The following excerpt is from the October 21, 2014 edition of israeltoday.co.il:
Yaakov Khalloul, a two-year-old Christian child from the Galilee, made history on Monday when he became the first person in Israel’s modern history to be officially registered as an Aramean.
To date, all Christians in Israel have been registered with population authorities as Arabs, given that for most, their mother tongue is Arabic. But last month, outgoing Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar issued a directive permitting local Christians to now be voluntarily registered according to a more ancient ancestry.
“We are not Arabs. We are simply Christians who speak Arabic,” noted Father Gabriel Naddaf in an interview with Israeli media last year. The Nazareth-based priest who has been actively encouraging young Christians to join the Israeli army, noted that Aramean Christians were living in this region long before the Arab Muslim conquest.