My column in the daily Plymouth Herald this week (27.12.23), brief and to the point, pointing to the hypocrisy and endemic racism of the Western Establishment. What more is there to say?

Bethlehem town, just South of Jerusalem in the Palestinian West Bank, has shut down in solidarity with the people of Gaza, the Palestinian enclave on the Mediterranean Coast. 

People of every Faith recognise Bethlehem as the stated birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth. For Christians Jesus is the Son of God, for Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Rastafari and other Abrahamic religions He is a crucial holy prophet. In any case, His birthplace is a place of global pilgrimage, with two million people visiting the town each year out of curiosity or deep faith. 

The shops are shut, the town deserted, and the Church of the Nativity built on the site of the stable where the faithful believe Jesus to have been born has constructed, instead of the traditional nativity scene of Mary, Joseph and Jesus in a manger, a pile of stone rubble and dust with a baby in swaddling lying in the middle.

This is a Christian church, not an outlet for Hamas propaganda. The shut-down is in recognition of the twenty thousand Palestinian civilians who have been killed inside 9 weeks, the sixty thousand casualties suffering without proper hospital or medical support, and the nearly two-million now living without clean water and experiencing enforced starvation and associated deadly diseases.

The Church’s local Reverend Munther Isaac spoke from the pulpit, “This year Christmas feels different…It is impossible to celebrate when there is a genocide taking place in our land…and we are wondering is this our fate too, in Bethlehem, in Ramallah, across the West Bank?” 

Already, 300 have been killed in the Palestinian West Bank by Israeli settlers and troops since October 7th, turfed out of their homes and shot on their streets.

In Gaza, the number of children – at least seven thousand – now recorded as the largest casualty rate of children in such a period of war, any war in the history of humanity, is a devastating indictment that lies on the conscience of us all. 

In a very real and historical sense, this devastation of a civilian population is of Biblical proportions. 

Christians worldwide, and, increasingly Jewish groups everywhere, have called-out the carnage and called for a Ceasefire, to no avail.

And here’s the rub. This military invasion and occupation of the Palestinian territory of Gaza is not a religious war. It can hardly be recognised as a war at all given the immense difference of military power and resource between the Israeli Defence Forces, backed-up by US and UK fire-power, and the small number of street-fighters associated with the Hamas government.

This is a conflict not of Islam against Jew or the Holy against heathens. This is a territorial war born of imperial domination and colonial power. Most vitally, this is western Imperialism maintaining its interests over the Arab World. 

Those who, out of prejudice and ignorance, hate Arabs or Islam or both, wish to perpetrate the lie that Jews everywhere are at existential risk from terrorists, and that the extermination of all potential enemies is the only reasonable response. 

In reality, the Israeli State is not the same as the Jewish people, nor do the Zionist settlers represent Judaism. Zionism is a separatist political creed whilst Judaism is a world faith. 

Those who support Israel in this so-called war number a small minority of the human race and an even smaller number of nation States. 

Indeed, in a vote at the United Nations a last week, only the United States voted against a ceasefire, the power of the World’s most armed and dominant imperialist nation ever conceived being enough to veto the wishes and concerns of the rest of humanity.

On Christmas Eve Israeli fighter planes bombed residences and killed nearly 200, not by precision but as an expression of total power against a captive population of over 2 million people. This is a politics of domination, one over another.

Such wars do not ensure a peaceful outcome.

We who demand a ceasefire and oppose the war are not antisemitic, on the contrary we are anti-racists. And we want peace with social justice and human rights for all.

The New Year beckons with the question, where does this end? War against those in Lebanon? Expansion of western forces into Yemen, or even Iran? In these days of growing conflict, the demand for Peace on Earth must not be confined to Christmas.