Christmas is not a Western story – it is a Palestinian one

Christmas is not a Western story - it is a Palestinian one Christmas is a story of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in its path. 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...

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