The Grinches Who Stole Jerusalem

Department

Art

Document Type

Editorial

Publication Date

12-25-2017

Abstract

In the last few days several attempts to pen a Christmas Day posting failed. Procrastination, that debilitating and enervating affliction, took over, sapping, draining, and hampering my thoughts and playing havoc with my emotions.

In fact, I spent this cloudy and very dreary Saturday morning raking leaves, hauling mounds of wet leaves and dumping them onto the compost pile, thinning out brush, pruning trees, cleaning the garage, rearranging tools in my workshop, and basically killing time to avoid having to sit down and wood peck on the keyboard.

And the reason?

All Christian Palestinians celebrate Christmas with competing emotions. This is a time of the year during which Palestinian Christian families, like most Christian celebrants around the world, gather to celebrate the birth of the Nazarene, that Palestinian Jewish child, the Prince of Peace, the King of Kings, the Almighty Savior. And what are feasts without food? Instead of turkey, all the trimmings, and a miscellany of deserts, Palestinians will no doubt feast by partaking spicy lamb, chicken, pinion-nut-sprinkled rice, all the trimmings (including hummus which Israelis have appropriated as their own – along with everything Palestinian that has been scrooged by these colonial settlers), and a miscellany of deserts such as baklava, burma, knafe, and hareesa. Unlike most Christian celebrants, however, and especially among those who’ve experienced their Palestine under the brutal Israeli occupation (and/or the infamous refugee camps), Christmas is a reminder that Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Gaza, and (more recently) Yemen are under the worst and certainly most oppressive modern military occupations and sieges compliments of paramours Israel and the United States of Israel, including Saudi Arabia, the Donald’s most recent BFF.

Publication Title

CounterPunch

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