The Philos Project: a modern version of a colonial missionary project for the Arab world

The Philos Project is a well-financed outfit that is repackaging a worn-out colonial missionary ideology in a revamped format. With the financial backing of well known pro-Israel donors, the organization purports to “equip a new generation of Western Christians to support … liberty and justice” in the “Near East.” It does this by organizing highly subsidized tours of Israel and some Arab countries; pamphlets, podcasts, and video documentaries; and “networking and advocacy opportunities.” 

It seems targeted to younger people and minorities who are less likely to swallow a straight-up Christian Zionist ideology that is totally oblivious to any kind of “worldly” rights. Similar to some of the more sophisticated figures on the right wing of the American political spectrum, it borrows from civil rights language to advance its agenda. For example, its Facebook page features a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr, attacking antisemitism, next to another quotation from Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations. Danon’s political views are well to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu’s, so much so that an Op-Ed in the Times of Israel said: “It is hard to conceive of a more short-sighted, shameful and damaging appointment than that of [Danny Danon as] UN envoy.”

The perspective of the Philos Project is perfectly illustrated in a recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by Robert Nicholson, the organization’s founder and Executive Director.     

The gist of Nicholson’s Op-Ed is that “Near Eastern Christians” (a Eurocentric term) have not been brought under the so-called Abraham Accords that are allegedly rolling back regional hostilities. So, consistent with his organization’s mission, the leader of the Philos Project makes a bizarre suggestion: that a state actor ought to be enlisted to represent the excluded “Near Eastern Christians” and bring them under the peaceful umbrella of the Accords. Nicholson’s top candidate for this role is (Christian) Greece, with prodding from the most powerful Western (Christian) power, the U.S., pressuring the Near East’s most powerful Muslim state, Saudi Arabia, to assist in this noble endeavor!

It is remarkable how efficiently Nicholson packs his Op-Ed with dangerous fallacies. Here are a few of them:

• He asserts as a matter of fact that the Abraham Accords roll back hostilities in the region. In fact, as a Washington Post editorial clearly stated in September 2020, the Accords’ aims “include the reinforcement of harsh authoritarian rulers; the deepening of U.S. entanglement in a sectarian conflict among Sunni and Shiite regimes; and the marginalization of the issue on which Israel’s future most depends: relations with the Palestinians.” When Morocco was added under the Accords, they also included another dangerous normalization, namely that of Morocco’s illegal occupation of the Western Sahara, in defiance of overwhelming international consensus. The Accords were a boon to Israel, itself an illegal occupier of Palestinian and Syrian land, and the most powerful and belligerent military power in the region.
• Nicholson’s portrays the West as the broker that will protect minorities—especially Christians– from persecution, which he strongly associates with the region’s Sunni Muslim majority. While there is no doubt that the region has suffered from ethnic strife, and that there are strong domestic forces that stoke often brutal ethnic and sectarian violence, the western powers have certainly not played the role of saviors. On the contrary, western powers have historically, directly or indirectly, supported extremist religious groups all over the region. Such support was most visible in the funding and arming of the Mujahideen that were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia also actively supported the dictatorship of Zia al Haq in Pakistan, which used a perverted version Islam to brutally suppress all democratic groups in that country. Iraq’s descent into the abyss and the rise of ISIS happened under U.S. military occupation and was, to a great extent, the result of the U.S. supporting one or more factions against the others, and often shifting its sectarian and tribal alliances. Likewise, in Syria’s civil war, western allies Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, Qatar, as well as Israel have stoked the savage brutality. In all these countries, Christian minorities paid a heavy price (as in Egypt under Sadat’s presidency,) while the western powers largely looked the other way.
• Nicholson refers to the “century long animus between Muslims, the region’s largest group, and Jews, its oldest Abrahamic population,” and to “local Jews, who gained independence in 1948.” In fact, historically, while Muslim and Arab societies have often experienced ethnic and sectarian tensions, these pale in comparison with the “Christian” Inquisition in Spain and other European countries, or the abomination of the Holocaust that German and other European fascists perpetrated, often in the name of Christianity. Jewish and Christian minorities historically fared far better under Muslim rule than the Jews did in most of Christian Europe. Furthermore, the creation of Israel as an independent state in 1948 was decidedly not led by “local Jews.” Zionist leaders were Europeans who, at every turn, sought or actually received vital support from colonial and imperial western powers. And they succeeded in creating their state at the expense of the majority Palestinian population that was driven out of its homeland. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is no longer an exclusively “Palestinian narrative,” but is almost universally recognized, including by Israel’s New Historians.

It is absolutely true that Christians have been vulnerable and – in many cases—subjected to terrible violence in many places in the Arab World, but many of them (including these authors) place a great deal of the blame on western powers for often using religious extremists directly or through  alliances with regional allies. Israeli support for the fascist “Christian” Phalange in Lebanon is a case in point, and Saudi support for so-called “Sunni” extremists in Iraq and Syria is another. 

There are very likely some people involved with the Philos Project who are genuinely well-meaning, but they are being misled. As Arab Christians, we say to the Philos Project that we refuse to be swayed by an ideology that seeks to separate us from our Muslim brothers and sisters. The severe crises in the Arab World, while they often manifest in sectarian forms, are political and economic in origins. The roots of the crises are a complex mix of the legacy of colonial “divide-and-rule” policies and current geopolitical alliances, as well as domestic factors. The best that the western powers can do is to stop their militarization of the region and their support for dictatorial Arab regimes and for the apartheid Israeli state.

Rev. Alex Awad and Dr. Maher Massis are Co-Chairs of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace.