WHAT is the difference between last year’s “Christ in the Rubble” crib in the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, in Bethlehem, (News, 15 December 2023) and this year’s “Crib with the Keffiyeh” at the Vatican? The answer is the level of outrage that it is causing in Israel.
The keffiyeh is the chequered headscarf that has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israeli aggression. Pope Francis has just been photographed praying in front of a nativity scene, presented to the Vatican by craftsmen from Bethlehem, in which the Holy Family have been carved from local olive trees and the Baby Jesus rests in a manger with a keffiyeh for his bed.
That is not all. The Israeli press have recalled that the Pope has previously described children dying in wars as the “little Jesuses of today”, and recently told an interviewer that Israeli violence in Gaza “should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition” of genocide.
Jesus was a Jew, Israeli papers point out, and yet the Pope is falling for the trope that Jesus was a Palestinian — a line frequently repeated by prominent members of the PLO with statements such as “Every Christmas, Palestine celebrates the birth of one of its own: Jesus.”
There are no simple lines in the modern Middle East. That much is clear from the events this week in Syria. There, perhaps the most grisly government in a region full of brutal regimes has been overthrown by rebels who were once affiliated to al-Qaeda — but who are now rebranding themselves as moderate Islamists pledged to preserve the rights of Syria’s many minorities, including Christians, Druze, and Alawites.
The change has brought many of the people of Syria euphoria. But Western observers are more sceptical. UN agencies have documented abuses in the area that the rebels previously held. Earlier optimistic uprisings in the Arab world — in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen — all resulted in chaotic conflict, or authoritarian rule. In Iran, a popular secular revolution against the autocratic Shah ended with a ruthlessly intolerant theocracy.
The lines are just as confused in the Holy Land. All criticism of Israel is now commonly misrepresented as anti-Semitism. Israel’s right to defend itself is used as a cover-all to justify the slaughter of innocent children. That said, Pope Francis was ill-advised — in his letter to Palestinian Catholics on the anniversary of the murderous Hamas-incursion into Israel on 7 October 2023 — to quote one of the most notoriously anti-Semitic verses in St John’s Gospel.
The spirit of evil that foments war, Pope Francis wrote, is “murderous from the beginning” and “a liar and the father of lies”. With these lines, in John 8.44, Jesus upbraids fellow Jews who questioned his authority; their words, he says, come not from Abraham, but from Satan. Jesus’s words here are historically specific, but, over the centuries, they have been used to vindicate the Christian calumny that the Jews are murderers and children of the devil and have no truth in them.
Apportioning a national identity to Jesus is not helpful. But nor is a denial that the weak, meek, and vulnerable baby in the crib — born under a military occupation, and later a refugee — brings good news for the oppressed, marginalised, and powerless.