On Wednesday evening, Yisca Harani spent several hours at a local police station. “I got a report about a ‘spitter’,” the Jewish activist said over a patchy phone line from Jerusalem, explaining that a Christian monk had been the latest target of such humiliation. Harani, who heads the Religious Freedom Data Center (RFDC) – an Israeli NGO that documents anti-Christian incidents and help victims report them to authorities – said there are so many cases now that she and her roughly 100 volunteers are kept busy “24/7”. “The most common is spitting,” she said. “But it can also be graffiti on [Christian] signs with crosses on them, vandalism or different forms of harassment.” The perpetrators, she said, belong to a very tiny part of Israel’s population of 10 million – “most Jews would never do this” – and mainly identify as ultra-Orthodox, Shas-style Sephardis or nationalist religious Jews. “They all wear kippah [traditional Jewish skullcaps]. I’ve not seen one secular Jew misbehave toward Christians.” In 2024, her organisation recorded 107 incidents. Last year, the number jumped to 181. “There isn’t a month that goes by without at least ten incidents reported,” she said, but noted that in reality, the numbers are likely much higher. This is in part because victims either do not know how to report, or do not want to “make a fuss” over less serious offences like spitting. Why the spitting? The question of spitting takes us centuries back through the history of Jewish-Christian relations, throughout which Jews, as a minority, suffered immensely at the hands of a Christian majority – from anti-Semitism and persecution to attempts at extermination. In the 11th century, Jews (then being persecuted during the Crusades) were accused of spitting at the cross in an act of religious contempt, Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein explained in a Times of Israel blog post. Some Jewish communities then adopted this gesture to show resistance and defiance. Over time, “the spitting Jew” became a negative stereotype for Jews. When the state of Israel was created in 1948, Jews became a majority group for the first time, with Christians in the minority, and the spitting became even more symbolic. Goshen-Gottstein wrote that the problem is that some insular Jewish communities have not followed modern developments in the Christian world, and do not know that many churches have since revised their theologies, legitimised Judaism, issued apologies and are even fighting anti-Semitism. “The spitters and attackers are, of course, clueless,” Goshen-Gottstein said. Far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir added fuel to the fire in 2023, when he, as Israel’s sitting national security minister, told Army Radio that spitting at Christians was not a crime, and that not everything “justifies an arrest”.