Christmas eve: wishes from Tel Aviv

Dana Mills is chronicling what it means to an Israeli peace activist to live in the aftermath of the 10/7 attacks and the daily presence of no good news of so many hostages and Israel's Gaza war of vengeance. As it happens, she's what Erudite Partner calls "a hemi-semite," the offspring  of a Christian parent who identifies with the tribe of her Jewish parent and claims no religion for herself. (E.P. is a hemi-Semite too.) So Mills knows from Christmas having spent a lot of time around Christians.

She contemplates a very painful Christmas in the accursed "Holy Land". The small tribe of resident Palestinian Christians have called off what is usually their high season at the Biblical sites of the Incarnation.

... This year, I've heard from different Palestinian Christian friends that their communities are treating Christmas differently. The grief for the death toll in Gaza is tremendous, and the feeling of heaviness is everywhere in Palestinian communities. I told someone I know, a practicing Christian, and he said "I can understand why you wouldn't feel like celebrating Christmas". I don't think this captures the extent of the decision to not mark Christmas here, and the reason for that.

... The Christian Palestinian community is smaller than the Muslim one, yet the connection between this land to the sites to which Christians all around the world pray and long has sustained. Flying to Tel Aviv around this time always brought pilgrims and priests of various kinds on my flights (I recall one flight in which around 50 nuns were sitting on the plane and I felt like an extra in The Sound of Music). I always knew that for various people my homeland was "the Holy Land". I used to sign "regards from the not- very- holy-land" when visiting home.

... Yet, the decision to not have grand and open celebrations for Christmas here is a big one. It's not a matter of "not feeling like it". It's protesting on a symbolic plain that constitutes the ontological place in which the narrative of Christmas took place. It's removing the ground, quite literally, from the story of Christmas.

Living abroad added to my complexity of my feelings towards Christmas. I was shocked and appalled by the commercial nature of Christmas; most people around me mainly saw it as a time for shopping and a break from work. Very few people took interest in the holiday's meaning and symbols, and even the music and other cultural artifice around it.

So I'm both sad and also not surprised that the little town of Bethlehem is not on many peoples' minds this year, as they rush for Christmas shopping and overjoy in putting their autoreply on email. And so, even this act of protest, which is really what the Palestinian community has by way of power internationally, is perceived as "not feeling like celebration"; a personal, individualistic act rather than collective dissent. ...

... I wrote yesterday about realizing that I need to engage with social media in order to understand this war, how to campaign against it and how to engage with those who disagree with me around it. I've found recently that the people who upset me the most on social media are those who write hollow statements on everything I post, such as "praying for peace" or some such. Many of whom are also practicing Christians. The reality here is so horrendous that I find it offensive to see people cling on to slogans and words that bring them comfort while looking away from the world in all its gore. Of course, peace is what I-- many people around me--- strive towards, but in order to get even close to that, so much healing, restorative justice, and just a deep space of grief have to be held.

... Don't talk to me about peace on earth before you're willing to look at the pain and grief we're living through here, in your Holy Land. If I can force myself to look at Gaza instagrammers photos of ash clad children running to look for their families, so should a Christian who wants to see peace in any possible way come to this earth.

And so, I felt heavy hearing of the decision not to have big public events for Christmas yet understood it and felt the need to be in solidarity with it, from my bad-atheist-Jewess- half- Christian point of view.

This is a sad Christmas, whether you are interested in what had happened in the "Holy Land" million years ago, or not; take a stern look at what is happening here now, around the corner from the little town of Bethlehem.

My Christmas wish is for a ceasefire to finally be installed and last, for Israel to tend to its injured, dead and grieving, and focus on life not revenge; and Palestinian communities to receive solidarity not only as victims of atrocities but as a people who deserve -- like all of us -- the right to self-determination and cultural and political sovereignty.

My Christmas wish is for us to make the small, important step towards a just peace-- recognizing and acknowledging power disparities as well as the pain held by all communities on this land.

My Christmas wish is that we are able to look at the worlds inhabited around us, and that the world outside of these borders between the river and the sea looks at us and understands we are real people who wish to live, not die, and need solidarity in order to cease this senseless violence.

BETHLEHEM, OCCUPIED WEST BANK - DECEMBER 14, 2023: In Bethlehem, the Lutheran Church decided that its Christmas nativity scene this year would be different by placing the symbolic Baby Jesus in a manger of rubble and destruction to reflect the reality of Palestinian children living and being born today ... Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023. The pastor of the church is a Palestinian Christian theologian.

More from Dana Mills can be found at this link.