Bethlehem, West Bank

This year, Christmas lights have returned to Bethlehem, the West Bank city where, according to Christian tradition, the baby Jesus was born in a manger, warmed only by straw and the heat of an ox and a donkey. These lights are meant to offer a semblance of a return to some semblance of normalcy after two years of war and genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israel's ultra-religious and far-right government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu. A large tree adorned with lights and stars stands in the middle of the city's main square, known as Manger Square, near the Church of the Nativity, which claims to be the oldest church in the world. These are attempts to attract tourists once again, and indeed, some have already ventured back to Bethlehem during this festive period. They are engaging in a type of tourism that straddles the line between religious, cultural, and even morbid or disaster-seeking tourism.

These lights are just what we said, an illusion. Bethlehem is about ten kilometers from Jerusalem, but even a journey like this is complicated and dangerous because Bethlehem is surrounded by Israeli army checkpoints. During the months of peak media attention, the spotlight was on Gaza for obvious reasons, but the West Bank—including East Jerusalem—continued and continues to endure extreme pressure, with severe restrictions on fundamental civil liberties (freedom of movement and assembly, to begin with), destruction of olive groves, landscape and cultural significance, and forced and arbitrary arrests and displacements.

In Gaza, meanwhile, things haven't improved since Trump's supposed peace plan, presented in mid-October with a pomp directly proportional to its futility. As the most reliable analysts warned at the time, what was touted as a success of Trump's mediation (celebrations in Tel Aviv and Sharm el-Sheikh, the American president's triumphant speech before the Knesset, the signing of the peace agreement at a Red Sea resort in the presence of some thirty people, a ceasefire, and the return of the hostages—always precarious, as it turned out)—has only truly served to appease Trump's insatiable vanity and to remove the genocide in Palestine from international headlines and news reports.

However, the genocide continues. Among the Israeli soldiers are murderers, rapists, torturers, and looters. But above all, the Netanyahu and Trump governments remain as aligned as ever in the objectives coldly stated by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich last September at a meeting with construction executives: "The Gaza Strip is a gold mine that we will share with the US. We have invested a lot of money in the US; now it's time for reconstruction." The local population is simply superfluous.