u/LostAppointment329

The video of the IDF soldier smashing that Jesus statue in Lebanon is obviously looks bad, and honestly, almost everyone in Israel is disgusted by it. But if you actually look at what happened next, it shows why there is a massive difference between the two sides. Instead of making excuses or celebrating the guy, the Israeli government and the IDF went into full accountability mode immediately. Netanyahu said he was stunned and saddened, and there is already a criminal probe happening. The army even promised to help the village fix the statue. Compare that to how Christians are actually treated in the West Bank and Gaza.

In Gaza, the Christian community has basically been wiped out and now sits at fewer than 1,000 people. In Bethlehem, the population has crashed from 85 percent to only about 10 percent. A survey found that nearly half of Palestinian Christians feel discriminated against for jobs and 40 percent feel like Muslims do not even want them there. This is a slow, quiet exit driven by fear and social pressure that nobody in the media wants to talk about.

The double standard is the craziest part. While people freak out over one statue, they ignore actual violence against Christians by Palestinian terrorists. In October 2025, a young Christian named Elio Abou Hanna was shot dead at a Palestinian camp checkpoint in Beirut just because he missed a stop sign. There was no apology and no probe. Just a few weeks ago on April 7, Hezbollah and armed groups blocked a Vatican aid convoy led by Paolo Borgia while it was trying to bring food to Christian villages in the south. Meanwhile, the IDF is the one actually protecting those same villages and sending in food aid.

The media also ignores things like the firebombing of the Holy Redeemer Church in Jenin in December 2025 where extremists burned the nativity scene and the Christmas tree. They also overlook the systematic land theft in Bethlehem and Beit Jala, where Christian families are targeted by land mafias while the Palestinian Authority looks the other way. People talk about the vandalism of a statue but stay silent about the massacre of actual Christians in places like Damour or Chekka, where hundreds were killed by Palestinian and Hezbollah forces and no one ever apologized.

At the end of the day, Israel has a professional army that investigates its own mistakes. Israel is the only place in the Middle East where the Christian population, now over 180,000, is actually growing with full rights and citizenship. In the West Bank and Gaza, it is basically official policy to discriminate and drive them out. One idiot soldier doing something stupid is a crime in Israel, but for Palestinian terrorists, targeting Christians is the norm.

I feel like a huge part of the "stateless" problem in Judea and Samaria is actually Jordan’s fault and it gets totally ignored.

Most people don't realize that under the original 1922 Mandate, the area of "Palestine" actually included both sides of the Jordan River. Jordan was essentially created as the Arab state of that territory. Then, from 1950 to 1988, Jordan legally annexed Judea and Samaria and gave everyone there full citizenship.

For 38 years, these people were Jordanians. They weren't refugees in their own homes. They had Jordanian passports, they voted in Jordanian elections, and they were represented in the parliament in Amman.

In 1967, Jordan joined other Arab nations in a war to destroy Israel. Israel actually sent a message to King Hussein asking him to stay out of the fighting, but he attacked anyway. He lost the war and lost the territory. But even after losing the land, the people living there remained Jordanian citizens for another 21 years.

Then, in 1988, King Hussein just decided to "disengage." Overnight, he issued a decree saying that every resident in the West Bank was no longer a Jordanian. He stripped millions of people of their only nationality just for a political move.

Imagine if the United States tried to invade Mexico but lost the war and Mexico took over California. In that scenario, would the United States just strip all Californians of their US citizenship? No other country in the world is allowed to just turn off people's nationality because they lost territory or because it is politically convenient.

Jordan basically created a massive stateless population and then washed their hands of it.

Since Jordan is already majority Palestinian and was originally part of the same mandate, why is the solution to take away land from Israel? Why isn't the solution for Jordan to take back their own citizens? To me, the most logical scenario is for these "ex-Jordanian" refugees to be reintegrated into Jordan where they actually belong and have a citizenship history.

Why does Jordan get a pass for making their own people stateless?