire they built quickly began to impose their faith and culture on the regions it occupied.
As a result, Aramaic was slowly buried as a spoken language in favor of the new empire’s lingua franca—Arabic. This transition should be familiar to students of Jewish history. Before the Muslim conquest, many Middle Eastern Jews also spoke Aramaic. The classic compendium of Jewish law and lore, the Talmud, was written in the language. But after the Arab conquest, Jews began to adopt their own dialects of Arabic, and the Talmud slowly became unintelligible to everyone but a small scholarly elite.
During the same period, some Aramean Christians were converted to the new Arab-Islamic order, while others retained their distinct identity. They did so by holding on to their Christian faith, which used Aramaic as the language of prayer, even as Arabic became the language of daily life. Despite the extraordinary pressures placed on its speakers, Aramaic managed to survive into the 20th century as a spoken language, mainly in a few Christian villages in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. In an incident that is by no means irrelevant to the Aramean push for recognition, one of those communities, the Eastern-Orthodox Christian village of Ma’aloula, was recently overrun by Islamist forces fighting in the Syrian civil war.
The story of Aramean Christians in Israel is illustrated by what transpired in Chaloul’s hometown of Gush Halav. Before 1948, Aramaic was taught in local schools. But after the founding of the state of Israel, Israeli-Arameans were categorized as “Arabs,” and thus compelled to study Arab culture, history, and language. Since the Israeli Education Ministry made no provisions for teaching Aramaic in public schools, the language was preserved in the Maronite liturgy and private initiatives like the Aramaic language program that Chaloul and his brother Amir launched in Gush Halav.
To be fair, the Israeli decision to address Arameans as Arabs should be seen in context. The idea that Arabs, irrespective of religion, constitute one nation was promoted by some Middle Eastern Christian intellectuals throughout much of the 20th century. Indeed, it remains popular in certain Christian circles today, including in Israel. Self-professed Aramean Christians will tell you, however, that it was an idea born out of their community’s political vulnerability. To survive in an Arab-dominated Middle East, they had to “become” Arab. But the idea that adopting an Arab national identity would work to their benefit has been shattered in recent years, as the rise of ultra-radical Islam has resulted in attacks on Christians in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq that sometimes border on ethnic cleansing.
Once Chaloul won over Levin, however, a movement for change began to gain momentum. Levin was elected to the Knesset in 2009, and quickly began to advocate on behalf of Israeli-Arameans.
This seemed to create a snowball effect. In August of 2012, parallel to Chaloul’s efforts, IDF Major Ihab Shlayan—an Eastern-Orthodox Christian—founded the Forum for Christian Enlistment in the IDF. Shlayan believed that Israeli-Arameans should no longer tolerate “the lies” that compelled Israeli Christians to kowtow to Arab sensibilities. He recruited a Greek Orthodox priest from Nazareth, Father Gabriel Naddaf, to head the organization. A somber man who projects an intense sense of mission, Father Naddaf shared Shlayan’s views, and added greatly to the forum’s prestige.
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