The Electronic Intifada 24 December 2024
The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is all but empty for a second year running as Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues.
Xinhua News AgencyChristmas songs have been blasting out over the sound systems of shops over here in the UK for weeks now. They alternate between gratingly jolly seasonal jingles and, in slightly more upmarket shops, choirs of angelic voices retelling the Christmas story.
The irony of this whole soundtrack to the festive system, and in particular of those carols proclaiming “no room at the inn,” is mostly lost on the customers thronging to fill their shopping bags with seasonal must-haves.
The truth is there would be plenty of room at the inns of Bethlehem for Mary and Joseph today, the hotels of the town being largely empty, its tourist trade, which was already hit hard by coronavirus, is now wholly decimated by the escalation of Israeli violence in the West Bank and its ongoing massacres in Gaza.
Of course, to even knock at the doors of the hotels of the little town would require the young couple to be able to travel from Nazareth and reach Bethlehem in the first place.
Their route by car or by foot would be considerably more complicated today than covering that same distance by donkey over 2,000 years ago. Military checkpoints, forbidden roads and a 270-mile separation barrier – a combination of concrete walls, military-patrolled roads and barbed wire fences due to reach 440 miles in length once completed and illegal under international law – all block the way.
Not only would their journey there be complicated, they would not be guaranteed return.
In two large waves of forced expulsion and denial of return, Israel – at its establishment in the 1948 Nakba and after its occupation of the rest of historical Palestine in 1967 – ensured that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians could not return to the homes and villages from which they came.
This was most dramatic in 1948, when some two-thirds of the entire Indigenous Palestinian population at the time was forcibly expelled and denied the right of return.
After conducting a census in September 1967, Israel deployed similar measures to complicate or thwart the residency status of the some 270,000 people found to be absent in the immediate aftermath of war, “either because they had fled during the conflict or were abroad for study, work or other reasons.”
Demographic threat
Since then, of course, Israel’s obsession with the “demographic threat” has determined policy over who can and cannot receive permits to stay, whether in occupied territory or Israel.
For two decades now, for instance, Israel has prevented citizens of Palestinian origin from securing residencies for their spouses if these are from occupied territory.
Indeed, Joseph, supposedly from Bethlehem, and Mary of Nazareth would not, under the present regime, have been allowed to live together.
The use of a census to control populations, on the other hand, would have been familiar to the young couple. The Roman-appointed Jewish client king Herod was supposed to have carried out a massacre of first-born sons in order to preempt the prophesized coming of a new king.
ُُThe birth itself would be much more humiliating today than merely being born in a manger. Palestinian women face difficulties far more dehumanizing and morally reprehensible than the full inns with which their ancestor was met.
For years, they have been repeatedly detained at Israeli checkpoints throughout illegally occupied Palestine. Thirteen years ago, The Lancet, a British medical journal, recorded that between 2000 and 2007, 10 percent of pregnant Palestinian women were delayed at checkpoints every year while traveling to give birth in hospital, delays that caused 69 births at checkpoints and the deaths of five mothers and 35 infants.
This, of course, pales with the experience of pregnant women in Gaza over the last 14 months. Not only has Israel killed more women and children in the first year of the assault on Gaza than in any other equivalent time period in a conflict in the past 20 years, but the ruthless inhumanity imposed on pregnant women and infants is particularly acute.
As far back as April, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) reported that most of the 183 women who on average give birth daily in Gaza lack access to trained midwives, doctors or healthcare facilities as a result of Israel’s genocidal violence.
And for an estimated 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women in Gaza as of December last year, anxiety and malnutrition are critical risk factors. “This number,” the IRC notes, “would have risen exponentially since then.”
According to the United Nations Population Fund in October, thousands of pregnant women are on “the verge of famine” and “in famine-like conditions.”
Little town
Bethlehem’s stifled tourist trade might today leave it quiet, but it is far from still, as the lyrics would have it.
Last year, on Christmas Day itself, the birthplace of Jesus was raided by the Israeli army, a regular occurrence that includes the 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity itself.
All this, of course, is a distant reality under the din of the Christmas jingles in shops up and down the UK.
It is even a distant reality in the annual nativity plays performed in primary schools across the country when proud parents help their beloved offspring to learn lines in preparation for their part in the retelling of the story of the coming of Christ.
In the modern-day woke world of inclusion and diversity of representation, schools might resist casting the dark-haired girl in the class as Mary; they might have boys playing angels; they might place girls in crowns as kings. Tea towels will be shoved on heads and secured by a length of cord and there’ll be a thobe dress and a headscarf for Mary who will sit piously on a stool.
But judging by the silence at seasonal events last year, by the deafening silence from most schools and the whole educational establishment throughout Israel’s campaign of genocide, and by the treatment of university students demonstrating against genocide, the irony of the school nativity will at best go unspoken and at worst be deliberately overlooked.
Far more chillingly, the thoughts of the children, their parents and teachers will no doubt be far from the children of Gaza, and indeed all of Palestine, denied so much more than a crib for a bed.
And so it will come to pass in these days that the celebration of the birth of Jesus, “the savior” child, whom we praise for his compassion for “the poor and mean and lowly,” will be exposed unequivocally as a hollow, superficial imitation of the very message it purports to represent.
Amy Abdelnoor’s debut novel, “Ever Land,” which grew from her experiences living in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and under Israeli occupation in Ramallah, is due in 2026. On Twitter/X: @amyabdelnoor.
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