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

Digital

Work

24 January 2025

4 min read

Back to the office! The suspect motives behind the bosses calling for it

Working From Home isn’t the end of the world.

George Pitcher

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

An office wall displays a huge motto reading 'punch today in the face'

Really?

Johnson Wang on Unsplash.

If we’d been working from home in 1980, I wouldn’t have met my wife (as she, of course, then wasn’t). The slow demise of the office romance may not exclusively be driven by WFH, when a clumsy or unwanted speculative pass will likely precipitate a visit from the HR police. But it’s sure harder (I’m told) to chat someone up over Zoom than a water-cooler.

There are some things you just, well, have to be there for. And it’s not just a matter of curating the gene pool for the future of the human race, which is hardly the top priority for most employers. Much more immediate commercial demands are served by employees being bodily present at work. They can check colleagues’ body language, be mentored more spontaneously, gossip about work, read the room and go outside for a fag with a friend. None of that works on a laptop at the kitchen table.

And yet these aren’t aspects of working life that are much, if ever, cited by opponents of WFH. Yup, for these bosses, it’s always about productivity, which allegedly slumps like the shoulders of a college-leaver told to re-write their CV, when staff work from home. So companies as diverse as Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan are demanding that their workers work five-day weeks at the office again.

Except, two things: One, that productivity point isn’t true. Professor Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, has demonstrated empirically that a hybrid working model of three days at the office, plus two at home, is every bit as productive as fully office-based work overall. And, two, bosses may be shocked to learn that it’s their job to manage productivity, which is just as measurable at home as in the office. But then you don’t get to shout as much.

And there I think is the real point. Bosses might not be shouty, but their motives for office work are more than suspect. They may be obsessed with control. They need to see their staff working for them for proof of productivity. They want to sit in a big glass-walled office watching them. And, perhaps most of all, if staff aren’t in the office then what’s the point of being a boss? It might bring their own productivity management and role into sharper focus.

People who are privileged to manage their own time, or lack of it, in an office really shouldn’t be in the business of lecturing people who are not.

Furthermore, it’s been a long time, if ever, since some of those with the loudest voices calling for a return to the office have ever worked an ordinary job themselves. Lord Rose, formerly CEO of Marks & Spencer and chairman of Asda, told BBC’s Panorama that home working was part of the UK economy’s “general decline” (not true – see above).

And Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, formerly business secretary (remind me, how did that go?), continues in opposition to fight the bad fight to get civil servants as well as the private sector permanently back at the office. Hilariously, he most recently did so in a video from the drawing room of his mansion in Somerset. Though, to be fair, having lost his seat at the last general election and seeing his investment company sliding down the pan, he’s not so much working from home as just... at home.

The serious point is that people who are privileged to manage their own time, or lack of it, in an office really shouldn’t be in the business of lecturing people who are not. They really don’t know – or have forgotten - what it is to have your life demanded of you from 9am-6pm from Monday to Friday in a location that is less than comfortable to work in. Is that so complicated to take aboard?

And there’s another very big thing here. To demand office slaves is to commoditise people, to make them chattels (and, if some of these bosses were honest with themselves, that’s what they want). Staff become just another asset, not unlike the freehold of the office building in which you put them and watch as they make you money every day.

To put it bluntly, that is a sin. To treat human beings as tradeable commodities is to debase their dignity. And for those of faith, that dignity is vested in each unique one of them bearing the image of God. As a good Catholic, Rees-Mogg should be familiar with the doctrine of Imago Dei.

So there’s a holy, as well as secular, work-ethic at play here. The worker is worthy of his/her wage. That scriptural phrase usually focuses on the material value of the wage. But it’s also worth registering that the worker is “worthy”.

To treat staff like they have an inherent worth, rather than simply a productive asset, has a value way beyond the money they are paid. And the dividends on that investment will be immense. Respect them. Let them work from home.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up