T.S. Eliot began the 6th of his Advent-Christmas-Epiphany Ariel poems “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” in an apt and poignant manner.
There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open to midnight),
And the childish—which is not that of the child
The birth of the child, of course, was none of the above, so accurately depicted by Eliot. The actual birth was about the uncertain Joseph-Mary having to leave their home in Nazareth, being ignored in their hour of birthing need in Bethlehem, larger political powers seemingly driving them to places of loneliness---they must have wondered as did the Magi in Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” that indeed it was a cold coming, a hard coming and was it all folly? And where was God in all this, God actually with them in the form of a vulnerable child (never easy to see when much seems to contradict and oppose such a read of a lived historic moment).
It would have been a matter of months (perhaps under 2 years) that Herod sent his death squads to slaughter many innocent children, Joseph-Mary and Jesus refugees, flight to Egypt and the Jewish community there a temporary home for a few years. Such is, in brief, the tale of the Jewish Jesus born from the Jewish context, the Biblical Jewish tale central to the Western Tradition and ethos, a chosen people, a people offered land, a people near and dear to a significant segment of the Christian Tradition. But, where in this tale are the Muslim and Christian Palestinians?
We have witnessed a barbaric and aggressive Jewish assault on the Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The extreme right-of-centre Israeli state has brutally, even though judged as engaging in genocide and violating international law, ignored basic human rights and savaged the Palestinians in Gaza (the West Bank has also felt the impact of this). The right-of-centre Jewish Orthodox Zealots and Christian Zionists have cheered on such a war against a people, and Western leaders have done little to halt the carnage. And, there was the 1st Christmas--yes, the slaughter of the innocents (many more done by the Jewish state than ever done by the Roman military) and Mary-Joseph-Jesus refugees (rather minor when compared to the multitude of Palestinian refugees).
What will be the long-term ripple effect for politics in the Middle East and Palestinian children who have seen families killed, homes destroyed, hospitals, and educational structures obliterated? How will Muslim states (pro-contra West) view the virtual apathy of Israel in this war? And there was the 1st Christmas, many faithfully and religiously remember these days, some as Eliot noted, missing the deeper meaning. But what is the relationship between what the Palestinians are living through (much more gruesome and sustained, Jewish death squads creating hovels, slaughtering many innocents) and the 1st Christmas? To isolate the latter from the reality of the former is to misread the meaning of the contemporary reality in Israel today and its war, genocide, and refugee-making machine on the Muslim and Christian Palestinians on this Christmas season. It might be of some worth to read Eliot’s “The Triumphal March,” the 5th in the Ariel poems, to get a sense of how such a drama plays itself out in the affluent and insulated West to get a sense of the tragedy the West and Israel are facilitating and inflicting on the Palestinians and the unwary implications of it
Fiat Lux
Ron Dart
Comments