Thank you so much for this article. I have had long experience of working in Israel and in Palestine. I was there earlier this year, when Israel brutally bombed the Jenin refugee camp from the air. The mass killing and slaughter is incredibly painful. And thanks for referring to Priyamvada Gopal’s work too; this article by her is interesting and relevant. Is Decolonization “Genocide”? Let’s See<https://zen-catgirl.medium.com/is-decolonization-genocide-lets-see-de91184cb8af> With best wishes, André -- Dr André de Quadros<http://www.andredequadros.com/> Professor of Music, Boston University Distinguished Academic Visitor, Queens’ College, University of Cambridge
From: <[email protected]> on behalf of V M <[email protected]> Reply-To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 5:42 AM To: V M <[email protected]> Subject: [GRN] What Child Is This (O Heraldo, 24/12/2023) https://www.heraldgoa.in/Edit/By-invitation/What-Child-is-This/215628 Today of all days we cannot turn away. This evening at midnight, countless millions of people in every part of the world will celebrate the birth of “whom shepherds guard and angels sing.” That is Palestine, where there will be no Christmas celebrations in the original Manger Square in front of the nearly 2000-year-old Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. “People are grieving and sad about what is happening in Gaza,” the parish priest told Deutsche Welle earlier this week. “This is the first time that the place where Jesus was born, I see it empty like this.” Father Issa Taljieh is a Bethlehem native who has served the famous pilgrimage site for 12 years, where he’s responsible for the Greek Orthodox premises (by ancient agreement, the church is shared with the Catholics and Armenian Apostolic Church). Today, it is under the loose administrative control of the Palestinian National Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas, at the heart of an envelope of territory hemmed in by two bypass roads and 37 separate enclaves for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers. Just like every other part of the occupied West Bank, these are tense environs shrouded in an atmosphere of violence, and it has remained that way for a very long time. I had the opportunity to experience this fraught “holy land” way back in 1984, when my family was granted special permissions to visit Israel that came printed on little slips of paper that were meant to be discarded after we left Ben Gurion Airport on the way home. In those years, like all other Indians, our passports carried this prominent proscription: “Not Valid for Travel to Israel, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia”. Since then, it has become relatively common for many of us to make similar trips, and tens of thousands of Goans have undertaken pilgrimage tours to all the iconic Biblical sites: Jerusalem, Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee. But that was not the case 40 years ago, and we had known no one else from our backgrounds who had made it out there for the apex event that is Midnight Mass in Bethlehem, in what is most likely the oldest Christian site of worship in the world. Unbeknownst to us, that very same Christmas Eve turned out to be an important turning point for Palestine and the Palestinians. The territories of the West Bank had been originally seized from Jordan in 1967, after the so-called Six-Day War, when Israel decisively defeated an Arab coalition (and simultaneously occupied the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt), but were left relatively alone and handled comparatively gingerly until Midnight Mass in 1984, when my family and everyone else was entirely shocked when Shimon Peres suddenly showed up – the first Israeli leader to ever visit the iconic shrine – and popped up onstage in Manger Square to exhort us: “I bring a greeting of peace to all those who seek peace.” It’s an indelible memory: Peres delivering promises that sounded like threats, with an army of snipers standing out against cloudless dark skies on all the surrounding rooftops. The holy night became tinged with menace. What happened since then – the massive expansion of settlements, Intifadas, constant violence and the steady devolution of Israel into an apartheid state – has directly led to the war of extermination being waged against the Palestinians in Gaza, enabled by an increasingly obviously ethnonationalist coalition of the west led by the USA. To the stark horror of yet another generation of young people who expected better from the world, we are seeing exactly how the “rules-based international order” applies only selectively, with some lives valued more than others. Arundhati Roy described this terrible moment in time at an award function in Kerala earlier this month: “Something in our moral selves will be altered forever. Are we going to simply stand by and watch while homes, hospitals, refugee camps, schools, universities, archives are bombed, a million people displaced, and dead children pulled out from under the rubble? The borders of Gaza are sealed. People have nowhere to go. They have no shelter, no food, no water. The United Nations says more than half the population is starving. And still they are being bombed relentlessly. Are we going to once again watch a whole people being dehumanised to the point where their annihilation does not matter?” A couple of days ago on Twitter, the outstanding writer and public intellectual Priyamvada Gopal (she is a professor at Cambridge University in the UK) posted that “I’m dreading the evening we think about a baby born in Bethlehem. Too painful to contemplate.” I agreed at first, but now it seems to me this Christmas Eve is perfectly timed precisely because we are firmly enjoined – via scripture, tradition and historical circumstance too – to think and talk about Palestine. And of course, it’s not only about Palestine but the future targets of the same annihilatory forces. As the German pastor Martin Niemöller famously warned about the Nazis: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Goa-Research-Net" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/goa-research-net/CAN1wPW44WAe79Oexox2ubigHoj16XQdAeUY%3DM1iu1Nzi4ExOHg%40mail.gmail.com<https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/goa-research-net/CAN1wPW44WAe79Oexox2ubigHoj16XQdAeUY%3DM1iu1Nzi4ExOHg%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Goa-Research-Net" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/goa-research-net/36F20D20-9844-4706-9712-3CED9135B254%40bu.edu.
