By Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colon

“The Israeli hasbara apparatus — roughly translated as the explanatory structure for the State of Israel — works to perpetuate images of Palestinians as terrorists whose rockets deliberately kill civilians while Israeli airstrikes are conducted with “surgical precision” even if fifty or more Palestinian children are bombed “by mistake.” All of these activities are based on a biblical discourse that gives the settlers the requisite theological rationale. This Israeli settler colonial endeavor has to be seen as the last chapter of the Western settler colonial project, taking place today in the twenty-first century in Palestine. It continues to be serviced and powered by the motherland: the Anglo-Saxon world.” – Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, the Bible.

This is a bitter and grief-stricken Christmastide. It is bathed in the blood of Palestinian children, women, men, elders, and people with disabilities. An even more revanchist form of the 1948 Nakba is being executed — and that is the proper word for it — on Palestinians by the Israeli regime and its military apparatus. Despite the faux hand-wringing noises coming from the Biden administration and the Pentagon, all sensible observers know that this is malign shadow puppet theatrics just in case a miracle happens and the International Criminal Court, going against all its previous history to date, decides to prosecute Israeli and US officials for genocide and war crimes. Let’s hope that miracle emerges. But I would not bet on it.

I find it almost impossible to convey Christmas greetings this year. I write as a minister ordained in a Black LGBTQ led fellowship of believers in a radically open and inclusive Gospel. Not the Gospel of bigotry, hatred, exclusion, and genocide which is at the core of the neo-confederate and ethnonationalist fascist movements in the ascendancy in these lands. We know these people to be the purveyors of unfreedom and political violence which grows daily in the US and throughout the world. They are our enemies. But what of Biden and his ilk? They are not much better since the economic policies that the Clinton Democrats, enacting friendly amendments to 1980s Reaganite policies, elatedly rushed to impose on this country’s working people created the material conditions for Trumpism. Of course, no one in the Democratic elites would confess to their complicity in this turn of events. That would require moral clarity and political courage. Thus, the people who actually own and run this country will stand by and watch Israel commit genocide and see it largely as a public relations problem to be managed in light of the run up to the 2024 national elections. How to manage the optics and messaging around the mass killings and expulsion of thousands of Palestinians are their only concern.

The Nativity stories in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew are just that: tales with salient theological and political message. There is no historical truth to them in the way we think about these things now. The writers of the Gospel had other understandings of how narratives told over time, first in oral form and then codified in texts, communicated truths without necessarily relating factual accounts. They presented truths that the nascent Jesus movement lived by under initially hostile conditions in the Roman empire’s margins. The early Christians knew from their reading of the Jewish tradition and their experiences of state-sponsored persecution that empires, like the US, and its minion states, like Israel, will commit genocide on a grand scale if the oppressed resist their domination using the tools of violence by which they have been subjugated. To follow their Palestinian Jewish teacher meant nonviolence and martyrdom as practice and eschatological promise. They also understood that empire’s lethal machinations would be fruitless in the end.

If we look at the situation in Gaza and the West Bank with a sober, albeit world-weary lens, the war crimes enacted by Hamas on October 7^th are not of a comparable scale to what the US has funded and abetted in Israel for the last 50 years in Palestine. In fact, they are the ordinary tools of the weak and oppressed at moments of desperation. Most counterinsurgency experts understand this kind of violence as the inevitable outcome of asymmetric warfare. What happened on October 7^th could have been prevented through multi-party political dialogue and the plain decency of treating Palestinians as equal human beings. Hamas may or may not be destroyed by the Israeli Occupation Forces, but only an ideologue and delusional fool would think that Palestinian resistance, in nonviolent and armed forms, will cease. No people have greeted their oppressors with acquiescence and joy. It did not work for the French and US in Vietnam. Nor did it provide victory for the Soviets in Afghanistan or the British in India despite their arrogance and purported military might. Likewise, nothing that is happening now will make Israelis safer nor will it make people in this country immune to the inevitable blowback. Have we forgotten that there is always a reckoning? And it will come in deuces to Israel, Britain, Western Europe, and the US. The fantasy of being insulated from the vile lethality of genocidal war crimes throughout the world will not hold as our institutions collapse and the planet takes its revenge on the abuse that capitalism has inflicted on ecosystems globally.

The message this Christmas is clear: the Living Word of God in the form of child from an oppressed and occupied people is the target of genocide not its prosecutor. Wherever the forces of Death and Unfreedom ply their military power and genocidal crimes that is where Christians must resist and put our bodies, minds, and souls at the service of disrupting and ultimately destroying that machinery in whatever ways are at our disposal. What is happening in Gaza is apocalyptic in its true sense. As Bill Wylie-Kellerman’s writings have shown us, the apocalypse is the unveiling of the real conditions for the powers and principalities of this world to maintain their deadly grip on exploited and suffering people like our Palestinian siblings. What is happening in Gaza is the exposing of the demonic not in some maudlin Hollywood version sense. Quite the contrary, the demonic is the worship of power, money, and the despoiling of whole peoples, especially its most vulnerable members, in this world. And the Living Word exposes all of it. We, as revolutionary Christians, must enact the consequences of that unveiling in our lives. Anything short is a betrayal of the Palestinian people’s right to national liberation and the Gospel itself. Let Christmas be our catalyst to build a new sky and earth where the laughter and joy of Palestinian children are the only sounds worth singing about.

Edgar Rivera Colón, PhD, a medical anthropologist, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Medical Education at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. He teaches courses on health justice and the history of racism in medicine in the Narrative Medicine program. Dr. Rivera Colón is also Course Director at Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Certificate of Professional Achievement program where he trains students in qualitative research methods. With his Columbia colleagues, he co-authored the award-winning textbook, The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford University Press). He was a co-facilitator of the People’s CDC through his work at the Free People’s University for Urban Restoration in Orange, New Jersey. His present book project is Love Comes in Knots: Meditations in the American Labyrinth. He hosts a podcast about radical politics and spirituality called Karl Marx Ate My Field Notes. He is an ordained minister in The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries missioned to be a social movement chaplain in Los Angeles and beyond.