OPINION: Slaughter of the innocents

Baby. Manger. Swaddling clothes. Stable. Angel. Star. Shepherds. Magi. No room at the inn. Galway. All those words are very difficult this year, especially as Christmas has been cancelled in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. It has been cancelled because of the slaughter of the innocents – 8,000 children have been killed in Gaza by US-made bombs since October 7.

That’s greater than the population of Westport and its environs. And that’s only the number of children killed. Another 10,000 women and men have also been killed.

Slaughter of the innocents now takes on a new meaning. We have a new King Herod directing his ‘shoot-to-kill’ army. Whether it’s the White House or the Knesset or both is irrelevant, it is still sanctioned by both. The imprimatur of death.

Rev Isaac, the Lutheran pastor of Bethlehem, has a ‘crib’ where Jesus is lying in the rubble while all other Nativity figures are ‘outside’, searching for the child in the rubble. That’s the crib in 2023.

Jewish writer, Anna Baltzer, had an interesting opinion piece in Common Dreams (an independent news outlet) last month in the wake of the Hamas attack. “Let me be clear: Hamas’ killings of Israeli civilians were wrong, in clear violation of international law. But they weren’t about antisemitism,” she writes.

“The key thing to understand is that, in Israel/Palestine, unlike anywhere else in the world, Jewish people—specifically white Ashkenazi Jews—are the ones in power. Jewish Israelis are the occupiers and Palestinians are the occupied.

“When I spent eight months in the West Bank documenting human rights abuses, I saw the way Israel controls every aspect of Palestinian life, separating Palestinians from their schools and hospitals; torching their olive groves, demolishing their homes, imprisoning them without trial, discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel and bringing about the slow, sometimes quick, death of Palestinians in Gaza by cutting them off from the outside world, putting them on a collective ‘diet’, and periodically bombing civilian infrastructure, homes, and families.

“Palestinians, of course, do not care what religion their occupiers are. Like all occupied people, they will resist whoever is occupying them… We need a basic analysis of power and history to understand that Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians, while egregious, had nothing to do with those Israelis’ religion and everything to do with occupation and settler colonialism.”

She quotes from the Hamas 2017 charter, which mentions Jews in one section: “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious, or sectarian grounds… antisemitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage...”

Ms Baltzer also states that she does not believe US support for Israel is driven by concern for Jewish safety. “It is driven by US imperial interests,” she argues. “Antisemitism is real, anti-Arab racism is real, and right now, two historically oppressed groups are being pitted against each other in service of white supremacy and colonialism. And misrepresentations of antisemitism are performing the central function of stopping well-intentioned people – Jews and non-Jews alike – from rising to the immense urgency of this moment to stop genocide and resist US imperialism.

“… Jews can grieve for Israeli loved ones lost or held in Gaza and refuse the weaponisation of that grief to commit genocide against Palestinians.”

Flip the coin and travel from the Holy Land to Galway, where there is also no room at the inn. The ‘stable’ is in flames. The Irish Government gives ammunition to the wrong people with its policy of excluding local people from decision making and planning when it seeks to house asylum seekers and refugees. We weep for Palestinians, rightly, yet oppose others, shamefully.

How quickly we forget. Happy New Year.