Maeve Higgins: Children the victims in birthplace of Jesus Christ

A man dressed in a Santa outfit walks alongside Israel’s separation wall in Bethlehem on December 22, 2022. Picture: Hazam Bader/AFP

Like the best old Hollywood actresses, trying to find out what year Jesus Christ was born is next to impossible.

But scholars and historians have largely agreed upon the place he was born in — Bethlehem, in Palestine.

Jesus was born a Jewish Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem, a town that today, sadly, sits right at the heart of one of the most intractable conflicts in the world — that between Israel and Palestine.

It sits on a huge aquifer, one of Israel’s primary water sources. In 1967, the Israelis took control of a pumping station in Bethlehem, which later became the site of an Israeli settlement. They kept coming, and now there are dozens of settlements and thousands of illegal Israeli settlers surrounding Bethlehem, completely disrupting residents’ lives.

Speaking to National Geographic in 2017, Nicholas Blincoe, author of Bethlehem: Biography of a Town, said: “Between the settlements and Bethlehem, there is a settler ring road; and between that and Bethlehem, there’s a wall. It is an open-air prison. There’s no other way to describe it.”

This Christmas, as millions celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, it’s important to understand what life is like for children in Palestine today.

As the year draws to a close, it’s terrible to note that 2022 has been one of the deadliest for children in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And according to the United Nations, it has been the deadliest year for all Palestinians since 2006.

Israel is running military raids and killing Palestinians in their own cities and villages, including Bethlehem, on a near-daily basis. There is a rise too in Palestinian armed attacks, and an increase in Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians.

The situation seems to be reaching a boiling point. Still, with the incoming Israeli coalition government set to be the most right-wing and anti-Palestinian government yet, it could well get worse. And it’s a grim truth of occupation and racism that the children often pay the price.

According to Defense for Children International, around 2,200 children have been killed by the Israeli military and Israeli settlers across the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2000.

Virginia Gamba is the special representative of the UN secretary-general for children and armed conflict. She visited the West Bank and the Gaza Strip earlier this month as the violence and attacks on Palestinians escalated. Gamba said she was “aware of the daily crimes committed against Palestinian children” and met with families of the Palestinian child victims to hear from them about “the grave violations that rise to the level of crimes committed by the occupation forces against Palestinian children”.

During her meeting with Palestinian foreign minister Riyad Al-Maliki in Ramallah, she received a report that included details of Israel’s “systematic and deliberate crimes against the Palestinian children, which fall within the framework of Security Council Resolution 1612 (2005)”.

This resolution covers the killing and maiming of children, targeting schools and hospitals, sexual assaults, kidnapping of children, and denying access to humanitarian and medical aid. Reading that list is horrific enough. Can you imagine living there with your children, or being a child there yourself?

Child killing

A couple of weeks ago in Jenin, the Israeli army raided the occupied town on a Sunday night and started what is now a predictable wave of gunfire and firebombs. Jana Zakaran, 16, went up to the roof of her building to get her cat to safety. When she didn’t return, her father went to look for her.

Palestinian women react during the funeral of Jana Zakaran, 16, in the West Bank city of Jenin.

He found his child dead, her cat beside her.

“She was killed in cold blood by the Israelis — she was alone on the roof,” Zara’s uncle Majed Zakaran was quoted as saying by The Guardian newspaper. “She was just a child, and they shot her four times in the head and chest.”

The story of one child born in Palestine changed the entire world’s destiny. The story of another child killed in Palestine should do the same thing, but will it change anything?

In her book, They Called Me A Lioness, A Palestinian Girl’s Fight For Freedom, published this year, Ahed Tamimi gives a stunning account of her own childhood in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, which became a centre of the resistance to Israeli occupation when an illegal, Jewish-only settlement blocked off its community spring.

In 2017, when Tamimi was 16 years old, she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier who refused to leave her front yard. The video went viral, and Tamimi was arrested and, despite her youth, imprisoned for months.

Nobody should have to grow up the way she did, with the slow and grinding humiliation of life under occupation, punctuated by the terror of Israeli violence. She saw family and friends shot and imprisoned by Israel right throughout her short life.

 Tamimi’s experience has been terrible, but her outlook is hugely impressive.

She is 21 now and studying law, her courage still intact as she vows never to leave Palestine. She sees a future worth staying for, and worth fighting for, noting a kind of steadfastness among other Palestinians that she calls ‘sumood’.

Tamimi writes that wherever she looks, she sees walls and soldiers and hate, but she also sees sumood.

“I see it in the persistence of every villager who plants a new olive tree immediately after Israeli settlers set fire to their existing ones. I see it in the smiling faces of the children playing outside with such joy despite growing up in a giant cage.

“I have hope that those children and their children will have a better life than the one I’ve lived.”