By Adalberto Santana on January 5, 2024
In the Latin American popular imagination, the Three Wise Men are emblematic figures of children’s dreams, especially in the popular sectors, since they bring the joy of toys in the early morning of January 6. In some Latin American countries such as Puerto Rico, this date is the main holiday of the year. In others, the Three Wise Men look for gifts in the popular market to give immense joy to their children with the desired toys or with the resources they have to give this pleasure to the children.
The Three Wise Men and the Palestinian children
The Magi are also in the popular and religious imaginary, the emblematic figures of those characters from the Middle East who traveled on their camels in search of the child Jesus to a portal in Bethlehem. In other words, at the beginning of our era, there in the Great Palestine, where the son of two humble pilgrims was born and persecuted by orders of the king of Judea, Herod. Similar personage, to the now Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had ordered the execution of children under two years of age in order to disappear the envoy of God. Today Netanyahu does it by murdering more than 23,000 Palestinians, 70 percent of whom are children and women, with his bombing of the Gaza Strip.
According to the Gospel of Matthew, those Wise Men from the East went to Bethlehem to pay tribute and homage to the son of Mary and the humble carpenter Joseph, to give him gifts as a symbolic wealth: gold, frankincense and myrrh.
This symbolic tradition is rooted in the feelings of the Latin American people, especially in the most humble to give the children of our America gifts that humbly bring them every January 6: Melchior, Gaspar and Balthazar. Characters that in this popular imaginary travel on their camels coming from different kingdoms of the Middle East and that by the color of their complexion symbolize three ethnic-cultural groups. Balthazar represents the African communities, Gaspar the Asians and Melchior the Europeans. They are characters of that cultural diversity that has taken root in the collective imagination of the Hispanic-American popular sectors.
At present, Palestinian children are suffering the greatest atrocities of Israeli Zionism. The new Herods are devastating the Gazan communities and their counterinsurgent premise is to expel the people of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank from the greater Palestine. They seek in their strategy to turn Palestinian children, women and men into the new pilgrims of the 21st century. Multiple testimonies give an account of the atrocities of Israeli Zionism:
“The Israeli army has detained hundreds of Palestinians across the northern Gaza Strip, separating families and forcing men to strip down to their underwear and then loading them aboard trucks and transferring them to a detention camp located on the beach, where they spent hours – and in some cases days – exposed to hunger and cold, human rights advocates, family members and some of the released prisoners themselves reported. Palestinians detained in the devastated town of Beit Lahia, in the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya, and in Gaza City neighborhoods, said they were tied up, blindfolded and piled into the back of trucks. Some said they were transported practically naked and with little water to the detention camp, located in an unknown location” (El Financiero, 17/Dec./23).
The best hope is that in the harsh reality of our times, the Magi will arrive this January 6, 2024, and will bring the Palestinian people the desired peace in the face of the atrocities generated by the Israeli Zionist war. May the Palestinians not become the new pilgrims who, like Mary and Joseph, will have to flee to Egypt to escape the new Herods that today have incarnated in Benjamin Netanyahu. Undoubtedly, that would be the best gift of the Magi that the people who oppose the war of extermination and genocide that is being sown in Gaza, with the blood of the Palestinian people, are clamoring for in various parts of the world.
Adalberto Santana lives in Mexico City, he holds a PhD in Latin American Studies and is a tenured researcher at the Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CIALC) at UNAM.
Source: Telesur, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English