NAZARETH, Israel — Speeding across the Jezreel Valley toward Jerusalem, Sandro Jadon tapped his fingers against the steering wheel in time with the big band jazz blaring from the car speakers.

“He’s driving a jeep, but he ain’t in the army,” singer Brian Setzer crooned. 

Jadon slowed as he passed a bus stop where Israeli soldiers in camo fatigues awaited transport to northern posts. 

In the midst of a conflict on three fronts — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran — Israeli troops congregate on street corners, in cafes and around government buildings.

Many are between 18 and 20 years old, recent draftees of the mandatory military service required of Israeli citizens. 

Jadon, a 41-year-old Christian with dual Israeli and U.S. citizenship, received an exemption from service as a young adult due to his Arab ethnicity. 

These days his identity is murky. He used to say he was of Palestinian heritage.  

But that all changed after the Oct. 7 attacks.

“After Oct. 7, I stopped even using the word Palestinian anymore, just because it was so horrible what was done,” Jadon said, referring to the day Hamas militants killed about 1,200 Israeli citizens and abducted about 250 civilians. “I started using the term ‘they,’ not ‘us,’ because I don’t want to associate myself with them. I’d rather be an Arab Israeli. That’s the passport I hold.

“I was taught as a Christian to love people and love my enemies,” he added. “They not only hate their enemies, but they wish death upon them. I don’t want to be part of that culture that doesn’t represent my Christ.”

But the Nazarene, who runs a touring company, doesn’t fully identify with the country on his passport either. 

“My family is the minority of the minority within a minority,” said Jadon, whose family serves the Nazareth Church of Christ. “So we’re Arabs — that’s a minority because about 80 percent of Israelis are Jewish people, and 20 percent are Arabs. Then we’re Christians … so that’s a minority in the Arab sector. And then we are Church of Christ, which is the smallest church ever.”

About 188,000 people — 1.9 percent of Israel’s population — identify as Christian. The majority are Orthodox or Catholic. Less than 7 percent of Israel’s Arab population list themselves as Christian.

“The Israeli flag doesn’t really represent me because it has the David star, and I’m not Jewish,” Jadon said. “At the same time, the Palestinian flag — for me personally — doesn’t represent me either.”

These days, avoiding conflict around his identity is impossible, he added. 

“If you’re Palestinian or Israeli, someone’s going to be on your side or against you. … The identity crisis is real.”

Future plans destroyed

“He wanna be Americano, Americano, Americano.”

Jadon was first introduced to big band jazz during his time in the U.S., where he lived for 19 years — almost half his life.

He carried that musical passion back to his Middle Eastern homeland.

His father, Maurice, attended Sunset International Bible Institute in Lubbock, Texas, for two years when he was young. 

After high school in Israel, Jadon returned to the U.S. and attended Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn. He later acquired U.S. citizenship and worked in the financial and service industries. In 2018, he moved back to Israel, closer to his family and ancestral home, to work in the tourism industry.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic devastated global travel. Israel imposed travel restrictions on non citizens. 

Tourism halted.

Jadon — who speaks Arabic, English and Hebrew — left tourism to work remotely in an anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing division for a financial services company.

Then tourism slowly began to flourish again when the Israeli government lifted restrictions in 2022. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism reported a 10 percent increase of tourists from the U.S. in mid-2023. 

For the Jadon siblings — Awny, Sandro and Natalie, all who work in tourism — 2024 was supposed to be an incredible year. 

Sandro Jadon founded Gideon Tours, his own destination management company, and financed a new car for touring services. Awny and Natalie Jadon launched Go Wired, a wireless audio tour guide system. 

Their work calendars were full.

Then the Israel-Hamas war began. 

Religious sites, normally heavily trafficked in the summer, stood empty across the country. At the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem — one of the most famous Jewish sites in the region — soldiers, not tourists, gathered in prayer. 

The lack of tourism has cost Sandro Jadon an estimated $100,000, he said. 

He isn’t alone. 

Many — including several of the 20 members of the Nazareth Church of Christ — are struggling financially.

In July, the Israeli government reported a decrease of 68 percent of tourists from the U.S. from the previous year.  

“It’s very minimal,” Sandro Jadon said of the scant number of tourists in the country. “I do see buses. There’s a lot of Filipinos, Malaysians and Nigerians. Those people are fearless, and they’ll come because they probably have it worse in their country, so they don’t mind.”

Natalie Jadon estimated her losses around $60,000. 

“I work for a Catholic tourism company, and they had over 200 groups coming this October, November and December — they all canceled,” Natalie Jadon said. “No one’s having tours; everyone canceled. I went from 24-hour on-call to nothing.

“It’s the financial part that has hit everyone the hardest,” she added. “We invested our money in everything.”

To help, the Lomax Church of Christ in Hohenwald, Tenn. —  nearly 6,500 miles from Nazareth — raised special funds for the Jadon family. 

A longtime supporter of the Nazareth church, the Tennessee congregation has funded the work for more than 50 years, minister Jon Hackett said.

“We put out a letter to the church and on Facebook — we sent it to local churches as well — saying, ‘Because of all the stuff that’s happening, the church in Nazareth and the Jadon family as well have been hurting financially and struggling, and we’d love to take a special contribution to help them,’” Hackett said. “And we raised almost $21,000 that Sunday.”

He said that money was on top of the congregation’s usual contribution, which the church sent to the Middle Eastern ministry as well.

“Most people in the States, when they think about Israel, think about the Holy Lands,” Hackett added. “They think about coming and seeing the sites. It’s a pilgrimage. So that’s what they really focus on. They don’t think about the mission work that can go on here, or needs to go on here.”

A war every few years 

“He’s in the land where anything can happen.”

The Israel-Hamas war is just one of numerous conflicts through which Sandro Jadon and his family have lived. 

In his first memory of war, he was about 7 years old. During the Gulf War in the 1990s, the government warned citizens of Israel about potentially lethal chemical weapon attacks from Iraq.

Jadon’s family sealed their windows and main living area with plastic and tape. 

His pet canary was placed in the largest room so the family could gauge if the air turned toxic. 

At night, he slept with a gas mask. 

But that wasn’t a unique experience living in the Middle East, Jadon said. 

“You never know what you will live through,” he explained. 

“Sometimes I get bitter, and I tell people, ‘If you come to Israel, you’ll see billboards saying God doesn’t live here anymore.’”

The Christian guide checks his phone multiple times daily for alerts these days. 

At night, phone notifications list the rockets being launched at the northern and southern borders of Israel. Occasionally, the alerts warn of drone attacks. 

Located in northern Israel, the Nazareth church is less than 40 miles from the Lebanon border, where Hezbollah militants recently fired at least 30 rockets toward Israel — one of which killed a civilian.

In the south, the Israeli military continues its offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. At least 39,800 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

“That’s a misconception of the war. They think because we don’t have that many casualties, that means we’re the worst people, that Israel is the bad guy,” Jadon said. “What bad guy? Because we’re defending ourselves? No, they’re a good government because they value life for their people and citizens.

“Imagine if Palestine had the Iron Dome as well,” he added, referring to Israel’s missile defense system. “Then you wouldn’t see all these casualties, but you’d see the war continuing on forever.”

Despite the fighting on either side of the country, Sandro Jadon said he feels safe. 

“It’s all on the borders,” he said. 

Yet, his father, Maurice, worries.

The minister for the Nazareth Church of Christ remembers a Hezbollah rocket strike on Nazareth in 2006 that killed two children under the age of 10 and blew out the windows of a church member’s home. 

The father of three said he trusts in God — but still he worries. 

“There’s no missiles coming to Nazareth now,” Maurice Jadon said. “But when you hear the news, when you watch the TV, you start worrying: What will we do? How can we evacuate? Where should we go? At night when I cannot go to sleep, I start thinking, ‘I should take my family to Jerusalem to get away from the north.’”

The church members also vocalize their worries — about family, about safety, about the war — to the Nazarene minister in private. 

“This situation has happened in the past several times, so we know the outcome of it,” Maurice Jadon said. “It will reduce our faith, our zeal, our hope, because … what we face is something that you can see, hear and touch.”

“The conflict has to come to an end,” Maurice Jadon added. “Why should we live every few years with a war?”

This piece is republished with permission from The Christian Chronicle.

Audrey Jackson, a 2021 journalism graduate of Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, is The Christian Chronicle’s managing editor.