By Phalapoem editor, 23/12/2024
As Christmas lights flicker across the world, illuminating trees in cozy living rooms and city squares, another kind of light dominates the skies of Gaza: the searing glare of American bombs. While carolers in the West sing of peace and goodwill, the people of Gaza, many of whom are Christians themselves, huddle in fear, mourning lives lost and futures stolen. It’s a bitter irony that the birthplace of Jesus—himself a Palestinian born under occupation—is now a stage for one of the most brutal and unrelenting sieges in modern history.
Jesus of Nazareth, often sanitized into a Westernized figure, was a man of the land known as Palestine. He lived under Roman occupation, preached liberation for the oppressed, and stood against tyranny—a legacy that should resonate deeply today. Yet, in a grotesque twist, the same Western nations that celebrate his life and message remain complicit in the ongoing Israeli occupation and slaughter of his people.
Consider the stark hypocrisy of governments like the United States and the United Kingdom, which, while decking their halls with messages of peace, funnel billions of dollars in military aid to Israel. These funds are used to perpetuate apartheid, flatten homes, and bomb hospitals—actions that even a first-century Jesus would have railed against. Politicians offer empty platitudes about “de-escalation” while actively fueling the fire, hiding behind the threadbare excuse of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” as though Gaza—a strip of occupied and long-sieged land deprived of basic human rights—is the aggressor in this unbalanced and sick equation.
Meanwhile, the so-called free press dutifully plays its part. Veteran media outlets, bastions of journalistic integrity (or so they claim), downplay the carnage with headlines that sanitize reality. Words like “clashes” are used to describe the bombardment of civilians. The death toll is presented as numbers, stripped of names, stories, and humanity. And when Palestinian voices manage to break through the noise, they are labeled as “extremists,” their grief politicized and their pain dismissed.
But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Western leaders who condemn Hamas with righteous indignation rarely spare a word for the children killed in Israeli airstrikes. Churches that teach the gospel of love turn a blind eye to the suffering of the very people whose land their Savior walked. The silence is deafening, and the complicity is glaring.
In Gaza, Christmas is not a season of joy but a reminder of loss. For the Palestinian Christians who remain, it is a time to mourn not only the absence of loved ones but also the erasure of their existence by a world that would rather not see them. And yet, amidst the rubble, the spirit of resistance endures. Just as Jesus stood firm against the empire of his time, Palestinians refuse to bow under the weight of oppression.
This Christmas, as you hang your stockings and sip your mulled wine, spare a thought for Gaza. Spare a thought for a land where the message of “peace on Earth” is drowned out by the hum of drones and the roar of explosions. Spare a thought for the hypocrisy that allows this to continue, year after year, in the birthplace of the Prince of Peace.
And if your conscience stirs, do something. Speak out. Write to your representatives. Boycott companies complicit in the occupation. Because Christmas isn’t just about celebrating the birth of Jesus—it’s about honoring his legacy of justice, compassion, and resistance to tyranny. And there is no better way to do that than by standing with Palestine.