Last Christmas in Bethlehem

With its Christmas displays cancelled, Bethlehem resident Christy Anastas writes about a bleak future for its Christian Palestinian community.

Christy Anastas

Christy Anastas is a Bethlehem resident. She is a Palestinian advocate for nonviolent ways of mediating a more stable Middle East.

A church gable featuring a cross, a Madonna and angel Christmas decorations.

2017 Christmas decorations on the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem

Jana Humeedat, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Religious minority groups, like Christians, represent about one per cent of the overall Palestinian population. We feel stuck between a rock and a hard place in this conflict. As a consequence of this war, many of us are already planning to emigrate once the opportunity arises. If this happens, Bethlehem will virtually become a non-Christian city. This would be a sad outcome given it was the birthplace of Jesus Christ and that in the early 1900s the Christian population used to be just under 85 per cent. Now Bethlehem's population is approximately five per cent Christian. After this war we fear that these statistics would decrease even more. The main source of income of the city heavily relies on tourism, with almost 70 per cent of Bethlehem’s GDP due to religious pilgrims from all over the world visiting Jesus Christ’s birthplace, especially during Christmas.

This is the first year for decades, when all Christmas festive displays have been cancelled in Bethlehem. This decision taken by Bethlehem municipality and the Palestinian church is a sobering and poignant one and comes with a financial heavy price paid by locals. Such traditions have been kept for decades, even during the second Intifada, so that between 2000 to 2005 a Christmas tree in Manager Square was still displayed each year. Even the Covid-19 pandemic did not stop Bethlehem from decorating the entire city. However, today many Palestinian Christians are not in a festive mood. The Israel-Hamas war is in its second month and has already a higher death toll than during the whole of five years of the second Intifada.

A ceasefire is what Palestinian Christians will be praying for during this Christmas, alongside praying against the perpetual cycles of death, violence, and destruction.

In my opinion it feels fitting to stand in solidarity with those who mourn, inspired by Paul’s letter to the Romans encouraging Christians to “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn”. During such devastating circumstances of the civilians in Gaza, Palestinian Christians are heartbroken at the enormity of lives lost and the desperate conditions experienced especially by children. The desire to celebrate the birth of the most important child in Christianity’s history is dimmed by the death toll of children in Gaza during this war. An ancient biblical proverb offers a powerful depiction of what it would be like for us Christians to celebrate Christmas as usual. It would have felt “like one who takes away a garment on a cold day, or like vinegar poured on a wound, is one who sings songs to a heavy heart.”

However, the announcement of the cancellation issued by the head of Bethlehem municipality, was made exclusively in honour of Palestinian “martyrs”, in Gaza and the West Bank. This disappointing statement distorts the church’s role in the region as a peace builder and the bridge amongst different communities and ethnicities. In fact, it is an utterly missed opportunity for the church to demonstration its ethics and values in the region, especially when confronted with losses of lives across all ethnicities and religions. A more inclusive nuanced statement that could have honoured the suffering of all, could have been worded along the lines of offering tributes to the devastating losses of lives in the Israel-Hamas war since the 7th of October, without any discrimination or prejudice. That old proverb continues to say, “if your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.”

The exclusivity of the statement's approach made by the churches was a lost opportunity to express a more authentic side of Christianity to the world revealed from its birthplace. It could have counteracted the way the church was portrayed in Europe during the Holocaust. It could have been the chance to respond in a less indifferent manner to the plights of the Jewish people in the region, rather than reiterate a similar stance of the European churches during World War II.

A ceasefire is what Palestinian Christians will be praying for during this Christmas, alongside praying against the perpetual cycles of death, violence, and destruction, inspired by what our brothers and sisters in Gaza have conveyed to us in private communication. Christians in Gaza are pleading for peace and stating that as a community, they oppose violence. The zero-sum approach towards this war has made it difficult for us Christians to be true to our faith without being condemned or oppressed for it. When we call for a ceasefire, we are accused of supporting terrorism and denying Israel’s right to self-defence. However, when we want to acknowledge the suffering of the Israeli side during the 7th of October, we are deemed to be traitors. Our objective isn’t to attempt to prevent Israel from defending itself; rather, to suggest that the consequences of inflicting violence and bloodshed in retaliation could reinforce a stronger hold for violence and extremism in the region.

Therefore, most Palestinian Christians do not feel they have the freedom to stand for their beliefs and the churches in the region are not portraying the best paradigm. In my opinion, this is one of the main factors behind the drastic decline of the Christian population generally especially in Bethlehem. It is also why they no longer hold as much power as they used to in influencing the culture and mindsets in the area. Their roles became more politicised which has gradually led them to neglect standing up for truth until it has become too dangerous to even express it. This could well lead to a reality where this would be the last Christmas in Bethlehem for a majority of Christian families.

Article

Comment

Ethics

Freedom

War & peace

25 August 2025

4 min read

There’s light and darkness in journalism’s truth game

“There’s your truth, there’s my truth and there’s the truth.”

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A church altar holds commemorative frames of killed journalists

The Journalists’ Altar.

The Journalists’ Altar at St Bride’s church, on London’s Fleet Street, bears the Perspex tombstones of reporters and their colleagues who have died in wars and conflicts around the globe, in the act of bringing news to us.

This solemn memorial is joined by new ‘stones’s for Anas al-Sharif and his four-man crew from Qatar-based al-Jazeera, who were killed in a targeted strike on their tents at the gates of the Al-Shifa hospital in eastern Gaza City.

It was worth checking that they’re included on the altar, as there’s the sneaking suspicion that someone might have decided that honouring them in this way would be inappropriate or even inflammatory. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF), who killed them, would certainly take this view, having described al-Sharif, one of the few television correspondents bravely to have remained in northern Gaza, as a “terrorist” who “posed as a journalist.”

Journalist rights groups, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as well as, unsurprisingly, Al Jazeera itself counter that this is baseless. The CPJ adds “there is no justification for [the] killing.”

Of course there isn’t. Al Jazeera is pro-Arab and consequently pro-Islam and, therefore, anti-Israel. Al-Sharif may have had links with Hamas in the past, but he and his colleagues were demonstrably non-combatant. If we start killing journalists who are biased against us, we’re entering very dark moral territory indeed.

I worked for The Observer when it was owned by conglomorate Lonrho and it promoted proprietor Tiny Rowland’s best interests in Africa and in his battle with Mohammed Al-Fayed for ownership of Harrods. News Corporation’s titles aren’t famous for exposing and criticising the activities and opinions of the Murdoch family.

It might be a stretch for even their fiercest critics to suggest that Rowland or the Murdochs had committed acts of terrorism, but the point is that journalism, good or bad, is never truly independent. That al-Sharif and his friends had associations with Hamas is largely irrelevant. Indeed, journalists must have contacts with the dark side.

If we’re at risk for our allegiances, then it’s not just us but freedom itself that is under threat. Imagine if we could be arrested for sympathising with supporters of Palestine Action, currently a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK. That, worryingly, begins not to sound too farfetched.

Journalism, when it works properly, shines as a light in the world’s darkness, revealing what’s really going on. It’s what makes it a less trivial professional activity than many other walks of life. The Journalists’ Altar bears testament to that.

The light shining in darkness is central to the Christian tradition, revealed in the prose poetry of the opening sequence to John’s gospel (a line of which appears on the Journalists’ Altar). It is inextinguishable, exists only because darkness exists and is revealed in the human capacity for love, the triumph of hope over despair and lives led self-sacrificially.

That’s way too much freight for humble old journalism to carry. But it is true that journalism shines a light in human affairs, the better to reveal what lies in the darkness so that we can examine it. In that endeavour, it shares an interest in truth

A late and lamented Observer desk editor of mine once told me dolefully, when I wailed that lawyers were preventing a story I knew to be true, that “there’s your truth, there’s my truth and there’s the truth.” I don’t think he meant to mark the difference between subjective and an objective, absolute truth, but he did define the truth game that we’re in.

As it took Gaza’s territory, Israel’s government long ago ceded its moral ground – quite an achievement given the scale of the atrocities committed by Hamas on Israel’s people on 7 October 2023. It simply cannot afford to allow the light of what is true to shine in the darkness of Gaza. So, it bans foreign correspondents from reporting from within the Strip.

“Democracy dies in darkness” has been the slogan of The Washington Post since 2017, a line it lifted from its Watergate heritage. There’s been a fair bit of chortling and downright rage at this conceit since its newish proprietor, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, declined to allow the Post to back the Democrat candidate against Donald Trump at the last US election (those pesky owners again).

But it’s not really democracy that dies in the dark. It’s just that we can’t see in the dark. We need light to do that. Journalism, for all its weaknesses and absurdities, provides some of that light. Israel, Gaza and the deaths of five Al Jazeera journalists show that it’s a light that isn’t inextinguishable. That’s more than a worry.

Al Jazeera’s anchor Tamer Almisshal nailed it: “Israel, by killing and targeting our correspondents and team in Gaza, they want to kill the truth.” Our democracies need to ensure that doesn’t happen.

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