Nativity Crime Scene

This Christmas we can't ignore genocide in Gaza and escalating conflict in the region—no matter how tempting that may be.

As we near Christmas, I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the Middle East, which I have long avoided diving into because there’s just so much blood in the water. (Jaws would have a field day.)

Even though it makes me sick, I have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Oct. 7, 2023, the ensuing carnage, and the conditions that led to all of it. I would write and talk about it more, but Israel-Palestine is not a popular subject in “polite” circles (not to mention impolite ones). For many (misinformed, provincial-minded, typical) Americans, it’s not a subject at all beyond its religious/Bibilcal implications. I posit that more Americans have read the entire Bible (covering at least 4,000 years of Jewish history) than have bothered to read so much as a pamphlet on modern-day Israel. They probably think “Netanyahu” is a failed internet company that keeps trying to stay relevant.

Plenty of otherwise educated people don’t know shit about the Middle East—except that someone holy named Jesus died there a long time ago, Jews and Muslims live there now, and they’re always fighting. (No one can ever get along for some goddam reason.) Thousands of years of bloodshed, tyrants, terrorism, and so on. It’s a tired trope, and it conveniently lets the West—and the United States, especially—off the hook for its contributions to the madness.

We are funding and supporting genocide, my friends. There is no polite way to put it. We’re putting weapons and intelligence into the hands of remorseless, high-tech killers who can’t come across a hospital, school, or journalist anywhere in the region without blowing it up. Take that news to your Christmas dinner table. And tell your family that the slaughterhouse that is Gaza, and the police “state” that is the illegally occupied and settled West Bank, would not be possible without American complicity: We pay billions for this, and we don’t even keep the receipts.

I wish I could say that things were trending in the right direction, but news from the region seems bleaker than ever. Israel, a nation-state of unhealed trauma if there ever was one, knows it has a greenlight from its few-but-mighty allies and enablers, so it has only expanded its war of vengeance: To Lebanon, Iran, and now to Syria—taking advantage of the fall of the Assad regime by bombing the hell out of coastal Syria and occupying more of the Golan Heights. And it feels like things are just warming up.

But fuck all that, right? It’s Christmas. Time to get drunk, stuff our faces, and open shiny, non-recyclable packages filled with unrecognizable shit we don’t need. Even if a few body parts ended up in those packages and someone filled our celebratory wine bottle with blood, we wouldn’t notice: We would turn it off the way we turn off our TV sets when bad news from abroad streams in. Americans live in a manufactured, store-bought reality 365 days a year—Christmas just happens to have a Jewish and Middle Eastern flavor.

For me, the Middle East is not an abstraction. I can still remember the tastes, sights, sounds, and smells up close. In 2012, I traveled to the West Bank and beyond: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus. I swam in the Red Sea without a bathing suit, crossed checkpoints, fasted for Ramadan (a little), smoked hookah, drank beer, and ate the best goddam food I’d ever eaten. I met Israeli activists, Palestinian humanitarians, an armed Jewish settler (asshole) from New Jersey, and the great Miko Peled. I visited mosques, synagogues, and churches. I even hit on women I had no business looking at—as I learned later.

But one of my sharpest memories is crossing a checkpoint between Gaza and Sderot (a town in Israel) and meeting a Gazan who was headed abroad for the first time to attend university in Europe on scholarship. I had never seen a bigger smile on a man’s face. Most Western men would be ashamed to smile that much.

I wish I could say there were more smiles to go around—but Gaza, then tightly controlled like a penal colony, is now a graveyard. Tens of thousands are dead based on conservative estimates, which no one who’s paying attention could believe. I think it makes more sense to track who’s alive in Gaza—especially in the northern part, which continues to be “ethnically cleansed” as I write this. This must be done, of course, because every Palestinian in Gaza (and beyond) is somehow responsible for the killings and kidnappings on Oct. 7—even children too young to know Hamas from hummus. (This is what you’d have to believe to accept the status quo: You’d have to be a bloodthirsty moron, basically.) It’s too much madness even for me.

And that’s all I have the stomach to write for today—I’ll likely take a break for the next week or so. This has made me a lot sadder than my usual rants, and I shouldn’t be so sad around Christmas. It could just be an empty savior complex of some sort. After all, I’m with the ones I love, I’m far from Gaza, and my neighborhood isn’t under siege—at least not until my political enemies trace my IP address and decide to take me out before I gain too much of a following. I likely made far more of them by writing this.

It’s a wonderful life indeed.

Merry goddam Christmas!