By Frei Betto on December 25, 2023
Nativity set up this Christmas in a church in Bethlehem. photo: EFE
This Christmas Jesus is born in Gaza. Not in a manger, but among the rubble of what is left of the homes of its inhabitants.
He is not born surrounded by animals, but by detonated bombs, Tavor Tar rifle bullets fired against the civilian population (950 shots per minute), grenades and lethal gases. And the murderous flights of F-35 fighters.
Jesus is born and ignores that his parents, who intended to take refuge in Egypt, were hit by a deadly rain of bunker buster bombs dropped by Israeli troops.
Now it is not King Herod who puts hundreds of children to the sword. It is the Zionist government of Netanyahu, in its lust for revenge and extermination of those it considers human animals, as declared by Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant.
Jesus and his parents found no shelter in Bethlehem. They had to stay in a manger. Like them, Palestinian families were summarily expelled from their homes to make room for Zionist settlers who do not recognize the right of the Palestinian nation to create a legitimate state. Displaced, these thousands of families found themselves confined to the narrow borders of Gaza and the West Bank, controlled by Israeli troops as if they were subhuman, surviving in conditions of an open-air concentration camp.
Jesus is born today without the magi coming to give him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. What they have given him now are 12,000 tons of bombs since October 7 (33 tons of explosives per square kilometer), which is equivalent to an atomic bomb.
There is no choir of angels or songs of glory to God, but the shrill sound of alarm sirens and the terrifying whistle of shells fired from the deadly cannons of Merkava tanks.
Jesus was born under the seal of discrimination because he was Palestinian, because he was the bastard son of a Nazarene couple (so much so that Joseph wanted to abandon Mary when he knew she was pregnant), because he was homeless, because his family occupied the land of a farm in Bethlehem, because they considered him a blasphemer and usurper of the title of Son of God.
Once again Jesus is rejected in his own land. If his fellow countrymen are prevented from creating their State, any self-defense action they undertake will be labeled as terrorist. A label that the mainstream media never used when Menachem Begin, on July 22, 1946, blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and killed 91 people. Nor when more than 200,000 people, all innocent, were cruelly murdered in the greatest terrorist attack of all time: the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. government on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, Hamas transgressed the rules of just war by kidnapping more than 200 people, most of them civilians. But who protests against the administrative detentions carried out by the Israeli government, which is holding nearly 5,000 people in prison without formal charges?
Jesus is born in Gaza and now they can no longer kill him, because he will resurrect in every child, in every young person, in every Palestinian citizen aware that the land of the vineyards and olive trees keeps in its soil the ashes of his most ancient ancestors.
Frei Betto is a famed Brazilian liberation theologian and the author of 60 books. He is also an advisor to social movements including the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST).
Source: Cubadebate translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English