Christians around the world will celebrate Christmas tomorrow. They will do so with accustomed joyousness and euphoria. But, they would generally be unaware of and/or indifferent to the ongoing genocide and torturous everyday existence of people in Gaza under Israel’s ruthless military tactics.
Comfortable Christians and church bodies around the world function as if Gaza exists in an alien world. They might know partial facts from random glances at TV news or from newspaper columns. But, they are generally unwilling to take tangible steps to use the occasion of Christmas to protest the Israeli occupation and the colonialist-militaristic instruments that enforce it. How can a Palestinian wish his friend, sister, bother, or relative a ‘Merry Christmas’ when Israel is indulging in coldblooded genocide?
Over the last 18 years, 2.3 million people find themselves in an open air prison in Gaza confronting degradation, anguish, dispossession, and political oppression. They remain afraid for their lives not knowing when Israel will bombard their spaces and ruthlessly kill, maim, and mutilate people in thousands with impunity.
The international community generally watches muted – indifferent to their plight.
The number of victims multiplies with each passing day. In Gaza, children, women, elderly, young people who dream of a future when they can work in decent jobs, lie sick and grievously injured by the indiscriminate and persistent bombings on civilian populations. The population as a whole is deliberately deprived of food and medicines by the Israeli blockade in Gaza. In short, Gaza is nothing less than a concentration camp and one that is comparable to the worst in history.
A little boy’s narrative illustrates the shock and awe of living like this. He recites how, one morning, he left his home to go to the sea-shore where rations are distributed to refugees, homeless and the jobless. That morning, as usual, he was up at 5 am on his way to the beach where food was distributed. It was a must-do ritual, for else his family would go hungry for the day. He set out to return home with a skip and smile, assured he had done his duty towards his old grandparents, his parents and siblings. Horror struck him when, on his way back, close to his home, he eye-witnessed the bombing of a set of flats, one of which was his own.
In just one stroke, a few hundred had instantly died, or were too seriously injured to recover. He found to his horror that his entire family was killed. With just one bombing, he was orphaned. He stares into an empty future. Most people in the area, and who survived, were not thinking of food but left wondering about a roof over their heads, burying the dead, and getting on with their lives, bereaved and depressed. Yet at the end of that strike, Israeli Generals were gleefully totalling up their success rates. While Israel finds cynical delight in their lethal battering, the trauma never ceases for the survivors.
Al-Jazeera reports: “There is no safe place to shelter in the Gaza Strip”.
The Palestinian health ministry reports that as deadly Israeli attacks continue about 18,000 Palestinians have been killed and 49,500 wounded in Israeli attacks since October 7, including an estimated escalation of close-to thousand or more every day since that count.
Hamas militants were accused of killing 1,400 Israeli civilians when the fighting broke out on October 7. Truth tellers have revised those figures down to 1,147. The contrast in numbers does not diminish the losses or the tragic consequences on the Israeli side but the way in which revenge is being wreaked on the Gazans bears no comparison. The ignorant assume that the Hamas attack on October 7 was the beginning of the war. Mainstream media, notably in the West, are getting the public to make-believe that October 7 was the original day in the Palestine-Israel conflict. The fact is it happened in the 75th year after May 15, 1948, after Israel invaded Palestine and grabbed land, dispossessed the indigenous populations, imposed wars and key political raids, and kept stealing land after each occasion.
That catastrophe that beset the Palestinian people, is generally referred to as the Nakba. Whereas, the UN Partition agreement awarded the Arab state a territory of 11,100 square kilometres or 42%, the Jewish state received an unjust proportion – a territory of 14,100 square kilometers or 56%. The remaining 2% – comprising the cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the adjoining area – were to become an international zone. It naturally led to wars.
Reclaiming land as a matter of justice is justified even under international law. That is what Hamas set out to do. Today, Israel holds over 78% of what was once the entirety of historic Palestine. Some of those areas are now virtual Bantustans’. As a sealed-off enclave, fragmented from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) and controlled by Israel within its apartheid system, Gaza is a strip of land that can in many respects be likened to a Bantustan, when the indigenous people were shut off from the rest of the population. The Separation Wall has created even more egregious apartheid-like conditions.
Meanwhile, it is a fairly well guarded secret in neo-colonial circles that capturing Gaza is also about massive oil resources that the West wants to grab for its use. Israel plays the role of instrument in return for armaments to crush the Palestinians.
It is not just Gaza that is under severe attack. Several cities and villages in The West Bank are also under constant threat: Jenin, Sheikh Jarrah, Nablus, Bethlehem, and several towns and cities places north of these areas with nightly attacks. The war is broadening and both sides are terrified of potential costs. Israel fears how Hamas is joined by Hezbollah and other resistance groups, even countries opposed to Israel, in the region. Yemen has hindered ships from and to Israel from using waters in the Red Sea costing Israel millions more to transport their goods. The need for a just and lasting peace is urgent because if the war to spread, it could only harm the entire global economy and global security.
A time to celebrate
So, what should Christmas 2023 resemble for Christians and their churches in this context? The churches in Palestine are setting the tone. Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem have been cancelled. The Heads of Churches in The Holy Land have declared that there cannot be celebrations for as long as the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is on. They now have to pick Christ from the rubble of the shattered homes, schools, hospitals, and other buildings that house vital project services. The Churches have asked that people stay in silence and pray for the victims and for peace. This should be a mandate for churches all over the world.
Christians are now passing through the season of Advent. Advent is a season observed in most Christian denominations as a time of expectant waiting and preparation for both the celebration of the Nativity of Christ at Christmas and the return of Christ at the Second Coming. Advent is the time to recall how god embraced the most vulnerable of people – the vulnerable, voiceless, poor, homeless, the marginalised, and the forgotten.
Christmas 2023 is hardly the time to be celebrating when people in the entire Holy Land are suffering severe oppression. A relay of funerals is what one witnesses every day. If Christians anywhere in the world are planning celebrations, they must be conscious of the violence of the war in Gaza. Just as Christ draws us to a journey where we shift from material celebration to those who are trampled over by the rich and powerful, the homeless and uninvited, the bombed and isolated, Christians are called to work for ‘peace on earth’, and, at this moment, notably in Gaza.
Christ himself was born into the world unsolicited and as a source of annoyance to the ruling classes of those times. After finding no room to give birth to Jesus, Joseph and Mary who had traversed miles and miles upon a donkey where Mary could give birth to her baby found them rejected in place after place.
That night in Bethlehem is lived out today every day. This is the world at its worst regardless of where you are – Gaza, West Bank, Ukraine, Dalits and Tribals of India, Manipur in India and to the people in the ‘forever wars’ in Africa as in Congo, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Mali, Burkina Faso, South Sudan, and in Asia – Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and West Papua. There is a colonial agenda behind each of these wars and they are about natural resources.
Under the rubric of the expression ‘festive season’, commerce multiplies. Corporate interests play up Christmas because it attracts consumer interests, which are a kind of opium that prevents working for real peace based on justice.
As the world observes Christmas in 2023, the church must preach hope and justice in the midst of hate, and war. It must rebuff those who practice caste, class, ethnic superiority and, in its place, summon people to practice equity. In the midst of genocide – especially in Gaza, but wherever else there is oppression and cruelty, the church must practice the true meaning of Christmas.
The true meaning of Christmas is found in The American Magazine (1889). I quote: Christmas calls on Christians “to give up one’s very self – to think only of others – how to bring the greatest happiness to others.” That, in turn, demands sacrifice. For Christ’s journey itself was a journey from ‘The manger to the Cross’ – a thorny path in which he confronted the rich, powerful, and cruel. To claim Christmas as a festival of peace, love, and hope, is to engage in costly solidarity with the weak and powerless. Or else, we will be emptying Christmas from its very essence.
May this Christmas season be a time when humankind, as a whole, can aspire to a just world where death and destruction are left behind and an authentic peace be positioned through constant dialogue.
(Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator/human rights activist, and a long-time Palestine solidarity advocate. Courtesy: The Wire.)
