Why has there been a great-and little reported-Christian exodus from the Middle East, with some two million fleeing in the past 20 years alone?

One of the most important aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has been overlooked is the plight of Christians in the Holy Land. Christians in the Palestinian territories have dropped from 15 percent of the Arab population in 1950 to just two percent today. This Christian exodus is a result of many factors, including the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians, the related decline of the economy, but perhaps most significantly, the religious persecution these Christians encounter from their Muslim neighbors.

For Pierre Rehov, life only took on true meaning when he began putting it at risk. He had been a movie producer, a novelist, a journalist and a lawyer. But none of those professions satisfied his searching soul. In moments of deep personal introspection he questioned himself, ?Who and what am I really?? For him, the answer came when he turned on the news on October 6, 2000, and saw the images of the shooting of Mohammed al-Dura, the 12 year-old Palestinian boy, whom Israel was summarily accused of targeting. ?I was in shock,? says Rehov, who rarely watches the pro-Arab French broadcasts. ?In this case, I knew as a producer that there was something very fishy about the images. The angles just weren?t right.?

The day after al-Dura was shot, there was a pro-Palestinian rally in the streets of Paris, where the participants screamed, ?Death to the Jews.? Rehov was reminded of one century ago when the exact same antisemitic scene played itself out on the streets of Paris prompted by the Alfred Dreyfus trial. Rehov?s instincts told him that the death of Mohammed al-Dura was another blood libel against the Jews. ?I knew that I was no Herzl, but I had to do something,? Rehov says.