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.

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31 July 2025

4 min read

Portofino’s real prisoners are not the beggars it is banning

The economic elite can’t exclude the poor from their privileged bubbles

George Pitcher

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

A colourful row of buildings in an Italian port.

Portofino's harbourside dining.

Slim Emcee on Unsplash.

I know Portofino a bit, because it’s nearby my Italian in-law family and we’ve been there a couple of times when visitors have wanted to see it. It’s a former fishing village on the Ligurian coast, a natural bay and beyond lovely. And its mayor, Matteo Viacava, has just banned beggars from its cobbled streets, as they irritate wealthy tourists and celebrity visitors, which is less lovely.

Italy struggles with its relationship with tourism. Rome was sinking under a pile of rubbish a few years ago. The more literally sinking Venice tries to repel visitors with taxes, while providing a backdrop welcome for mega-wealthy weddings. The walled Tuscan town of Lucca recently cracked down on the buttodentri, the restaurant touts who hustle diners. As with any European tourist destination, Airbnb apartments drive rental prices up and the indigenous population out.

There is something particular about the Portofino beggar purge though. Perhaps it’s a bit like Versailles before 1789 – in the case of Portofino, the poor have no clothes so let them wear Prada. It’s all designer boutiques and there isn’t a real shop, a paneterria or forno, to be found. No one carries any weight, naturally, but you do wonder how they eat at all, if not in one of the extortionately priced trattoria.

To visit, as thousands will this summer, is to realise how much there is that you don’t require. It has everything a rich visitor wants, but nothing that they actually need. We’ve heard people call it Disneyland Italy, but I think it’s more like Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner TV series, shot in another, similarly named, dystopian village, Portmeirion in North Wales, where everything is laid on except freedom. Even that’s not quite right – as The Eagles nearly wrote, in Portofino you can leave any time you want, you just can’t afford to check out, unless you’re loaded.

It strikes me now that the mysterious bubble that pursued the aspirant escapee McGoohan along the beach may have been a cunning metaphor. People who live in Portofino (and very few do), or who seek sanctuary there, or in Palm Beach, or on Long Island, or in St Moritz, or on Mustique, or in South Kensington, exist in a bubble.

Joining friend and foodie Loyd Grossman at the Chelsea Arts Club a while ago, he told me he’d just walked down from his home in South Kensington and seen not a single person who actually lived there, but only people who cleaned their houses. Residents arrive from and leave for the airport, often from subterranean garages, in privacy-glassed limos.

Like Portofino, these are bubbles from which anyone but their own demographic are excluded. It doesn’t have to have gates to be a gated community. The bubble is a psychological state, which is bought to protect us from those of lesser means and especially, God save us, from the poor.

Simply to have them removed is to have head and hearts dwelling in gated communities.

And, increasingly for the economic elite, the poor are anyone who cannot afford to, or are not forced to, separate themselves for security, because they have no access to a privileged bubble. That the poor are always with us is a gospel injunction, which I used to take at face value as a statement of apathy or resignation, even acceptance, in an inadequate world, that the poor are simply poor and there is nothing to be done about it.

Latterly, I’ve seen it far more in the post-modern sense of being present with the poor in their moment of poverty, in solidarity and in their corner. That means they share our space, as neighbours. We’re not just talking about the economically poor here, but the dispossessed and discarded; the vulnerable and volatile; the marginalised and maligned.

We, the rich, can’t afford to exercise zero tolerance, to pretend they don’t exist, because – to coin a phrase of George Osborne’s when, hilariously, he claimed as Chancellor of the Exchequer to be making common cause in austerity – we’re all in this together. And by “this” I mean the one, shared bubble, which is universal.

We’ve been considering tourists and beggars, but we can scale it up to famine in Gaza or Sudan; asylum seekers in small boats; prisoners in Guantanamo Bay or on death rows; those who face earthquakes and tsunamis. They can’t be made to disappear by magic or mayoral edict, only by addressing the circumstances of their poverty – of food, money or spirit – with practical, social and political policy, plus a dollop of compassion for the cause of their plight.

Simply to have them removed is to have head and hearts dwelling in gated communities. It’s not sufficient, for sure, to notice the beggars this summer, to drop a few euros, but it’s a start along the street towards knowing that the poor are indeed always here, with us. Even in Portofino.

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