As a Catholic Christian I celebrate at Christmas the nativity (birth) of Jesus.
The story is well known: Joseph walks alongside his pregnant wife Mary on a donkey across difficult terrain on their journey of c140km from their home in the town of Nazareth in Galilee to his ancestral home of Bethlehem in Judea in order to register for a census required by the Roman authorities. Once there they found there was no room available to rent. So they managed to take shelter in a stable for animals where Mary subsequently gave birth laying the new born baby in a manger (animal feeding trough). Nearly 2 weeks later three magi or priests followed a star to Bethlehem from the lands of the Parthian Empire where they gave gifts for the baby Jesus. Later soldiers carried out the orders of King Herod the Great (the ruler of the Roman vassal state of Judea) to kill all baby boys under the age of two to stop the fulfillment of a prophesy that one would become a future "King of the Jews".
That was over 2000 years ago. Yet the story of Jesus resonates today in the land of his birth. Pope Leo, the spiritual leader of Catholics, correctly gave a modern reference to the nativity when he said in his first Christmas sermon that the story of Jesus being born in a stable showed that God had “pitched his fragile tent” among the peoples of the world. He was alluding to the fact that nearly 2 million Palestinians in the land of Jesus’ birth live today in cold, hunger, squalor and without the basic necessities of life such as clean water, sanitation, education and work, confined largely to hastily erected tents immersed in floods along a seashore battered by the winds and rain of vicious storms after their homes, neighbourhoods schools and workplaces were systemically destroyed by an Israeli military using an estimated total of 200,000 tonnes of explosives, which is equivalent to the total energy of approximately 13 Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs.
But in spite of the poverty and terror of the Holy Land during the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, it is unlikely that the Nativity could occur today. A Palestinian Arab from Nazareth would be generally forbidden from traveling to Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank even if it was his ancestral city. Likewise for Palestinians going in the opposite direction. Even if they managed to get a permit from the occupying military power, they would have to go through multiple Israeli checkpoints, a 8 metre high separation wall as well as encounter illegal settlements and their armed Jewish residents who are increasingly and violently taking over Palestinian lands, attacking, evicting and killing the indigenous population. Where Palestinians have being forced by an Israeli campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide to escape to nearby Jordan or Egypt, unlike the family of Jesus who temporarily fled to Egypt to save their lives, they would never be allowed to return to their homes, which would be given to Jewish colonists.
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