In the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Palestinian children are using a small piece of land as a soccer field. The location—against a looming wall that separates Israeli settlers from West Bank Palestinians—is not ideal, but there aren’t many other options; open land here is precious. And even this small patch of normalcy has become an object of contention.
Israeli authorities have ordered its destruction, suggesting the football pitch represents a security risk. A global letter-writing campaign and the intervention of the world football association, FIFA, have so far protected the field from destruction. By February, its fate was still uncertain, a small reminder of how tenuous life and freedom are in the occupied West Bank.
Meanwhile, most of the world’s attention has been focused on the devastation in Gaza, where a fragile ceasefire holds. The Trump administration, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and officials from regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar continue to discuss the fate of Gaza’s people. The people themselves have been largely left out of the discussion.
Somehow, Trump’s scheme to replace the obliterated cities of Gaza with a massive casino and resort complex continues. The only real hindrance appears to be the inconvenient presence of the Palestinians themselves. It’s hard to clear 2 million people out of the way of a construction project.
While that tragedy continues to unfold in Gaza, about 30 miles away in the West Bank, an ongoing campaign of settler violence, facilitated by Israel Defense Forces’ indifference to or active collusion with settlers, is making life even more miserable for Palestinians. Like Gaza’s residents, the people living in the West Bank are an encumbering challenge for the Zionist maximalists managing the Israeli government. Encouraged by the Trump administration’s support, some Israelis dream of a nation that extends far beyond the lands the United Nations first mapped out. Many neighborhood and regional adversaries have been vanquished or otherwise neutralized, and these days, the dream seems tantalizingly close.
Within this context, the fate of a soccer field in Bethlehem has risen to international significance. At play are not only school kids looking to escape the occupation’s grim reality; it also points to the fate of the Palestinians themselves.
These people include what are sometimes called the “living stones,” the indigenous Palestinian population often considered the oldest Christian community in the world, descendants of the earliest Christians. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, has sought to remind the world that Palestinians are Christian as well as Muslim. On January 17, he and the other patriarchs and bishops of Holy Land Christians released a statement warning against Christian Zionism’s accelerating influence. The statement asserted that this ideology, which supports the state of Israel as a biblical imperative, has the power to “mislead the public, sow confusion, and harm the unity of our flock” by pushing a “political agenda which may harm the Christian presence in the Holy Land and the wider Middle East.”
The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, showed little sympathy. He quickly responded that he did not believe “any sect of the Christian faith should claim exclusivity in speaking for Christians worldwide or assume there is only one viewpoint regarding faith in the Holy Land.” The ambassador explained that as an evangelical Christian, he rejects the use of Christian Zionism as a pejorative and wonders how any Christian “would not also be a Zionist.”
He might consider listening to the Christian communities under settler attack in the West Bank or spending time with some kids at a soccer field to see if they change his mind.
This article also appears in the April 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 4, page 41). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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