A tale of very different Christmases in two Bethlehems
In the Lehigh Valley this year, Bethlehem enjoyed its usual Christmas festivities. Main Street was filled with out-oftown visitors and seasonal cheer. Christkindlmart enjoyed crowds of eager shoppers. The city center’s Moravian Church offered its traditional, beautiful Christmas eve liturgy.
A very different Christmas took place in the original Bethlehem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. There, the Christian churches of the city and the municipal government canceled Christmas festivities this year. They were lamenting what was happening in Gaza. By the Christmas season, after less than three months of Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’s sudden attack Oct. 7, the ongoing and appalling level of death and destruction that the Israel Defense Forces were inflicting on Gaza was evident.
No wonder the Rev. Munther Isaac, pastor of the distant Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, delivered a different kind of Christmas sermon than those preached in the churches of its namesake city.
Isaac entitled his homily “Christ Under the Rubble” and he preached it next to a putz that featured the infant Jesus, swaddled in a traditional Palestinian keffiyeh, lying amid a pile of rubble.
The sermon, easily available online, is worth reading. It begins with a quick account of why, for Palestinians, this Christmas was a time, not of joy and hope, but of anger and fear: “More than 20,000 killed. Thousands are still under the rubble. Close to 9,000 children killed in the most brutal way. Day after day, 1.9 million displaced. Hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. Gaza as we know it no longer exists.”
This pastor of a Christian church went on to make a remarkable claim. “This is an annihilation,” he said. “This is a genocide.”
A war of annihilation is what Hitler told his generals he wanted them to wage in Russia. Isaac is not alone in wondering if Israel is up to something genocidal in its war on Hamas, a war Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says will go on for many months.
Recently, Masha Gessen, the Russian-born winner of this year’s Hannah Arendt prize and a writer for The New Yorker magazine, compared the situation in the Gaza strip before Oct. 7 to the miserable situation of the Jews in the ghettos of eastern European cities during the Nazi occupation — a mass of humanity, crowded into a restrictive space, imprisoned within guarded walls, unable freely to leave, without adequate nourishment, employment or prospects for a viable future. If not to justify, perhaps these miserable conditions go some way to explaining the savagery of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. What is now taking place in
Gaza, Gessen described in terms borrowed from SS bureaucrats: “the liquidation of the ghetto.”
Gessen is not the only Jewish scholar to describe what the
IDF is engaged in as a genocide. Professor Omer Bartov of Brown University, one of America’s most respected scholars of the Holocaust and of the Eastern front during World War II, recently stated that, in the level of death the IDF is inflicting on the Palestinian people, he perceived a “genocidal intent” — intent being one of the most difficult aspects of the crime of genocide to establish.
In addition to wondering if a fate similar to Gaza’s awaited the occupied West Bank, where illegal settlers and their IDF protectors have killed more than 300 since Oct. 7, Isaac’s sermon expressed outrage at the hypocrisy and racism of the Western world. Its leaders, for all their talk of human rights and international law, have supported the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children by providing Israel with financial aid for its weaponry and diplomatic cover for its military operations.
Isaac’s sermon concluded with a powerful message: “If you are not appalled by what is happening in Gaza, if you are not shaken to your core, there is something wrong with your humanity. And if we, as Christians, are not outraged by the genocide, by the weaponization of the Bible to justify it, there is something wrong with our Christian witness, and we are compromising the credibility of our gospel message.”
The final part of the sermon’s message applies to those for whom the Christmas season holds a spiritual meaning. The first part applies to us all.
Michael G. Baylor is a resident of Bethlehem.