“Long time ago in Bethlehem” or so the whole Christian community says every Christmas time.
“O come ye, o come ye to Bethlehem” we reverently sing; but the Bethlehem in that exhortation refers not to the blighted Bethlehem of today but to events that unfolded two thousand years ago when Mary, a blessed lady of meagre means, made her way to Bethlehem and gave birth to a child.
Fast forward to 2014. A Palestinian mother-to-be, Mariam, sets out in a neighbour’s car and tries to make her way to a hospital in Bethlehem. She never makes it nor does the child inside her. For they are stopped; brutally stopped at checkpoints by teenage soldiers – many freshly arrived from Europe – bearing Uzi sub-machine guns which they point at her. But it’s not the guns or their bullets that hurt so much as their jeering remarks.
Mariam, the woman in labour is not let through the gate and is forced to give birth to a stillborn in full public gaze. Palestinian women or/and their babies often die at checkpoints from complication under the watch of leery occupation soldiers. As far back as 2006, the United Nations Development Fund for Women and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) reported that “an estimated 2,500 births per year face difficulties en route to a delivery facility.”
But what of the Palestinian child who survives his checkpoint birth and does make it into this world? What is his or her fate in the ‘Holy’ Land? In a word: worse. The European Union and human rights organisations, like Defence for Children International (DCI), B’Tselem, Addameer and UNICEF, document how hundreds of Palestinian children undergo widespread ill-treatment and torture at the hands of the Israeli army and police force. It is best to quote directly from the UNICEF report, Children in Israeli Military Detention:
“Many children are arrested in the middle of the night, awakened to the frightening sound of heavily armed soldiers banging loudly on their front door and shouting instructions for the family to leave the house.
Once a child has been identified, he or she is hand-tied and blindfolded and led to a waiting military vehicle for transfer to an interrogation site.
Many children are subjected to ill-treatment during the journey to the interrogation centre. Some endure physical or verbal abuse; some suffer from painful restraints or from being forced to lie on the hard floor of the vehicle. The most common sites for interrogation of children from the West Bank have been the police stations in the settlements as well as Ofer Prison and Huwwara Interrogation Centre.
The children are questioned by men dressed in civilian clothes or military uniforms, or sometimes in Israeli police uniforms. No child has been accompanied by a lawyer or family member during the interrogation, despite article 37(d) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. There is no independent oversight of the interrogation process.”- UNICEF REPORT
Palestinian adults fare no better. There are approximately 4,600 Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli jails. Nearly every Palestinian family has been touched by political imprisonment – a father, mother, son, daughter, sister, brother, cousin, uncle, aunt.
Administrative detention is a procedure that allows the Israeli military to hold prisoners indefinitely on secret evidence without charging them or allowing them to stand trial. It is renewable indefinitely. Palestinians are not charged with any crime, nor are they brought to trial.
This is the reality of today’s Bethlehem that nobody – not the caroller, not the padre and certainly not the reveller – talks about. Some don’t know; many don’t want to know, and others who know don’t care. Christianity stops where today’s Bethlehem starts. It is not the harsh reality of today’s Bethlehem, but a ‘star-in-the-sky-shepherds-watching-their-flocks-by-night’ collage of romanticised images that Bethlehem evokes in Christian minds.
Things are even worse for the Palestinians in Gaza who have been under a relentless, life-crippling starvation siege since 2006. But no one wants to know. In all my 59 years, I cannot recall a single padre mention the plight of the Palestinians – not even at Christmas when we are obliged to think of the oppressed.
“Why do they fight back with rockets? Why,” Many Goans ask me and my colleagues, Sr Lisa Pires, Advocate Albertina Almeida and Mac Vaz, “don’t the Palestinians respond to the theft of their land non-violently?
Well, the answer is: they do! The very fact that 99% of the Palestinian population day-after-day, decade-after-decade meekly go on living their lives under conditions which make normal activities – going to school, work, hospital, markets – a living nightmare is itself suggestive of extreme non-violence.
Goans have called me “a donkey” and ask: “Who is paying you?” whenever I bring this up in social media like the Facebook group Goa Speaks. “Why should they respond with rockets? The Brits colonised us, but we didn’t fire rockets at them, so why should the Palestinians on their colonisers?” they ask.
That is a comparison of incomparables. True, India was colonised, but: (i) the British didn’t acquire India as a result of a genocide (as Israel did in 1947-’48 destroying 543 villages, massacring, raping, looting and eventually expelling 80 per cent of the Palestinians); they came in as traders, took sides in battles between rival rulers and built their empire gradually by political arrangements like ‘subsidiary alliances’ and ‘suzerainty’ over 175 princely states. Yes, the senior most positions were held by the British; but most Indians were administered by fellow Indians at varying echelons (ii) Indians were not expelled from India and their land and homes taken over by English families.
The Palestinians are the indigenous people of their land in as much as the aboriginals and Red Indians are of theirs. Gandhi recognised this when he said: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct.”
Bravo to the school children from Avedem, Quepem who, as Albertina Almeida mentioned in her excellent article, Goans for Palestine, re-enacted a checkpoint scene at their school assembly! They care. In their tender hearts resides the true spirit of Christmas.
It resides too in the heart of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu who reiterated his support for the Palestinian-led campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel: “People who are denied their dignity and rights deserve the solidarity of their fellow human beings. I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing in the Holy Land that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under Apartheid.”
(David Albuquerque is an ex-teacher of St Anthony’s School, Majorda, who now teaches and resides in Brisbane. He is a keen, serious and passionate student, and supporter of the Palestine cause and a messenger of the ground situation there. His views are his own)
