2023-12-26 18:00:08
Mr. Macron, in this painful Christmas season for Palestinians of all religions, you have sent us, Palestinian Christians, a message of solidarity and support. In a press release from the Elysée published on December 24 – on the dark night during which yet another massacre took place in Gaza, in the Maghazi refugee camp, costing the lives of more than 70 people – you testify of your concern and support for us from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.
In this press release, you call us “Christians of the Holy Land”. Several times, as if you were afraid that someone would misunderstand you. This is a very strange abuse of language, an imprecision which left me perplexed. We are — this is how we choose to define ourselves, but it is also our historical reality — Palestinian Christians, who participate in what constitutes the Palestinian nation.
A religion whose founding myths were born here
Mr Macron, what do you think you are accomplishing by choosing to misname us? Why have you chosen, in this season, to remove us from our nation? This abuse of language, Mr. Macron, is distressing. It makes us disappear, with the wave of the hand and with a casualness that dismays us in this mourning Christmas, our culture and our traditions.
We practice a religion whose founding myths were born here, in Bethlehem, in Palestine: not in Rome, nor in Constantinople, nor in Moscow, and even less in Paris or Washington. Some do not hesitate to call us “living stones of the Church”. We are not practitioners of a foreign religion in an abstractly holy land.
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We are practitioners of a religion whose primordial story is that of a Jew living under the yoke of occupation; and which is articulated around his luminous birth then his death by an empire and its executioners.
An abuse of language that makes us strangers to our land
We practice this religion under occupation and in a system of apartheid which conditions our access to our holy places, the survival of our culture, and our lives.
This abuse of language makes us strangers to our land and our country. It is yet another means among many used by the great powers, all sides combined, and by Israel to reconfigure Palestine into a supposedly religious issue.
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This approach is practical, because it postulates a form of essential irreconcilability between Jews and Muslims; She obscures the material realities of occupation, colonization, apartheid, and makes the issue of political justice disappear behind a religious fog of a supposed fratricidal and secular opposition.
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