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.