Bethlehem in the Nativity and in the West Bank

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Earlier this year, I read Guy Delisle’s excellent comic Chroniques de Jérusalem twice in the course of two months. I began by finally checking out the English translation from a local library to give it a try (I like Delisle, but I’d had trouble getting into this particular comic in the past). Then, as I was getting into it, my brother-in-law texted me from New York to say he was stopping by a local French bookstore and ask if I wanted anything. I wanted the original French version, he picked it up, and I immediately reread the book (is it rereading if it’s in two different languages?) as soon as it arrived.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this book since the Hamas attacks in October and the ongoing Israeli reprisals. Delisle doesn’t have a particular thesis to his book—the comic is simply an attempt to capture the year that his family spent in East Jerusalem while his partner worked in Gaza for Doctors without Borders. It’s more travelogue than political argument, but it’s the kind of travelogue that involves navigating checkpoints while traveling through the West Bank and seeing fighter jets on their way to bombard Gaza while watching your kids play outside. There’s something about the almost-banality of Delisle’s perspective that makes it powerful in its own way, and reading the book twice in a short period profoundly affected my thinking.

American Christians have a lot of thoughts about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza right now, and I’m not sure how many of those thoughts are warranted. This isn’t to say that American Christians shouldn’t have thoughts about what’s going on: I rather appreciate what the Friends Committee on National Legislation has been up to, not to mention my own church. Rather, it’s a recognition that many American Christians’ views about the Israel-Hamas war are driven by a superficial, conservative Christian theology rather than any serious empathy with the stakeholders or any serious commitment to peace or justice. In short, their disregard for Palestinians is driven by an Islamophobia that is dogwhistled at best, and even their purported support for Israel is ultimately driven by supersessionist, fundamentally anti-Jewish religious attitudes.

With all that—and much more—in mind, I’m hesitant to say that Christians ought to have anything to say about this conflict that’s driven exclusively by distinct Christian doctrines and traditions. And yet, Christians are heading into a time of year where we think a lot about Bethlehem, and that gets me thinking about a specific scene from Delisle’s book. For the Christmas of 2008, some friends have come to visit, and although Delisle (like, presumably, his friends) isn’t particularly religious, he begins by taking them to Bethlehem to see the purported birthplace of Jesus. Of course, though, Bethlehem is in the West Bank and inolves navigating walls and checkpoints, leading to the following panels:

As Delisle puts it, tourists leave for Bethlehem with the mental picture on the left, but come back with the mental picture on the right. It’s one thing to know something about a town called Bethlehem in the Christian scriptures—it’s another thing to visit the town itself, to see it surrounded by illegal settlements and 8-meter high walls. This picture from Wikipedia is even more striking than Delisle’s illustration:

Die Mauer von Bethlehem, by Dirk D., is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

So no, I don’t believe that the importance of Bethlehem in Christian tradition necessarily gives American Christians the right to express an opinion about the West Bank on those grounds alone. Yet, it would be a shame to invoke a little town of Bethlehem this Christmas season and not ask ourselves what the experience of people living there today is—and what a better world might look like for the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza.

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