This poem came to me after learning that Christian leaders in the Holy Land have asked churches not to organize any “unnecessarily festive” activities, in solidarity with Gaza; as well as seeing the Nativity scene set among rubble in the Lutheran Church of Bethlehem this year.

Find resources on what’s happening in Palestine and how to help below the poem.

Please feel free to share around; credit to Avery Arden (they/them) with a link to binarybreakingworship.com.

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This year, Mary is just one of many
Palestinians failing to find
a safe place to give birth.

This year, Jesus is just one
of countless born
into rubble.

This year, the newborn Christ

dies 

his little body bombed
and tossed aside
into the growing pile.

This time, Jesus never makes it to adulthood —
doesn’t even make it the eight days to circumcision.
He doesn’t die a grown man
making a conscious choice
to defy Empire armed with naught but dreams

of a world where all the nations live as one
where last are first 
and all wars done —

No. This year, his newborn life is threat enough —
his family’s mere existence is rebellion enough  —
to warrant eradication.

Actually, it was then, too, two thousand years ago
— for Empire always fears the ones it grinds
beneath its millstone — back then, though
Christ’s parents found safe passage into Egypt —

now, snipers shoot them as they try
to leave the hospital that scarce had room
for one more woman’s labor cries.

Stigmata are
that much more
chilling between
an infant’s eyes.

And now, as then, some may blame Jesus’s death
on his own Jewish people — but
resist this lie! Now, as then,
the crime is Empire’s

with Western Christians at the helm

and those who would cast stones, look first
for your own nation’s name etched on the bombs
and tear gas canisters!

And, God,
if there is any hope at all
to wrestle from the rubble

as churches all across the Holy Land
close their doors to Christmas joy this year —
a holy choice to mourn with those who mourn
as Christ’s homeland is made a massive grave —

it’s this: there are still children left to save.

It’s this: not every olive branch has burned.

It’s this: the sacred promise of a God
who dies whenever Empire’s outcasts die —
that those cast down 

will rise.

Palestine, Palestine! I swear we will not cease
to shout your name until, at last, your streets
sing with your children’s laughter, loud and free.

– Avery Arden

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Notes on this poem

I am writing this note after revising some middle portions of this poem, and coming away still unhappy with the results.

As a Christian who believes that God expresses a solidarity with the oppressed so strong and intimate that They are literally one with every oppressed person, I cannot help but recognize Christ within the people being killed and expelled from their homes in Gaza right now. Christ is there among them, and that means he is among their dead as well as their displaced.

As the Rev. Munther Isaac of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem on the West Bank preached in October,

“God suffers with the people of this land, sharing the same fate with us. …God is under the rubble in Gaza. He is with the frightened and the refugees. He is in the operating room. This is our consolation. He walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death. …”

For Christians like Rev. Isaac, Christ’s intimate identification with those the world calls least, those whom Empire threatens to eradicate, is central to any sense of comfort they may have in the face of so much devastation. It’s also central to my own faith and personal understanding of the Divine.

Yet in this context, because modern-day Israel is a Jewish state, exploring that Divine solidarity comes with a great risk of perpetuating the long, harmful history of antisemitic blood libel and accusations of deicide. How do we affirm God’s presence with those suffering in Palestine without (implicitly or explicitly) adding to the poisonous lie that “the Jews killed Jesus”?

In wrestling with this complexity, I tried to write this poem to uplift both Jesus’s Jewishness and his solidarity with Palestinians. Jesus was born into a Jewish family, his entire worldview was shaped by his Jewishness, and he shared in his people’s suffering under the Roman Empire. His solidarity with Palestinians of various faiths suffering today does not erase that Jewishness. Nor does it mean that Jewish persons don’t “belong” in the region — only that modern Israel’s occupation of Palestine is in no way necessary for Jews to live and thrive there, or anywhere else in the world.

I also aimed to point out (sacrificing poetic flow to do so, lol) that Israel is by no means acting alone in this attack on Gaza or their decades-long occupation of Palestine. There is a much larger Empire at work, with my own country, the United States, as one of the nations at the helm. Israel is entangled in that imperial mess, and directly backed and funded by those forces — not because of what politicians claim, that we have to back Israel or else we’re antisemitic, but because Israel is our strategic foothold in the so-called Middle East. How do we name our complicity as our tax dollars are funneled into violence across the world, and act to end that violence?

Ultimately, I don’t know that this poem is a successful one. I don’t know if it avoids perpetuating harm. If nothing else, I hope it sparks conversation about resisting antisemitism as much as we resist Zionism.

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Palestine Resources

HISTORY

• History & facts about Palestinian Christians
  
• “Palestinian Christians and Muslims have lived together in the region for centuries”
  
• “What’s the Israel-Palestine Conflict about? A Simple Guide”
  
• https://decolonizepalestine.com/ — fantastic resource for getting your history + learning to recognize and debunk propaganda 

• Free ebooks on the history of Palestine & Israel
  
• Other book recs:
  • “Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel” by Gardner Thompson: history of the UK’s role in the creation of israel as a state
    
  • “Humane: How The United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War” by Samuel Moyn: discusses the role human rights frameworks and arguments for ethical combat have played in entrenching endless war in the post-9/11 era
    
  • Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis: essays, interviews, and speeches, that illuminate the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world
    

• Why is Gaza called an “open-air prison”?
  
• Stats around Israel’s military detention of Palestinian children
  
• The history of HAMAS — a nonviolent org radicalized into violence by Israel (a twitter thread with linked sources)
  

CURRENT EVENTS

• I highly recommend Democracy Now’s website + daily podcast as a news source that doesn’t dehumanize Palestinians or coddle Israel’s propaganda
  
• “A Nuclear Superpower and a Dispossessed People” — great starting-point article
  
• “How Big is Israel’s Military and How Much Funding Does It Get from the US?”
  
• Responding to people who weaponize the LGBTQIA+ community against Palestine
  
  • “LGBT+ people should not be a weapon of Israeli Apartheid: There should be no hierarchy of the oppressed”
  • “A Liberatory Demand from Queers in Palestine”
  • “I’m a Queer Palestinian. Here’s how I’m fighting for liberation”
  • Article by a Queer Palestinian living in the USA about the interconnections between these two identities
  • Screenshots from Queering the Map, which allows queer people across the globe to add comments, showing two comments from within Gaza — reminding us that queer people live in Gaza.
    
• “Despite What You Think, Palestinians Are Not Celebrating (Israeli) Death”
  
• Claims that Hamas beheaded 40 babies are unfounded

• “But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience” (video of live event with various speakers sharing speeches, poetry, etc.)
  
• It’s not antisemitic to be anti-Israel!
  
  • To me, fighting antisemitism across the globe is actually key to combating Israel’s propaganda: Israel claims to be necessary because nowhere else on the planet is safe for Jews — and they aren’t wrong about that lack of safety, but Israel is also not safe for Jews. A settler-colonialist state constantly in conflict with the group it’s occupying/ethnically cleansing, that requires every single civilian to spend some time in its military, is NOT safe either. (I found this TikTok video on the topic illuminating.)
    • On top of that, Israel is only “safe” for Jewish persons who accept its propaganda without protest. Holocaust survivors have been mistreated in Israel since its beginning in 1948, in part because many of these survivors spoke out about the similarities they saw between Germany’s attempted genocide of Jews and Israel’s actions against Palestinians.
    • Israelis who dare to protest Israel’s violence against Palestinians are often arrested or beaten by police. 
    • Others are detained, fired, or attacked.

• We need to fight to make our communities across the world truly safe for Jews. Some steps towards that goal:
  • If you (like me) are Christian, you must work to uproot the supersessionism that is deeply embedded in Christian biblical interpretation and beliefs. Here’s a tag of posts explaining what that means and where to get started. For instance, I highly recommend looking into the works of Amy-Jill Levine.
  • It’s also important for us to understand how some Christian groups weaponize Zionism for their own theological gain. Here’s a helpful resource made by a Jewish person about Christian Zionism.
  • The Anti-Defamation League has all these pages exploring how to speak out, educate, advocate, and more.
    
• We also need to listen to the Jewish people who anti-Zionist, pro-Palestine when they denounce Israel’s weaponization of their religion for its imperialist and genocidal purposes.
  • Here is the Jewish Voice for Peace’s discussion on Zionism.
  • And an article by Arielle Angel recommitting to peace and liberation
  • Look for the news stories that most of Western media is hardly sharing about Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace protesting Israel’s occupation (like this article, or this video of a Jewish rabbi telling Joe Biden to call for a ceasefire).
  • An article explaining how anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism.
  • And an article on how Zionism is linked to white supremacy

DREAMING OF A BETTER FUTURE

• “When Palestine is free I will…” – imagination is vital
• One-state solution
• Article sharing 3 Palestinians’ visions of liberation

WAYS TO HELP

• Boycott the orgs that BDS is asking us to boycott (it’s a much more manageable list than the huge ones many people are sharing around)
  
• Palestine Action – direct action options
  
• Jewish Voices for Peace also offers ways to take action
  
• Ways to use your money to help:
  
  • Buy an e-sim for Gazans to access internet (and get free art!)
    
  • https://palestinelegal.org/
    
  • https://www.map.org.uk/
    
  • https://www.pcrf.net/
    
  • https://www.unrwa.org/
    
  • https://twitter.com/gazamutualaid – mutual aid!

• Urge your University/School/Organization to put out a statement denouncing Israel
  
• Organize a Protest/Participate in a local one
  
• While calling your reps, tell them that as a voter, you’re unwilling to support them in the upcoming election unless they urge the White House to take a stand against Israel and stop funding them
  
• Share art/writing/films around Palestinian culture (see this tumblr post for Palestinian media to watch; I also recommend Oriented (2015) for an un-pinkwashed queer Palestinian story)
  
• If you’re part of a union, ask them what they’re doing to urge their industry leaders to take a stand against Israel + pressure the White House OR urge them to start a strike/walkout/etc if they’re not doing anything already
  
• Talk with your friends IRL about Palestine; keep spreading information on social media — don’t let talk of Palestine die down!
  
• See if your city/state council has put out a statement in support of Gazans. If not, try to push them to do so.