By Kyrsoibor Pyrtuh
“Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under…Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning…Refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Gospel according to Mathew 2:16ff)
What is currently happening in Gaza, under the Occupied territory of Israel, is nothing less than an ethnic cleansing and this mass killing of the children of Gaza is palpable to us here in this tiny Indian State, which is thousands of miles away. Ethnic cleansing is an established political/racial tool used for the homogenization of state and society. It is the mass killing against people who belong to the marginalized and unwanted ethnic group in order to establish an ethnically homogenous geographical space. Such campaigns have existed throughout both Biblical and non-Biblical worlds and had taken place for either ethnic or religious or political reason. However, the rise of extreme nationalist movements in the twentieth century led to an unprecedented level of ethnically motivated mass killings, like the Nazi massacre of six million Jews in the holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, Rohingya persecution and the merciless killings of the Palestinians in Gaza today.
Christmas is here again, and I share with my fellow Palestinian Christians, Arabs, Jews and others around the globe who are numb-founded at the gravity of the conflict, the senseless bombardments, destruction of homes, hospitals and spiraling humanitarian crisis. The images of the burnt and dead bodies of children wrapped in plain clothes will never be eroded from our memories. Yes! We will never forget and whoever has ordered and is participating in the killings of innocent children is committing a heinous crime and the State of Israel is culpable for the genocide. At the same time, we must also not condone the atrocities perpetrated by non-state actors and terrorists’ groups of all hues. They are equally guilty for crimes against humanity.
The call to cancel Christmas celebrations and festivities is valid and it should not be a mere token of protest, religious or political, rather to fully empathize with the people of Gaza irrespective of their creed and religion, and wherever we must fiercely convey the message that this genocide with 1.7 million people displaced, and 7,000 children killed must end immediately. It is our spiritual and moral obligation to call out- “Enough of Death, Enough of Destruction; End the Occupation.” This must be our prayer and become part of our liturgy this Christmas.
Does this current mass killing resonate with the nativity story during the birth of Jesus? Two thousand years ago when Jesus was born, Palestine was under the occupation of a foreign regime, i.e. the Romans, who were as brutal as any other occupied force in modern history. According to Roman annals, Ceasar Augustus was at the helm when Jesus was born and as the first Roman emperor, he led the transformation of Rome from a Republic to an Empire and he shrewdly combined military might, institution-building and lawmaking to become Rome’s sole ruler, laying the foundations of the 200-year Pax Romana (Roman Peace). The Pax Romana implied the period of Roman imperialism which lasted for roughly two hundred years and was obtained by brute force and oppression against the people.
The Bible narratives explicitly elucidate the events which led up to the birth of Jesus. In the first Christmas both Joseph and Mary, (Jesus’s parents), were migrant labourers who wandered from one place to another in search of livelihood. When Mary conceived the child (Jesus) they returned to Bethlehem to register for the census, and it was no coincidence that the time had arrived for her to give birth. Despite both Joseph and Mary being sons and daughters of Bethlehem, they did not own land and Mary couldn’t find a place to lay her newborn as they were displaced by the Roman occupation.
The first Christmas occurred during a dreadful time in the history of what was already a troubled and turbulent land. The Gospel of Mathew recorded the slaughter of the innocents and Mary, Joseph and Jesus’s flight to Egypt to escape death and destruction. At that point in time, Herod was the vassal king of Judea, which included the cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, under the Roman Empire who ruled from about 37 BCE to 4 BCE. The messianic proclamation of the birth of Jesus and the title of “King of the Jews” was an open challenge to his authority. However, Jesus’s mission was not to engineer a political coup d’état, rather he was committed to speaking truth to power and to stand in solidarity with the oppressed and occupied people of Palestine.
Herod’s tyranny was well known as he ordered the execution of his wife and three sons on suspicion that they were planning to murder him. He would execute anyone whom he believed posed a threat to his rule. However, some bible scholars argue that there are no parallels to the narratives of Mathew as to the massacre of innocent children below two years of age and it was written to address the Jewish readers of the time who were familiar with the story of Jewish captivity in Egypt and the killings of the newborns by Pharoah. It was written specifically for the Jewish readers and to bring a comparison between Moses and Jesus as the liberators of the occupied and oppressed people, in Egypt and under the Romans respectively. Be that as it may, Mary and Joseph did not forget the sufferings they have undergone under the occupation and would never forget the bruises that Jesus, their son, had to bear for the Jews, Arabs, Greeks, the slaves, the fishing community, the outcast, the women and marginalized people of Palestine under the Roman yoke. As Rev Munther Isaac, Pastor of Bethlehem Evangelical Lutheran Church, said, “This is what Christmas means to us, that we see Jesus being born among those who have lost everything, who are under the rubble.” And Jesus is being born amidst the massacred children of Gaza.
We shall pray for peace in Palestine; we shall pray for peace of Israel; we shall pray for peace in the World, but we will never forget those images of the bruised, battered and massacred children of Gaza, until Justice is done.
To my fellow Christians here in Shillong, let us be wary of the influence of the theology of Christian Zionism which calls for Israel to reduce Gaza to a parking lot. This negates the Good News which the angels announced to the shepherds on the first Christmas night.
(The writer is theologically trained in Bishop’s College Kolkata and was formerly working with the Presbyterian Church, Mawkhar, Shillong)