Silent Night - Unholy Night
This is my third Christmas with Palestinians. Each one has been more harrowing than the last. But this one has carried a deadly silence.
The first Christmas, I was shocked. Churches were bombed on Christmas Day. Ancient sanctuaries. Places of refuge. Places that had survived empires and centuries, reduced to rubble while the world exchanged greetings and wrapped gifts. I remember thinking: surely this will wake people up. Surely this is a line that cannot be crossed without consequence.
By the second Christmas, the bombing itself no longer shocked me. What shocked me was something far worse: the ease with which humanity discarded these people. The way suffering became background noise. The way Palestinians were stripped not only of safety, but of recognition. They were suffering in the land of Jesus himself, and yet even that symbolism could not pierce the indifference. The message was clear: there are lives the world will grieve, and lives it will explain away.
Now it is my third Christmas with Palestinians, and this one is perhaps the most disturbing of all.
There is a so-called “ceasefire”, but this word is being abused. This “ceasefire” has not stopped the violence, the killing, or the terror. What it has done is provide political cover. It has shielded the occupation from consequence while allowing its practices to continue under a softer name.
Just a couple weeks ago - two brothers, eight and ten years old, were shot for trying to gather firewood so their family could cook. Not for carrying weapons. Not for posing a threat. For crossing an arbitrary line that shifts daily, one that closes in on Palestinian life inch by inch, redrawn at will, enforced without warning.A line children are somehow expected to understand. A line policed with bullets.
Tonight, On Christmas, families in Gaza are forced to beg for sustenance while the world ignores their pleas for humanity.
How can anyone celebrate this holiday? I cannot celebrate any holiday. Not while this is called peace, restraint, or progress. Not while my friends still die in a deafening silence.
This is my third Christmas holding the hearts of Palestinians, and it is the first one where I feel something colder than shock, heavier than grief:
A sense that the cruelty is no longer shocking because it has been successfully normalized - a feeling that the world knows exactly what it is allowing.
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