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of Pope John Paul II, ‘Whoever meets Jesus Christ meets Judaism’ (Mainz, 1980).
The French Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger (1926–2007) once wrote that ‘Christ himself, the figure of Christ in its reality, can assume every face of humanity, but that can happen only because he is first of all the individual who was born in Bethlehem of Judea’.4 It is when the historical and biblical particularities of the Jesus story are denied—or downplayed in such a way as to obliterate Judaism from the Christian narrative—that ‘baby Jesus in the rubble’ becomes counterproductive as a Christmas image. We are not suggesting this is the intention of the creators, but in a social media age there are myriad ways for it to be used and misused around the world.
‘Baby Jesus in the rubble’ is also problematic when accompanied by the words of a sermon or a social media post that lack compassion or, worse, express hatred, for Israelis and Jews. Here, the keffiyeh ‘swaddling clothes’ become a politicised symbol of support for Hamas and rejection of the State of Israel. Jesus is presented as identifying with suffering Palestinian children, but not with suffering Israeli or Jewish children attacked, tortured, kidnapped, murdered by Hamas. In effect, this denies God’s justice for and loving embrace of all Israeli and Jewish children at a time when they most need to feel it, for their lives too are deeply traumatised and affected by the conflict in ways overlooked in much of the public discourse about the war in Gaza.
Further, there is an insidious religious problem that lurks when ‘baby Jesus in the rubble’ is weaponised politically. If
4 J.M. Lustiger, Choosing God—Chosen by God (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), 64. Quoted in Achim Buckenmaier, ‘Not Just Any Child, But That Special Child’, Jewish-Christian Relations: Insights and Issues in the Ongoing Jewish-Christian Dialogue, 30 April 2016, accessed at the website of the International Council of Christians and Jews, https://www.jcrelations.net/articles/article/not-just-any- child-but-that-special-child.html.
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