A local restaurant owner agrees. "We are the same here, we're born in the same place, we go to the same schools. The army is OK for me. If you live here, you must be like everyone else. I think Arab leaders should demand that Arabs do military service in Israel, because it will embarrass the Israeli government, as they don't consider us equal citizens. Even those who do go into the army don't end up in the air force or intelligence. We want this army to be with us, not against us. But the Arab leadership is very divided."

Others take a more radical approach. In June, a demonstration against the IDF draft took place in the Galilee village of Sakhnin. Protestors publicly tore up IDF draft invitations after Israel, for the first time in its history, sent voluntary draft notices to thousands of young Arab Christians. Those taking part in the rally called upon local Arab leaders to ostracise anybody who enlists in the IDF.

The one political factor unifying the Christians of all stripes in Israel, however, is the demand to return to the villages they were forced to leave in 1948 after Israel's war of independence.

In the village of Biram, skeletal stone structures of what used to be houses may be overgrown by vegetation, but in every doorway a framed photograph of the pre-1948 owner still hangs. All the local Christian schoolchildren, the locals tell me, know exactly where their families used to live.

The 1,050 Christian inhabitants of Kafr Bir'im and the neighbouring village of Iqrit were asked to leave their homes by the Israeli army in November 1948 while it was clearing the area of enemy forces. Both the army and the residents confirm that the villagers did not resist and left peacefully, having been given an explicit promise that they would be allowed to return once security was established. This was backed up by the High Court, which ruled in 1951 that the villagers should be allowed to return to their houses. But immediately afterwards the area was sealed off as a military security zone, and in 1953 the homes were demolished. Only the church was left standing.

Scores of Israeli politicians, including former prime minister Golda Meir, supported the right of return to the villages, to no avail: it was deemed to set a precedent for  others who had fled their homes in 1948.

Since August 2013, about 200 activists have been taking turns camping out in tents set up in the remaining structures in protest, while the court case over the legality of Israel's action continues. During an unprecedented visit to Israel in May by Cardinal Bechara Rai, head of the Maronite Church in Lebanon, the Kafr Bir'im and Iqrit community delivered a letter written in Arabic, English and, yes, Aramaic. In it, they asked the Cardinal to mediate between them and the Israeli government. "In the letter, we told him that we have good lives here, we live better than any other Christian community in the Middle East," Amir Halloul tells me. "But we want our villages back."