Phoebe and Crawford and Gus and Chloe would like to wish everybody a Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, Wonderful Kwanza and hoping your Hannukah was blessed.
In case your Christmas service didn’t point out the irony going on right now in the Little Town of Bethlehem, it’s in the walled up Palestinian side of the wall from Jerusalem. Our family wanted to remind you that thanks to a census decree in Luke’s gospel Mary and Joseph were refugees headed to Bethlehem over 2000 years ago. Right now with the conflict between Israel and Hamas there is no easy passage from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. If you add in the fighting in the West Bank and the people forced out of Gaza, there definitely is a lack of available inn space for any Palestinian. We are not placing blame anywhere we are just wanting to make sure you here all of the dialogue and grasp the history to this conflict and the generational trauma that has impacted both sides, but put into perspective that Israel has the greatest generational trauma after the Holocaust., Are you beginning to see the similarity this year presents to the Luke Gospel Story of the Birth of Jesus. Dad has been dwelling on how to post about this topic for the past month, but finally was inspired after listening to the CBS Sunday Morning happy news.
Here is a detailed map of the conflict areas. You need to realize that moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was not seen as a neutral decision when it happened. The proximity of Jerusalem to the Palestinian territory was not by accident, nor was what happened when the State of Israel was created.
The only side we are picking is the side of humanity. We need to make sure that we don’t lose site of being kind to each other and not allow dehumanizing language.
Here is a little bit of curating. Don’t pretend this is not something we Americans can be ignorant about at this time. . . two giant conflicts in two historical hot spots put us in a place where history has the potential to repeat itself. Stay engaged and make sure you check your sources so you are not socially engineered with false info.
Please feel free to add your own comments or questions to create more dialogue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Israeli-Palestinian_conflict_detailed_map
Listen to history of Israel and Palestine since the creation of the State of Israel after WWII.