Palestinian

Every December, much of the Christian world enters a familiar cycle of celebration: carols, lights, decorated trees, consumer frenzy and the warm imagery of a snowy night. In the United States and Europe, public discourse often speaks of “Western Christian values”, or even the vague notion of “Judeo-Christian civilisation”. These phrases have become so common that many assume, almost automatically, that Christianity is inherently a Western religion — an expression of European culture, history and identity.

It is not.

Christianity is, and has always been, a West Asian / Middle Eastern religion. Its geography, culture, worldview and founding stories are rooted in this land — among peoples, languages and social structures that look far more like those in today’s Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan than anything imagined in Europe. Even Judaism, invoked in the term “Judeo-Christian values”, is itself a thoroughly Middle Eastern phenomenon. The West received Christianity — it certainly did not give birth to it.

And perhaps nothing reveals the distance between Christianity’s origins and its contemporary Western expression more starkly than Christmas — the birth story of a Palestinian Jew, a child of this land who was born long before modern borders and identities emerged.

What the West made of Christmas

In the West, Christmas is a cultural marketplace. It is commercialised, romanticised and wrapped in layers of sentimentality. Lavish gift-giving overshadows any concern for the poor. The season has become a performance of abundance, nostalgia, and consumerism — a holiday stripped of its theological and moral core.

Even the familiar lines of the Christmas song Silent Night obscure the true nature of the story: Jesus was not born into serenity but into upheaval.

He was born under military occupation, to a family displaced by an imperial decree, in a region living under the shadow of violence. The holy family were forced to flee as refugees because the infants of Bethlehem, according to the Gospel narrative, were massacred by a fearful tyrant determined to preserve his reign. Sound familiar?

Indeed, Christmas is a story of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in its path.

Bethlehem: Imagination vs reality

For many in the West, Bethlehem – the birthplace of Jesus – is a place of imagination — a postcard from antiquity, frozen in time. The “little town” is remembered as a quaint village from scripture rather than a living, breathing city with actual people, with a distinct history and culture.

Bethlehem today is surrounded by walls and checkpoints built by an occupier. Its residents live under a system of apartheid and fragmentation. Many feel cut off, not only from Jerusalem – which the occupier does not allow them to visit – but also from the global Christian imagination that venerates Bethlehem’s past while often ignoring its present.

This sentiment also explains why so many in the West, while celebrating Christmas, care little about the Christians of Bethlehem. Even worse, many embrace theologies and political attitudes that erase or dismiss our presence entirely in order to support Israel, the empire of today.

In these frameworks, ancient Bethlehem is cherished as a sacred idea, but modern Bethlehem — with its Palestinian Christians suffering and struggling to survive — is an inconvenient reality that needs to be ignored.

This disconnect matters. When Western Christians forget that Bethlehem is real, they disconnect from their spiritual roots. And when they forget that Bethlehem is real, they also forget that the story of Christmas is real.

They forget that it unfolded among a people who lived under empire, who faced displacement, who longed for justice, and who believed that God was not distant but among them.

What Christmas means for Bethlehem

So what does Christmas look like when told from the perspective of the people who still live where it all began — the Palestinian Christians? What meaning does it hold for a tiny community that has preserved its faith for two millennia?

At its heart, Christmas is the story of the solidarity of God.

It is the story of God who does not rule from afar, but is present among the people and takes the side of those on the margins. The incarnation — the belief that God took on flesh — is not a metaphysical abstraction. It is a radical statement about where God chooses to dwell: in vulnerability, in poverty, among the occupied, among those with no power except the power of hope.

In the Bethlehem story, God identifies not with emperors but with those suffering under empire — its victims. God comes not as a warrior but as an infant. God is present not in a palace but in a manger. This is divine solidarity in its most striking form: God joins the most vulnerable part of humanity.

Christmas, then, is the proclamation of a God who confronts the logic of empire.

For Palestinians today, this is not merely theology — it is lived experience. When we read the Christmas story, we recognise our own world: the census that forced Mary and Joseph to travel resembles the permits, checkpoints and bureaucratic controls that shape our daily lives today. The holy family’s flight resonates with the millions of refugees who have fled wars across our region. Herod’s violence echoes in the violence we see around us.

Christmas is a Palestinian story par excellence.

A message to the world

Bethlehem celebrates Christmas for the first time after two years without public festivities. It was painful yet necessary for us to cancel our celebrations; we had no choice.

A genocide was unfolding in Gaza, and as people who still live in the homeland of Christmas, we could not pretend otherwise. We could not celebrate the birth of Jesus while children his age were being pulled dead from the rubble.

Celebrating this season does not mean the war, the genocide, or the structures of apartheid have ended. People are still being killed. We are still besieged.

Instead, our celebration is an act of resilience — a declaration that we are still here, that Bethlehem remains the capital of Christmas, and that the story this town tells must continue.

At a time when Western political discourse increasingly weaponises Christianity as a marker of cultural identity — often excluding the very people among whom Christianity was born — it is vital to return to the roots of this story.

This Christmas, our invitation to the global church — and to Western Christians in particular — is to remember where the story began. To remember that Bethlehem is not a myth but a place where people still live. If the Christian world is to honour the meaning of Christmas, it must turn its gaze to Bethlehem — not the imagined one, but the real one, a town whose people today still cry out for justice, dignity and peace.

To remember Bethlehem is to remember that God stands with the oppressed — and that the followers of Jesus are called to do the same.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

One more Palestinian killed by Israeli army in Gaza while two Palestinians, including a child, are shot dead in occupied West Bank.

Red ribbons and Palestinian flags were seen in London at a vigil calling for the release of thousands of Palestinians being held without charge in Israeli prisons. The vigil focused on Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who’s been held for nearly one year. Al Jazeera’s Milena Veselinovic was there.

Winter cold ‘becomes lethal’ as Israel restricts entry of tents, blankets and other shelter supplies to ravaged enclave.

A Palestinian infant has frozen to death in the Gaza Strip, local authorities say, as Israel continues to restrict the entry of shelter supplies and other humanitarian aid to the enclave despite the harsh winter conditions there.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Tuesday that the two-week-old baby, Mohammed Khalil Abu al-Khair, died a day earlier after seeking treatment for severe hypothermia, brought on by the extreme cold gripping Gaza.

Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum noted that the child’s death comes as basic protections in Gaza have been “systematically dismantled” due to Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the territory.

“Families are living in tents on wet ground without heating, electricity or sufficient clothing,” Abu Azzoum said. “When food, fuel, shelter and aid are banned, cold absolutely becomes lethal.”

Israel’s two-year war has decimated more than 80 percent of the structures across Gaza, forcing hundreds of thousands of families to take refuge in flimsy tents or overcrowded makeshift shelters.

A huge storm that recently hit the Strip killed at least 11 people as torrential rains and fierce winds flooded tents and caused damaged buildings to collapse.

“We try to dry the children’s clothes over the fire,” Umm Mohammed Assaliya, a displaced Palestinian mother, told Al Jazeera from Gaza City.

“There are no spare clothes for them. I am exhausted. The tent we were given cannot withstand winter conditions. We need blankets,” she said.

Humanitarian groups have urged Israel to allow unimpeded deliveries of aid to Gaza.

But the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, which the UN says is best suited to distribute supplies in the territory, says the Israeli government has blocked it from bringing aid directly into Gaza.

“People have reportedly died due to the collapse of damaged buildings where families were sheltering. Children have reportedly died from exposure to the cold,” UNRWA said in a social media post on Tuesday.

“This must stop. Aid must be allowed in at scale, now.”

Hamas slams Israeli ceasefire violations

Meanwhile, Hamas has condemned Israel for its repeated violations of a ceasefire deal that came into effect in October.

At least 393 Palestinians have been killed and 1,074 others wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since the first full day of the ceasefire on October 11, according to the latest figures from the enclave’s Health Ministry.

The Israeli military also killed a senior Hamas leader, Raed Saad, in a targeted attack on a vehicle in western Gaza City on Saturday, further straining the tenuous truce.

On Tuesday, Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad accused Israel of “manipulating” the text of the US-brokered agreement.

“We want to make it absolutely clear: the ceasefire agreement is straightforward, detailed, and unambiguous. However, it’s evident that the Israeli occupation has distorted the text, manipulating and violating every single article,” Hamad said.

“Since day one, Hamas has fully abided by the agreement and honoured its commitments. In contrast, Israel has deliberately committed several systematic and preplanned breaches.”

A new wave of Israeli policies is changing the reality and boundaries on the ground in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli government has approved the formalisation of 19 so-called settlement outposts as independent settlements in the occupied West Bank. This is the third wave of such formalisations this year by the government, which considers settlement expansion and annexation a top priority. During an earlier ceremony of formalisation, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “We are advancing de facto sovereignty on the ground to prevent any possibility of establishing an Arab state in [the West Bank].”

Settlement outposts, which are illegal under international law, are set up by a small group of settlers without prior government authorisation. This does not mean that the settlers, who are often more ideological and violent, do not enjoy government protection. Israeli human rights organisations say that settlers in these so-called outposts enjoy protection, electricity and other services from the Israeli army. The formalisation opens the door to additional government funds, infrastructure and expansion.

Many of the settlement outposts formalised in this latest decision are concentrated in the northeastern part of the West Bank, an area that traditionally has had very little settlement activity. They also include the formalisation of two outposts evacuated in 2005 by the government of Israeli then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

While these government decisions may seem bureaucratic, they are in fact strategic in nature. They support the more ideological and often more violent settlers entrenching their presence and taking over yet more Palestinian land, and becoming more brazen in their attacks against Palestinians, which are unprecedented in scope and effect.

The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem estimates that settler attacks against Palestinians have forcibly displaced 44 communities across the West Bank in the past two years. These arson attacks, vandalism, physical assault and deadly shootings are done under the protection of Israeli soldiers. During these settler attacks, 34 Palestinians were killed, including three children. None of the perpetrators has been brought to justice. In fact, policing of these groups has dropped under the direction of Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is a settler himself.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently sounded the alarm about Israel’s record-breaking expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank and the unprecedented levels of state-backed settler violence. In a briefing to the UN Security Council, Guterres reminded states that all settlements are illegal under international law. He also warned that they erode Palestinian rights recognised under this law, including to a state of their own.

In September, United States President Donald Trump said he “will not allow” Israel to annex the West Bank, without offering details of what actions he would take to prevent such a move.

But Israel is undeterred. The government continues to pursue its agenda of land grab, territorial expansion and annexation by a myriad of measures that fragment, dispossess and isolate Palestinians in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and continues its genocidal violence in Gaza.

More than 32,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from their homes in three refugee camps in the occupied West Bank for nearly a year. The Israeli army continues to occupy Nur Shams, Tulkarem and Jenin refugee camps and ban residents from returning. Meanwhile, Israeli forces have demolished and damaged 1,460 buildings in those camps, according to a preliminary UN estimate. This huge, destructive campaign has changed the geography of the camps and plunged more families into economic and social despair.

This is the state hundreds of thousands of Palestinians across the West Bank find themselves in because of Israeli restrictions, home demolitions and land grabs. The Israeli army has set up close to 1,000 gates across the West Bank, turning communities into open-air prisons. This has a direct and devastating effect on the social fabric, economy and vitality of these communities, which live on land that is grabbed from under them to execute the expansion of illegal settlements, roads and so-called buffer zones around them.

According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, Israeli practices and policies over the past two years have cost the Palestinian people 69 years of development. The organisation recently reported that the Palestinian gross domestic product (GDP) has shrunk to 2010 levels. This is visible most starkly in Gaza, but it is palpable in the West Bank as well.

The results of these policies and this reality are Palestinians leaving their homes and Israel expanding. During the summer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a local news station he was on a “historic and spiritual mission”, in reference to the vision of the Greater Israel that he said he was “very” attached to.