Christmas is a threat to Israel
by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:
Cheap calls for peace prolong the agony.
Our carol service this year was unusually sombre. We gathered to hear once again the message of the angels, of the cry for the redemption of Israel, of peace on earth and goodwill to all. And we sang:
“Beneath the angel-strain have rolled,
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song that they bring; –
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!”
No one was unaware that the place we were singing about is now a place of war — of white phosphorus instead of Christmas lights, of terrified hostages hidden in dark tunnels, of starving civilians, where evil emanates from Hamas not Herod. We sang also of a little town called Bethlehem, “how still we see thee lie”. It felt both thoroughly disconnected from reality — and yet also disturbingly relevant. How can we not call for peace at Christmas? Or for a ceasefire, at least.
Having family over there, I know Israel as a place of ordinary life, a place like other places, domestic and everyday: a place of shopping and traffic jams, of offices and factories, of children making their way to school and parents thinking about what to cook for tea. Occasionally, I am so immersed in ordinary domestic life that it is sometimes just possible to forget that the names on the road signs are names that occur in my Bible. As a priest, it took me quite a long time to disaggregate the ordinariness of Israel from the sense of religious romance that I inevitably carried with me and attached to all these place names.
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