Bethlehem, Palestine today ... Christmas Day 2025... "The birthplace of Jesus - Bethlehem, [Palestine] 🇵🇸 - is walled off from the world by Israel, shrunk to less than 15% of its size by land grab & isolated from its twin city Jerusalem. Yet Christmas for Palestinians is a joyous national holiday of hope in justice. Merry Christmas to all." Nour Odeh

Bethlehem, Palestine today

https://x.com/chunguskitten/status/2003867271375249501/photo/2

https://x.com/chunguskitten 

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Nour Odeh #FreePalestine

@nour_odeh

The birthplace of Jesus - Bethlehem, [Palestine]  - is walled off from the world by Israel, shrunk to less than 15% of its size by land grab & isolated from its twin city Jerusalem. Yet Christmas for Palestinians is a joyous national holiday of hope in justice. Merry Christmas to all.

https://x.com/nour_odeh/status/2003854280357249049

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Merry Christmas from Times Square- from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) which was founded in 1980 in response to stereotyping, defamation, and discrimination directed against Americans of Arab origin.

New York Times Square!   https://x.com/adc

 

Merry Christmas from Times Square! From all of us at the @adc family!

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 https://adc.org/ 

In 1980, Senator James George Abourezk founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in response to stereotyping, defamation, and discrimination directed against Americans of Arab origin.

ADC is the largest Arab American grassroots organization in the U.S. We defend civil and human rights, fight discrimination, promote understanding of Arab history and culture, and partner across communities to advance social justice.

Billboard published after Pope Francis’ passing praising his Palestinian solidarity.

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Every person in the U.S., including students, workers, immigrants, and protesters, has the right to speak freely, peacefully assemble, and challenge injustice.

Our Issues

Since 1980, the ADC Legal Department has worked to simultaneously address a consistently heavy caseload and serve as a staunch advocate for the rights of Arab Americans on a number of salient policy issues. See a few of our key issues and information below:

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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.... "This Christmas, our invitation to the global church — and to Western Christians in particular — is to remember where the story began. To remember that Bethlehem is not a myth but a place where people still live. If the Christian world is to honour the meaning of Christmas, it must turn its gaze to Bethlehem — not the imagined one, but the real one, a town whose people today still cry out for justice, dignity and peace." Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac

By Rev Dr Munther Isaac

A Palestinian pastor and theologian.

Published On 24 Dec 2025

 

The sun rises over the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on December 24, 2025 [Yosri Aljamal/Reuters]

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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 the West, while celebrating Christmas, care little about the Christians of Bethlehem. Even worse, many embrace theologies and political attitudes that erase or dismiss our presence entirely in order to support Israel, the empire of today.

In these frameworks, ancient Bethlehem is cherished as a sacred idea, but modern Bethlehem — with its Palestinian Christians suffering and struggling to survive — is an inconvenient reality that needs to be ignored.

This disconnect matters. When Western Christians forget that Bethlehem is real, they disconnect from their spiritual roots. And when they forget that Bethlehem is real, they also forget that the story of Christmas is real.

They forget that it unfolded among a people who lived under empire, who faced displacement, who longed for justice, and who believed that God was not distant but among them.

What Christmas means for Bethlehem

So what does Christmas look like when told from the perspective of the people who still live where it all began — the Palestinian Christians? What meaning does it hold for a tiny community that has preserved its faith for two millennia?

At its heart, Christmas is the story of the solidarity of God.

It is the story of God who does not rule from afar, but is present among the people and takes the side of those on the margins. The incarnation — the belief that God took on flesh — is not a metaphysical abstraction. It is a radical statement about where God chooses to dwell: in vulnerability, in poverty, among the occupied, among those with no power except the power of hope.

In the Bethlehem story, God identifies not with emperors but with those suffering under empire — its victims. God comes not as a warrior but as an infant. God is present not in a palace but in a manger. This is divine solidarity in its most striking form: God joins the most vulnerable part of humanity.

Christmas, then, is the proclamation of a God who confronts the logic of empire.

For Palestinians today, this is not merely theology — it is lived experience. When we read the Christmas story, we recognise our own world: the census that forced Mary and Joseph to travel resembles the permits, checkpoints and bureaucratic controls that shape our daily lives today. The holy family’s flight resonates with the millions of refugees who have fled wars across our region. Herod’s violence echoes in the violence we see around us.

Christmas is a Palestinian story par excellence.

A message to the world

Bethlehem celebrates Christmas for the first time after two years without public festivities. It was painful yet necessary for us to cancel our celebrations; we had no choice.

A genocide was unfolding in Gaza, and as people who still live in the homeland of Christmas, we could not pretend otherwise. We could not celebrate the birth of Jesus while children his age were being pulled dead from the rubble.

Celebrating this season does not mean the war, the genocide, or the structures of apartheid have ended. People are still being killed. We are still besieged.

Instead, our celebration is an act of resilience — a declaration that we are still here, that Bethlehem remains the capital of Christmas, and that the story this town tells must continue.

At a time when Western political discourse increasingly weaponises Christianity as a marker of cultural identity — often excluding the very people among whom Christianity was born — it is vital to return to the roots of this story.

This Christmas, our invitation to the global church — and to Western Christians in particular — is to remember where the story began. To remember that Bethlehem is not a myth but a place where people still live. If the Christian world is to honour the meaning of Christmas, it must turn its gaze to Bethlehem — not the imagined one, but the real one, a town whose people today still cry out for justice, dignity and peace.

To remember Bethlehem is to remember that God stands with the oppressed — and that the followers of Jesus are called to do the same.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

---

• 
  Rev Dr Munther Isaac

  A Palestinian pastor and theologian

  Rev Dr Munther Isaac is a Palestinian pastor and theologian. He pastors Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in Ramallah and is director of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice.

   

  https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/12/24/christmas-is-not-a-western-story-it-is-a-palestinian-one 

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New Israeli barrier will slice through precious West Bank farmland- Palestinians who have worked the ‘breadbasket’ area for generations face being replaced by Israeli settlers... “All these [Palestinian] families have title deeds. They grow grapes, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, bananas, za’atar and olives. This land is very rich and that is the reason it is being taken. The whole aim is to take it over for settlers to use it.” Abdullah Bsharat: The council leader said he had been told by Israeli officers that the road and barrier would together be 50 metres wide, but Palestinian buildings or farmwork would not be allowed along a 200-metre cordon on either side.

Julian Borger and Quique Kierszenbaum in Atouf, West Bank

Sat 13 Dec 2025

THE GUARDIAN 

 

" “It is happening all through the Jordan valley, especially in the north. Israel is pushing forward, and accelerating the ethnic cleansing of this area,” said Dror Etkes, an Israeli activist who is the founder of the Kerem Navot organisation, which monitors Israeli land policy in occupied Palestine." 

The fertile land around the village of Atouf in the West Bank. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

The death knell for the Palestinian village of Atouf, on the western slopes of the Jordan valley, arrived in the form of a trail of paper, a series of eviction notices taped to homes, greenhouses and wells, marking a straight line across the open fields.

The notices, which appeared overnight, informed the local farmers that their land would be confiscated and that they had seven days from the date of their delivery, 4 December, to vacate their properties. A military road and accompanying barrier was to be built by Israel right through the area.

Lawyers for the Atouf village council have lodged an appeal, but long and bitter experience has taught Palestinians here to have low expectations of Israeli courts.

“The Israeli military can do anything they like. They don’t care about the law or anything else,” said Ismael Bsharat, a local farmer.

Similar eviction notices had been delivered on the same day all along an almost 14-mile (22km) strip of Palestinian farmland running north to south through Atouf, tracing out the route of the planned road and fence. And this week it became clear that this abrupt gash across Palestinian land was the first section of a new line of division that would redraw the map of the West Bank.

This week, Israel’s defence ministry made clear that this would mark only the first section of a new 5.5bn-shekel (£1.3bn) barrier that will eventually run 300 miles, from the Golan Heights on the Syrian border to the north all the way down to the Red Sea near Eilat. Labelled “Crimson Thread” by the Israeli military, the barrier will split countless Palestinian communities along its route... READ MORE    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/13/new-israeli-barrier-slice-through-precious-west-bank-farmland

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Our complicity in Gaza has set the stage for a second genocide - in the West Bank ... the back story that utterly undermines Israel's "self-defence" narrative in Gaza by Jonathan Cook

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 https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1956325210505859098

Jonathan Cook

@Jonathan_K_Cook

There is a revealing back story to Israel's so-called E1 Plan, a massive settlement project that includes the building of many thousands of new homes. The plan’s goal is to irreversibly sever the illegally annexed eastern, Palestinian side of Jerusalem from the West Bank, and then break the illegally occupied West Bank into two separate territorial cantons, destroying any hope of future Palestinian statehood.

 

That back story utterly undermines Israel's "self-defence" narrative in Gaza.

 

The media are playing up the role of Bezalel Smotrich, the self-declared fascist minister in Netanyahu's government, in the E1 Plan – as though it somehow reflects his ugly and malign influence. That is pure misdirection.

 

In fact, this plan has been around since the 1990s and was first formulated by the supposedly "peacenik" Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. It was intended as a parallel move to the “peace accords” of that time negotiated in Oslo.

 

The Oslo accords had incited huge divisions in Israeli society because it was assumed that they would cede back to the Palestinians significant pieces of territory Israel was illegally occupying and colonising in the West Bank. Domestic opposition ultimately led to Rabin’s assassination.

 

In Rabin's eyes, E1 overrode those objections. It would protect the then largest of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Maale Adumim, incorporating it into the eastern side of Jerusalem, which Israel had already annexed and was furiously settling with Jews while displacing Palestinian communities there.

 

As an aside, let us note that Rabin, who won the Nobel peace prize along with Yasser Arafat for signing the Oslo accords, was expressly against the creation of a real Palestinian state. He wanted “ an entity which is less than a state” – a vision that appears to have viewed that “entity” as little more than a glorified local authority running schools and collecting the rubbish.

 

Notably, Rabin also drew up plans for a separation wall across the West Bank between Israel and its settlements, on one side, and Palestinian communities on the other. A successor, Ariel Sharon, a hawkish former army general, would be the one to build that wall nearly a decade later, imprisoning Palestinian communities behind steel and concrete fortifications, and in the process stealing vast swaths of their agricultural land. Western capitals, as ever meekly protested to zero effect.

 

After Rabin, every Israeli prime minister, whether they identified with the Zionist left or right, advanced the E1 Plan: Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Sharon, Ehud Olmert.

 

And all helped build the initial infrastructure – the roads, and even a police station – to make E1 become a reality.

 

The plan was formally frozen in 2009 only after the US exerted huge pressure on Israel. Why? Because the realisation of E1 could mean only one thing: a permanent end to the pretence of a two-state solution. Israel's interest in "peacemaking" would be exposed as the hollow charade it always was, even under Rabin.

 

Smotrich has made precisely that point in his usual blunt way, saying E1 is necessary because it will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”. It is the prelude to his ambition, one shared by the rest of the Israeli government and large parts of the public, to formally annex the West Bank.

 

Which is why the Guardian and other media are calling the E1 Plan " hugely controversial" – a predictable and hugely controversial understatement.

 

In fact, E1 is utterly illegal. 

 

It is the precise opposite of what the International Court of Justice – the world's highest court –

ordered last year. Which was for Israel to begin dismantling the settlements, end its system of apartheid rule over Palestinians that has been required to enforce decades of colonisation, and restore all of the territory stolen by the Israeli occupation regime from the Palestinian people.

 

Spinning this the best way he could for Israel, the Guardian’s veteran foreign affairs correspondent Peter Beaumont observed, as if he was some sort of rookie journalist: “It remained unclear on Thursday how much buy-in Smotrich has from Netanyahu and the Trump administration.”

 

“Buy-in”?! As noted, every Israeli prime minister has sought to advance E1 – Netanyahu at least as enthusiastically as the rest of them. There is nothing controversial about the E1 Plan inside Israel.

So how does all of this relate to Gaza?

 

Establishment media, including so-called liberal outlets such as the BBC and Guardian, would like you to digest the news from the West Bank and the news from Gaza as though they are happening in entirely different universes. As though what Israel does to Palestinians in Ramallah is unconnected to what it does to Palestinians in Gaza City.

 

That is patently ridiculous. The two territories, the two occupations, the two systems of apartheid, the two programmes of ethnic cleansing draw on exactly the same Israeli impulse for domination, the same Israeli desire for ethnic cleansing and colonisation, the the same racist Israeli disregard for Palestinian life.

 

Israel’s settler colonial project has been going on for decades. All too obviously, the West Bank and Gaza are only separate territories – disconnected parts of the same Palestinian homeland – because Israel enforced their separation.

 

All Israeli leaders have signed up to the same settler-colonial programme that requires the removal and replacement of the Palestinian people. In Gaza, that removal is being carried out to a tight deadline and has required an overt genocide. In the West Bank, it is – for the time being, at least – being carried out more by stealth, more incrementally, more obliquely.

 

But the intended fate of the people in the West Bank is ultimately no different from the fate of the people in Gaza – unless we in the West stop it by refusing to remain silent about what is happening.

E1 is the last phase in an apartheid system made concrete by Israel in the form of the checkpoints and walls it has built across the West Bank. E1 is that territory’s version of the military cage Israel built around Gaza in the early 1990s, when the E1 Plan was first on the drawing board. It will create the conditions for an intensified blockade of the West Bank, in the same way that the cage around Gaza made possible the siege of Gaza that began in 2007.

 

We know where Gaza’s siege led: to years of different forms of Palestinian revolt, including

non-violent protests at the perimeter of their cage. Ultimately it led to Hamas’ break-out on 7 October 2007, and Israel’s genocidal response.

 

When we continue to do nothing to stop the Gaza genocide, or actively assist it as our governments have been doing for the past two years, Israel feels more emboldened. Our complicity in Gaza is precisely why Israel is dusting off the E1 Plan for the West Bank now.

 

Israel will continue intensifying its oppression there until it creates conditions for open revolt, as it earlier did in Gaza. Israel will seize such a revolt, as it did in Gaza, as the pretext for committing a second genocide – this time in the West Bank.

 

We know what is coming. The question is: Have we learnt anything? This time, will we act?