Christmas is not a Western story – it’s a Palestinian story
Christmas is a story of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in their path.
By Reverend Dr Munther Isaac*, Fepal website
Every December, much of the Christian world enters a familiar cycle of celebration: Christmas carols, lights, decorated trees, consumer frenzy, and the welcoming image of a snowy night. In the United States and Europe, public discourse often speaks of “Western Christian values”, even the vague notion of “Judeo-Christian civilization”.
These expressions have become so common that many have come to assume, almost automatically, that Christianity is inherently a Western religion – an expression of European culture, history and identity.
It’s not.
Christianity is, and always has been, a religion of West Asia and the Middle East.
Its geography, its culture, its worldview and its founding stories are rooted in this land, among peoples, languages and social structures that resemble those of today’s Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan much more than anything we imagine in Europe.
Even Judaism, invoked under the term “Judeo-Christian values,” is itself a profoundly Middle Eastern phenomenon. The West received Christianity – it certainly did not give birth to it.
And perhaps nothing more poignantly reveals the distance between the origins of Christianity and its contemporary Western expression than Christmas – the story of the birth of a Palestinian Jew, son of this land, born long before the emergence of modern borders and identities.
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What the West has done with Christmas
In the West, Christmas is a cultural market. It’s commercialized, romanticized, and shrouded in sentimentality. The ostentatious exchange of gifts overshadows any concern for the poor.
The season has become a spectacle of abundance, nostalgia and consumerism – a holiday stripped of its theological and moral core.
Even the familiar lines from the Christmas carol Good night they obscure the true nature of the story: Jesus was not born in serenity, but in the midst of upheaval.
He was born under military occupation, into a family displaced by imperial decree, in a region that lived under the shadow of violence.
The Holy Family was forced to flee as refugees because the babies of Bethlehem, according to the gospel account, were massacred by a frightened tyrant determined to preserve his rule. Sound familiar?
Indeed, Christmas is a story of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in their path.
Belém: imagination versus reality
For many in the West, Bethlehem – the birthplace of Jesus – is a place of imagination – a postcard from antiquity, frozen in time.
The “small town” is remembered as a quaint town from Scripture, rather than a living, breathing city with real people and a distinct history and culture.
Belém is today surrounded by walls and checkpoints built by an occupier. Its inhabitants live under a system of apartheid and fragmentation. Many feel isolated, not only from Jerusalem – which the occupier does not allow them to visit – but also from the global Christian imagination, which reveres Bethlehem’s past while often ignoring its present.
This sentiment also explains why so many people in the West, while celebrating Christmas, have little concern for the Christians of Bethlehem. Worse, many embrace theologies and political attitudes that erase or completely reject our presence in favor of Israel, the empire of today.
In these frameworks, ancient Bethlehem is considered a sacred idea, but modern Bethlehem – with its suffering Palestinian Christians struggling to survive – is an inconvenient reality that must be ignored.
This disconnect is important. When Western Christians forget that Bethlehem really exists, they become disconnected from their spiritual roots. And when they forget that Bethlehem is real, they also forget that the Christmas story is real.
They forget that this took place among a people who lived under an empire, who faced displacement, who longed for justice, and who believed that God was not far away, but among them.
What Christmas Means for Bethlehem
So what does Christmas look like when told from the perspective of those who still live where it all began: Palestinian Christians? What meaning does this have for a small community that has preserved its faith for two millennia?
Ultimately, Christmas is the story of God’s solidarity.
It is the story of a God who does not rule from a distance, but who is present among the people and takes the side of those on the margins. The incarnation – the belief that God has become flesh – is not a metaphysical abstraction. It is a radical statement about where God chooses to dwell: in vulnerability, in poverty, among the busy, among those who have no power other than that of hope.
In the story of Bethlehem, God does not identify with the emperors, but with those who suffer under the empire: its victims. God does not come as a warrior, but as a baby.
God is not present in a palace, but in a manger. This is divine solidarity in its most impressive form: God unites with the most vulnerable part of humanity.
Christmas is therefore the proclamation of a God who confronts the logic of empire.
For Palestinians today, this is not just a theology, but a lived experience. When we read the Christmas story, we recognize our own world: the census that forced Mary and Joseph to travel resembles the permits, checkpoints, and bureaucratic controls that shape our daily lives today.
The Sagrada Familia escape resonates with the millions of refugees who have fled wars in our region. Herod’s violence echoes the violence we see around us.
Christmas is, par excellence, a Palestinian story.
A message to the world
Belém celebrates Christmas for the first time after two years without public festivities. It was painful but necessary to cancel our celebrations; we had no choice.
A genocide was taking place in Gaza, and as people still living in the homeland of Christmas, we could not pretend otherwise. We could not celebrate the birth of Jesus while children his age were being pulled dead from the rubble.
Celebrating this season does not mean that war, genocide, or apartheid structures are over. People are still being killed. We are still under siege.
Rather, our celebration is an act of resilience – a declaration that we are still here, that Belém remains the capital of Christmas, and that the story this city tells must continue.
At a time when Western political discourse increasingly instrumentalizes Christianity as a marker of cultural identity – often excluding the very people among whom Christianity was born – it is vital to return to the roots of this history.
This Christmas, our invitation to the global Church – and to Western Christians in particular – is to remember where history began. Remember that Belém is not a myth, but a place where people still live.
If the Christian world wants to honor the meaning of Christmas, it must turn its gaze to Bethlehem – not the imaginary one, but the real city, whose inhabitants still demand justice, dignity and peace today.
To remember Bethlehem is to remember that God is on the side of the oppressed – and that Jesus’ followers are called to do the same.
*Reverend Dr Munther Isaac is a Palestinian pastor and theologian. He is pastor of Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in Ramallah and director of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice. Article published on 12/24/2025 in Al Jazeera
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