So this is Christmas in Bethlehem: Day Twenty-nine of house arrest

by Allison

December 20, 2002

I'd like to be able to write something noble and uplifting,
something which captures the true spirit of Christmas and transcends
all the ugliness we live with every minute of every day. If that's
the kind of thing you want to read, I suggest you take a look at Bob
May's Christmas message (www.bobmay.info) or perhaps Sandra
Olewine's or Alex Awad's. I'd like to be able to express the kind of
simple thankfulness that I expressed back in May. I'd like to be
able to say that we have been taking advantage of our confinement,
listening to Christmas carols ("O Little Town of Bethlehem") and
making Christmas crafts and spending quality time together. And I
know that would make everyone feel a lot better, wouldn't it?

But I am not going to try to make any of this acceptable for one
simple reason. It is not acceptable. The struggle that most people
are going through just to get from one day to the next is not
inspiring. It's not admirable or heroic or victorious. It's ugly and
nasty and hideous and exhausting, a perfect reflection of what's
being done to them. Of what is being allowed by all the self-
righteous champions of freedom, democracy, and civilization. All you
folks who want to be assured of the triumph of the human spirit so
you can sit down to your Christmas dinner, look elsewhere. You're
not going to hear it from me.

We have been invaded six times in the last fifteen months. This is
day 152 of curfew since last October, over five months' worth of
suffocating house arrest. In the last six months we have been under
curfew more often than not. Apart from an almost overwhelming sense
of fatigue and nausea, I don't even know how I feel about that. Does
anyone know or care that the most recent suicide bomber did not even
come from Bethlehem? He didn't even live in Bethlehem, merely nearby.
Shouldn't this small but significant detail have some weight,
considering the severity of the punishment? You are asking me to
care more about those Israelis who were killed on 21 November than I
care about my own family and colleagues and neighbors and the fact
is that I don't. Their deaths were tragic and needless but not more
so than the 152 days of our lives that have been tragically and
needlessly stolen from us. I am starting to take it very personally.

The army has very thoughtfully maintained a lower profile this
invasion, albeit mostly for its own benefit. It's easier to lie with
a straight face when the evidence is not so shockingly to the
contrary. Yes, this invasion is somewhat more polite than the last
five. Choirboys are not being assassinated in the Nativity Church
compound and historical sites are not being besieged, unless you
count the town of Bethlehem itself and we no longer do, thank
goodness for that. But even though the savagery is more subtle, it
is savagery nonetheless. As usual, it is the most powerless, the
most voiceless, the most impoverished who are bearing the greatest
burden and some of the footage coming out of the refugee camps over
the last month has been breathtakingly barbaric. I have sat here on
my couch and listened to testimonies from women that chilled my
blood, women whose entire lives have been lived as refugees, whose
pathetic homes have been vandalized beyond recognition, and whose
every male relative over the age of fourteen has been taken into
custody. Their experiences can only be described as appalling beyond
belief. Will you pause in your Christmas shopping long enough to
consider the enormity of their suffering and loss?

As Christmas approaches, it is clear that the Christian world would
feel more, well, comfortable if the army would withdraw from
Bethlehem. Most church leaders have managed to mutter that request
and thus ascend to the heights of cynicism. Do they imagine that
such a hollow gesture could make a scrap of real difference in the
lives of the people here, where every other household lives in a
state of Occupation-induced poverty? And would a withdrawal from
Bethlehem mean anything to the citizens of Jenin or Nablus or
Hebron? This is not about anything as easy or superficial as
Christmas celebrations, because even if they do withdraw—and they
have made it clear they won't—no one here will be celebrating. But
it would allow the armchair activists to breathe a little easier,
wouldn't it?

If the last two years have taught us anything, it has taught us that
the gesture, the occasional solidarity demonstration or letter to
the editor or twenty-buck donation, is sufficient unto itself as far
as most people are concerned. Like Aid to the Third World, it
convinces us of our own fundamental decency and assuages our
enlightened Western consciences, all the while leaving the
mechanisms of oppression securely in place.

And when people write to us from their comfortable living rooms to
say that, even under such difficult conditions, our religious faith
can still give us hope and joy, I know that they are in fact simply
using their religious faith as an excuse to remain passive and
continue justifying this situation which allows them their
comfortable living rooms while perpetuating our "difficult
conditions." So long as the comfortable living rooms are there and
the "difficult conditions" are here, praise the Lord.

As far as I know, Jesus called us to be His arms and legs and mouth,
not His backside. If He expects those who are suffering to endure it
with grace, it is only because He also expects those who are not
suffering to bear witness to those who are and to act, to remember
those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who
are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering." Anything else
is pure hypocrisy. And only hypocrisy on the most massive scale
could have gotten us to where we are now.

I just finished watching the most obscene piece of footage I have
seen this month. In it, a monstrous ugly green army bulldozer slowly
and patiently knocked over a pathetic little concrete block chicken
coop-with all the chickens still inside—while a dozen fully armed
soldiers surrounded the area standing guard. From a rooftop across
the street, the camera recorded this scene while the neighbor from
whose rooftop the scene was being filmed tearfully commented.

It was not her chicken coop being demolished and the situation did
not affect her personally. But as I listened to the comments of this
nameless woman whom CNN will never interview, I knew that she, more
than all the Christian leaders and politicians and media champions
put together, had the moral clarity to know that what she was seeing
was wrong and to say so. Without consulting the New York Times or
the New Testament she, and all of us who are here witnessing all of
this, know that that chicken coop is not a threat to the security of
the State of Israel and that its demolition is nothing but an act of
pure malice committed by bullies whose intention is simply to
further demoralize and impoverish its 1already demoralized and
impoverished owners.

For me this one little scene neatly summarized the entire purpose
and meaning of the last two years and my tears have never tasted so
sad or so bitter as they do today.

Merry Christmas from Occupied Palestine.