- Oct 17, 2011
- 34,006
- 37,425
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Atheist
- Marital Status
- Legal Union (Other)
Why Christmas is canceled in Bethlehem
Palestinian Christian leaders across denominations in the West Bank city decided last week that they will forgo all festivities this year as a mark of solidarity with their brethren in Gaza. There will be no public celebrations, no twinkling Christmas lights and no decorated tree in Manger Square — not as long, they say, as a state of war reigns over the embattled Gaza Strip, and the majority of its residents cope with Israeli bombardments, the devastation of their homes and a spiraling humanitarian crisis.“This is madness,” Munther Isaac, pastor of Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, told me. “This has become a genocide with 1.7 million people displaced.”
On Tuesday afternoon, the delegation [of Palestinian Christian leaders] went to the White House and delivered a letter [supporting a full-scale cease-fire] for President Biden signed by the leaders of the Christian community in Bethlehem, including Isaac’s Protestant denomination and his Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic counterparts.
There are roughly fewer than 1,000 Christians in Gaza, who have lived there without much problem despite the de facto takeover of the territory in 2007 by Hamas. But Israeli airstrikes destroyed or damaged almost all the community’s homes in Gaza City while also hitting Gaza’s oldest active church, where some were sheltering. “The vast majority of the Christian community in Gaza are now homeless,” Isaac said.
The delegation’s members condemned Hamas’s actions and deplored its killing of innocent civilians and abduction of hostages. But “[Y]ou cannot just ... give a green light for Israel to do what it’s doing right now, which goes way beyond, which is a revenge campaign.”
Jack Sara, president of Bethlehem Bible College, pointed to how the plight of Palestinian Christians doesn’t seem to be heard by many U.S. evangelicals, who see in muscular Jewish supremacy over the Holy Land a pathway for their own messianic vision.