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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Economics

Nationalism

Politics

25 September 2025

4 min read

Millions of children go hungry in a country that dares to call itself godly

The gospel of national greatness is less about grace and more about political grit

George Pitcher

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

A sand drawing shows an unhappy child's face with the tide coming in from below

A sand drawing for a child poverty campaign.

Barnardos.

If anything, the UK – and more specifically England – is becoming a Christian country again. But not necessarily in a good way. The rise of Christian nationalism mirrors the American experience, with Christian symbols such as the cross weaponised against asylum seekers and the knuckle-draggers under them, marching as to war.

But there are still many non-belligerents who would stake a claim to our Christian nationhood. Wiser counsels such as the historian Tom Holland. Or Danny Kruger MP, who spoke to a near-empty chamber in parliament recently, before defecting from the Conservatives to Reform UK, about a Christian restoration, envisioning a "re-founding of this nation on the teachings that Alfred made the basis of the common law of England." He may need to explain that slowly to Nigel Farage.

But by what measure do we claim to be a Christian country? Here’s one: Child poverty. It’s very hard to make a case for a state being foundationally Christian in principle if significant numbers of its children go hungry. And the UK shamefully ranks among the worst of the world’s richest countries in this regard, with our children’s poverty rates rising by 20 per cent over the past decade – defined as those living in a household with less than 60 per cent of the national median income, so currently less than about £19,000 a year.

That’s some 4.5 million living in poverty, or 9 in a typical classroom of 30. Unless action is taken the number will push five million by 2030. Anecdotal evidence from teachers is truly shocking. Children arrive hungry at school with empty lunchboxes to fill and feed family at home. The UK ranks below poorer countries such as Poland and Slovenia, which are currently cutting their child-poverty rates, and well ahead of other wealthy nations such as Finland and Denmark.

It’s a national disgrace. Christologically, it also fails the minimum threshold for a nation that supposedly holds that the kingdom of heaven belongs to children. In damp and sub-standard housing this winter, lacking nutritious diet and prone to ill-health, heaven will have to wait for these British children.

The same gospel tells us that the poor are always with us, which may make us resigned to it. But political complacency won’t do. If there is always relative poverty against great riches, then the true measure must be what we’re trying to do about it. The damning answer to that seems to be very little.

It’s actually worse than that. The circumstance is one of our own deliberate, political making, exacerbated by the then chancellor George Osborne, who introduced the two-child benefit cap in 2017. That limited benefit payments for families claiming Child Tax Credit or Universal Credit for more than two children. It was part of Osborne’s pantomime wicked-squire act, as he repeatedly told us with a straight face that “we’re all in this together”. It was also borderline eugenics, because one of its effects was to limit the breeding of “lower orders”, the benefit cap disproportionately hitting the budgets of working and ethnic-minority families.

With Osborne’s selective austerity and social-engineering drive long gone, it’s well past time for a Labour government to do something to rectify such social injustice. Current chancellor Rachel Reeves must abolish the two-child benefit cap in her November Budget. With other welfare cuts prevented by Labour’s summer backbench rebellion, the question inevitably squawked by right-wingers is how that will be paid for.

Opposition parties relish the prospect of Reeves welching on pre-election promises not to raise taxes on working families. And abolishing the two-child welfare cap could cost £3.5 billion a year.

There are creative ways and means. Veteran chancellor and former prime minister Gordon Brown – the unsung hero of the 2008 worldwide financial meltdown, without whom we wouldn’t have an economy to do anything with – proposes fairly taxing the excess profits of the £11.5 billion gambling industry, which enjoys VAT exemptions and pays just 21 per cent tax, compared with 35-57 per cent in other industrialised countries. And if more money is needed then remove some of the interest-rate subsidy enjoyed by commercial banks when they deposit money at the Bank of England. That is what social justice looks like (gambling also costs the NHS £1 billion-plus in harms, so it’s time for the industry to pay up).

That points to some fiscal answers. There are other actions that must be taken this autumn, at political conferences and on any platform available to those with a public voice and conscience. It’s good to see Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York and stand-in primate of England in the absence of Canterbury, laying into the two-child limit and benefit cap.

Both Cottrell and Brown tell heart-breaking stories of children’s poverty in the UK. We must fight it and ensure that Reeves’ forthcoming Budget does so. As the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza said recently that millions of children are living in “almost Dickensian levels of poverty”. The irony is that in Dickens’ time we were called a Christian country.

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