Christmas is not a Western story – it’s a Palestinian story | Notice

Every December, much of the Christian world enters a familiar cycle of celebrations: Christmas carols, lights, decorated trees, consumer frenzy, and warm images 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 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, culture, worldview and 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 far more than anything imaginable in Europe. Even Judaism, invoked under the term “Judeo-Christian values”, is itself a typically Middle Eastern phenomenon. The West received Christianity – it certainly did not give birth to it.

And perhaps nothing reveals the distance between the origins of Christianity and its contemporary Western expression more clearly than Christmas – the story of the birth of a Palestinian Jew, a child of this land born long before the emergence of modern borders and identities.

What the West has done with Christmas

In the West, Christmas is a cultural market. It’s commercialized, romanticized, and shrouded in sentimentality. Lavish gifts overshadow 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 song Silent Night obscure the true nature of the story: Jesus was not born into serenity but into upheaval.

He was born under military occupation, into a family displaced by imperial decree, in a region living under the shadow of violence. The holy family was forced to flee as refugees because the children of Bethlehem, according to the gospel account, were massacred by a fearful tyrant determined to preserve his rule. Sound familiar?

Indeed, Christmas is a story of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in its path.

Bethlehem: 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 village from Scripture rather than as a living, breathing city with real people, with a distinct history and culture.

Bethlehem today is surrounded by walls and checkpoints built by an occupier. Its inhabitants live under a system of apartheid and fragmentation. Many feel cut off, 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 entirely reject our presence in order to support Israel, today’s empire.

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 God who does not rule from afar, but who is present among the people and takes the side of those on the margins. The incarnation – the belief that God has taken on 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 child. God is not present in a palace but in a manger. This is divine solidarity in its most striking form: God joins 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 theology: it is 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 flight of the Holy Family 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 a Palestinian story par excellence.

A message to the world

Bethlehem celebrates Christmas for the first time after two years without public festivities. It was painful but necessary for us 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 the end of war, genocide or the structures of apartheid. 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 Bethlehem remains the capital of Christmas, and that the story this city tells must continue.

At a time when Western political discourse increasingly uses Christianity as a marker of cultural identity – often excluding the very people among whom Christianity was born – it is essential 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 Bethlehem 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 reality, a city whose inhabitants still cry out today for justice, dignity and peace.

To remember Bethlehem is to remember that God stands with the oppressed – and that Jesus’ followers are called to do the same.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.