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Attackers spray-painted anti-Christian graffiti in Hebrew on a Franciscan monastery just outside Jerusalem’s Old City, the church and Israeli police said yesterday, in an apparent “price-tag” hate crime.
Photos on a church website showed blue graffiti scrawled on the monastery’s front door denigrating Jesus and adding the words “price tag”—a euphemism for revenge hate crimes by Israeli extremists.
Israeli police confirmed the incident.
“What took place is that a church on Mount Zion was targeted. On it was written graffiti against Christianity, and ‘price tag,’ and now we’re investigating the incident,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
“It happened during the early hours of the morning,” he added.
“Price tag” is a term given to hate crimes carried out by Israeli extremists, normally targeting Palestinians and Arabs and often involving the torching and vandalism of cars, mosques and olive trees.
But attacks have widened in scope in recent months, and have also targeted the Israeli army, Israeli anti-settlement activists and several churches.
In a statement, the Roman Catholic bishops of the Holy Land expressed their “deep dismay” over the incident.
They added their “concern about the education given to young people in certain schools, where contempt and intolerance are taught” and noted that the “price-tag” language used suggested that Israeli extremists were responsible.
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said that such attacks were the cultural legacy of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War.
“After 45 years of Israeli occupation, a culture of hatred and racism has become mainstream among Israelis,” he said in a statement.
“School textbooks and official statements advocating that Jerusalem should be exclusively Jewish, with total rejection of the Palestinian Christian and Muslim identity of the city, have paved the way for gangs of terrorists to attack Christian and Muslim holy sites,” he added.
Israeli President Shimon Peres said that such actions “go against the morals and values of Judaism and do great harm to the state of Israel.”
“It is forbidden to harm the holy sites of religions and faiths,” he said.