Page 18 - North Star 2024

their homes due to Israeli air strikes on residential areas over the past 13 days, constitutes a war crime that cannot be ignored.” The Reverend Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Lutheran minister in Bethlehem, directly spoke out against the wholesale slaughtering of Christians and Muslims alike in Gaza: “To our European friends, I never, ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again. We are not white, I guess-- it does not apply to us according to your own logic.” (The IDF faced zero accountability, but that should go without saying.)
The attacks on Gaza have so severely endangered the already small Christian population that the political magazine The Nation published the headline, “Will This Be the Last Christmas for Gaza’s Christian Communities?” The essay reads, “Gaza has some of the world’s oldest Christian communities, yet Palestinian Christians say Israeli strikes put them ‘under threat of extinction.’”
Just like Muslim Palestinians, Christians in Gaza have faced the nightmarish horrors of the genocidal campaign in the region, with the added abuse of being deliberately erased from the narrative by their attackers. And just like the Muslim community, the Christians of Palestine are leaving a legacy of fearless resilience as they continue to congregate, pray, and practice their faith while the bombs drop around them. In a similar way as Ramadan, Christian religious observances have also taken on a special meaning and political significance during these times.
Christmas 2023 in Gaza exemplified this. Palestinian Christian Ola Musleh wrote in USA Today that “Christian leaders here canceled the celebrations in solidarity with Gaza. We can’t celebrate until our friends and colleagues in Gaza, both Muslim and Christian, are safe and can celebrate Christmas with us.”
Musleh lives in Bethlehem, the historical birthplace of Jesus, and the cancellation of Christmas in literally the site of the birth of Christ should underscore the urgency with which Christians in the region are resisting the genocide of their neighbors in Gaza. As described by The New York Times, a Lutheran church in Bethlehem made a special Christmas arrangement in protest of the war: “The baby Jesus — wrapped in a keffiyeh, the black-and-white checkered scarf that has become a badge of Palestinian identity — is lying not in a makeshi cradle of hay and wood. Instead, he lies among the rubble of broken bricks, stones and tiles that represent so much of Gaza’s destruction.”