“Bethlehem is a ghost town,” said Zarzar, who works in the tourism industry, told me in a telephone interview earlier this month. “Normally, Christians and Muslims from across Palestine come here to celebrate Christmas, along with American and European tourists. But they all evacuated when the war started. Since then, we’ve been under Israeli military blockade. We are completely cut off.”

Since Hamas’s attack on October 7, Israel’s military has limited movement for Palestinians across the West Bank, where Bethlehem is located, and conducted daily raids. At last count, 281 Palestinians in the territory have been killed by Israeli forces, and eight have been killed by Israeli settlers. More than 1,000 have fled their homes.

Last month, in response to Israel’s merciless devastation of Gaza, Palestinian church leaders canceled Christmas celebrations. At Bethlehem’s Lutheran church, Pastor Munther Isaac has erected a Nativity scene showing baby Jesus in a destroyed building. “If Jesus was born today, he’d be born as a child in Gaza under the rubble,” he explained in a recent sermon.

https://twitter.com/MuntherIsaac/status/1732822628388217058

Too-Silent Night. How Jesus’s Hometown Is Coping With War at Christmas. Bethlehem is usually brimming with cheer—and tourists—this time of year. But the war in Gaza has turned it into a “ghost town.” by Alex Shams, The New Republic, December 24, 2023

Chris Hedges Report: The Meaning of Christmas

Chris Hedges: In the early 1980s I was in a refugee camp for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. It was a cold, dreary winter afternoon. The peasant farmers and their families, living in filth and mud, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper. That night, they said, they would celebrate the flight of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus to Egypt to escape the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem ordered by Herod. The celebration is known as the Day of the Holy Innocents.

“Why is this such an important day?” I asked.

“It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,” a farmer answered.

I knew the passage from Matthew about the flight to Egypt by heart. I had heard my father, a Presbyterian minister, read it in services every Christmas in the farm town in upstate New York where I grew up. But it took an illiterate farmer, who had fled in fear with his wife and children from the murderous rampages of the Guatemalan army and the death squads, who no doubt counted friends, even relatives, among the dead, a man who had lost everything he owned, to explain it to me.

The story of Christmas—like the story of the crucifixion, in which Jesus is abandoned by his disciples, attacked by the mob, condemned to death by the state, placed on death row and executed—is not written for the oppressors. It is written for the oppressed. And what is quaint and picturesque to those who live in privilege is visceral and empowering to those the world condemns.

Jesus was not a Roman citizen. He lived under Roman occupation. The Romans were white. Jesus was a person of color. And the Romans, who peddled their own version of white supremacy, nailed people of color to crosses. The Romans killed Jesus as an insurrectionist, a revolutionary. They feared the radicalism of the Christian Gospel. And they were right to fear it. The Roman state saw Jesus the way the American state saw Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Then, like now, prophets were killed.

The Chris Hedges Report: The Meaning of Christmas by Chris Hedges, Scheer Post, December 21, 2024

So let’s begin Munther with the Christmas story. Last Christmas, this Christmas, of course, you have created this creche. What is it that you were trying to say through that symbolism?

Munther Isaac: Yeah, actually, when we made it at the church. Some, even our church, were a bit surprised and shocked, because we’re accustomed to think of Christmas as a joyful occasion. But this Sunday we presented this creche, I actually preached and said, this is actually the meaning of Christmas. This represents Christmas more than any other thing, maybe. The idea of Jesus identifying with an occupied community, a community that is oppressed in its pain and suffering. I think many times we forget the actual circumstances in which Jesus was born. We make it a romantic story, forgetting that, in essence, the vocabulary of that story is a refugee family, a tyrant, a massacre, taxation. These are all terminologies that we don’t usually associate with the Christmas story, but to us here in Palestine, they actually make the story, as we read it in the Gospel, very much a Palestinian story, because we can identify with the characters. And so the message to me was clear—if Jesus was born today in our world, he would be born in Gaza under the rubble as a sign of solidarity with the oppressed. Just as Jesus was born 2,000 years ago among an occupied community, a community that is under the yoke of a ruthless empire, in circumstances in which children were massacred. 

The Chris Hedges Report: The Meaning of Christmas by Chris Hedges, Scheer Post, December 21, 2024