Checkpoint 300 is a military post manned by the Israel Defense Forces on the edge of the Palestinian town of Bethlehem, where the New Testament tells us Jesus was born.
Nearby, there are concrete blast walls plastered with layer upon layer of graffiti that have emerged through the years of military occupation in West Bank towns like Bethlehem. The walls are a fixture of life in a dangerous land along lines that separate the Palestinians who live in the West Bank from the Israelis who live alongside them, and the walls have become a public canvas for expressions of protest that represent hope and despair, violence and peace.
On one of these blast walls on the edge of Bethlehem, there is a spray-painted stencil that shows an iconic image of Mary holding the baby Jesus. Both mother and child are adorned with halos fashioned out of barbed wire and in bold block letters beneath their image is a blunt warning: “CAUTION: BALLISTIC PROTECTION REQUIRED.”
The reality and the irony of life in the Holy Land is always stark, and particularly this week with more expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank which defy international law and renewed Palestinian violence with a car ramming and stabbing attack that killed two Israelis.
If you go past this blast wall and up the narrow streets that rise into what is known as Manger Square, there is a Crusader-era church which tradition holds is built atop the place where Jesus was born more than 2,000 years ago in a cave on the edge of a field where shepherds kept their flock.
In Manger Square, last December, a Christmas tree was lit for the first time in the two years since an October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas killed 1,200 and resulted in some 250 hostages being taken. That Hamas attack touched off an overwhelming and often indiscriminate Israeli military response that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Rev. Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian pastor of a Lutheran church near Manger Square, was born on a street just off Manger Square in Bethlehem. I’ve known Raheb and followed his work for more than a quarter century since I met him when researching and writing a book about the disappearance of the indigenous Christians of the Holy Land. Based in Jerusalem as the Middle East bureau chief for The Boston Globe between 1997 and 2001, I traveled frequently to Bethlehem and throughout the West Bank and Gaza. I was documenting the daily news stories unfolding there around the hope in the then fledgling peace process and its collapse into the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising. During that time, I was conducting research on the steady erosion of the Christian presence in the land where the faith began.
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Through one generation after another, the local Christian population of the Middle East has steadily fled the violence and uncertainty of towns like Bethlehem. Raheb tends to a dwindling flock, and has made a mark internationally as a leading theologian. Last December, he put out a holiday message that said, “Bethlehem gave Jesus to the world. It is high time for the world to give Bethlehem and Palestine justice and peace.”
In 2025, Raheb has edited a new book with contributions from 20 fellow theologians who are Christian, Muslim and Jewish. Together, these theologians examine the theological ramifications of the war on Gaza from a global perspective, dealing with such issues as genocide, settler colonialism, and international power dynamics.
The book is titled “Theology After Gaza: A Global Anthology,” and it is published by Cascade Books. It is co-edited by Raheb along with scholar Graham McGeoch, who is also a minister of the Church of Scotland. In this book, Raheb laments the disappearance of Palestinian Christians, particularly in Gaza, saying, “We are witnessing the death of a Christian community that was once a major thriving Christian hub in the region.”
The book was recently featured in the National Catholic Reporter and recounts some of its leading writers, including Dominican Fr. Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez, a professor of theology at Boston College, who writes that, “Reconciliation in Palestine appears today as an ethical-political challenge for human civilization. Either we achieve paths between two brotherly peoples, or we fail as humanity.”
Atalia Omer, a Jewish Israeli scholar who teaches at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, writes that due to events in Gaza,“The Jewish tradition is shattered, like the tablets of the commandments. The repair of Judaism means its decolonization, and this process will go hand in hand with decolonizing Palestine and centering Palestinian claims and demands.”
As the year 2025 has ended, Israelis and Palestinians and Christians, Muslims and Jews around the world are looking ahead to 2026 and hoping that a two-month-old ceasefire will hold. So far it is hard to have faith as both sides continue to violate its terms and the killing, while thankfully curtailed, is still continuing. The ceasefire agreement between Israelis and Palestinians and the hope for any lasting peace in the Holy Land feels as frail and vulnerable as the infant born in poverty and occupation in the town of Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago during Second Temple Judaism. That infant’s birth and the message of peace he brought onto the world are told in texts as ancient as the New Testament and in depictions as modern as the stenciling of the graffiti artist who just recently spraypainted it on the blast wall near Checkpoint 300 on the edge of Bethlehem.
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This article originally appeared on Charlessennott.substack.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org
