Bethlehem Church of the Nativity priest denied visa to speak at US event

Father Issa Thaljieh, the Palestinian parish priest at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, has been denied a US visa to speak alongside American clergy next week on the gravity of Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian villages. "Our government denied him a visa for 'security reasons'. A parish priest from Bethlehem, treated as a threat. That should worry all of us, because it means the people living through this are being kept from telling us about it," Laila Mokhiber, a volunteer with Orthodox Christians for Palestine (OCP), told Middle East Eye on Thursday. MEE has reached out to the State Department. Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant leaders are set to gather at the United Methodist Building near the US Capitol on Monday to demand that Congress hold accountable both settlers and the Israeli military, and also curb US weapons transfers to Israel. "Pressure in Congress is building. In September, 46 Democratic senators and Republican Rand Paul voted for Senator Chris Van Hollen’s measure demanding a State Department report on Israeli abuses in the West Bank, including the killings of nine Americans there since 2022," OCP, which is one of the organisers, said in a press release. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters The gathering also comes two weeks after Democrats won a landslide victory in the US midterm elections, taking both chambers of Congress and a slew of state legislatures, vowing to condition aid to Israel and stop taking campaign funds from the pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. Honey Thaljieh, Father Issa's sister, is now set to speak on his behalf, given her US visa was approved, MEE was told on Thursday. “My brother could not enter America to tell you what is happening in Bethlehem. But you cannot deny a visa to a truth. You cannot silence a people by keeping one priest outside the room," Thaljieh said in the press release. "I will stand in Washington, DC, not only as his sister, but as a daughter of Bethlehem, carrying the voices of families determined to remain on the land where their roots run deeper than walls, checkpoints, and politics. We are not asking for pity. We are asking for justice, dignity, and the right to stay in our homes." Monday's event will feature prominent speakers Reverend Mitri Raheb, the Palestinian Lutheran pastor and founder of Dar al-Kalima University, and Mother Agapia, the Greek Orthodox nun whose appearance on Tucker Carlson's podcast last year marked a turning point in the narrative on Palestine-Israel for the American right. The event will also include a reading of names from the Gaza Children's Shroud, a 120-yard cloth bearing the handwritten names of more than 20,000 children killed by Israel in Gaza in its military assault on the enclave. Over 74,500 have been killed in total. The shroud can be viewed at multiple venues in the greater capital region, including at the Islamic Center of Maryland on 15 November, when Janazat-ul-Ghaib, or funeral prayer for the absent, will be carried out in congregation for the more than 22,000 children killed by Israel, in what the United Nations and Holocaust scholars have deemed a genocide. Christian Zionism Munther Isaac, the outspoken leader of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, was also denied a US visa for a Christian convention that took place in Atlanta, Georgia, last week. The US State Department does not typically provide reasons for visa denials, nor is it obligated to do so. But Isaac had visited the US several times before, including in September 2025, some eight months into the Trump administration's tenure. The Church at the Crossroads conference, Isaac said in a press release from his organisation, the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice (BIPJ), "is an invitation to American evangelicals to meet Palestinian Christians, and to reckon with the ways their theology harms Palestinians on the ground". BIPJ is a Palestinian Christian-led ministry that is affiliated with Bethlehem Bible College, a leading evangelical seminary in the Arab world. 'Detained and interrogated': Israel blocks British MPs from entering occupied West Bank to meet Palestinians Read More » More than 500 people attended Church at the Crossroads this year, similar to last year's inaugural event. “The way of empire claims that God is on our side, as if [they] alone have exclusive access and rights to God,” Isaac told the crowd then. “Do you know what the biggest problem with Christian Zionism is? You cannot find Jesus in it.” The Trump administration's current US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is an avowed Christian Zionist, as are many of the backers of The Heritage Foundation - a conservative think tank whose Project 2025 and Project Esther playbooks lay out the necessity of cracking down on criticism of Israel. They have come to define Trump's policy agenda. But the majority of voters in the US now see things differently, and Church at the Crossroads has sought to capitalise on the momentum. "Mirroring the discontent demonstrated in the midterm elections, many American evangelicals are no longer satisfied with the answers provided by faith leaders whose stances only take into account a prevailing one-sided narrative," the BIPJ press release said. "Instead, many are asking fraught questions about Israel, Palestine, and their relationship to these places as Christians, and shifting sentiment among younger believers continues to reshape the conversation."