"Resistance is at the Core of Our Identity"

Rifat Kassis, a Christian Palestinian human rights activist, author, and speaker, who is presently living in the West Bank, feels Israel is paving the road for another Nakba

- Rifat Kassis

DECEMBER 22: Christmas is approaching. It is a time for cheer and joy and togetherness. In Jerusalem and Bethlehem, it’s a day that is well celebrated. But in the West Bank, there is no yuletide cheer this year. The mistletoe or holly have been replaced by bombs and the chorus of carollers has been replaced by screams of dying people. The cacophony of babies crying amid shelling is all that I hear in my sleep now. Sometimes real, sometimes imagined. I hear these voices and see their bloodied faces on my phone when I open social media. I hear the crashes in the distance at night. I stay in bed, helpless. There isn’t much I can do except pray for the safety of my people who are being massacred by the thousands.

I am a Christian Palestinian born and living in Beit Sahour, a small Christian-majority town near Bethlehem, West Bank, about 74 kilometers from the border of Gaza and 12 km from Jerusalem.

My house is located just a couple of blocks away from an Israeli settlement. I am 65 years old and have spent several terms in Israeli prisons for defending my cause. In all these years living in the West Bank, though, I have never seen anything like this. 

I did not witness the Nakba of the 1940s, being born a few years after it. But memories have a way of being passed down, like clothes, from mother to son, father to daughter.

My parents, who lived through the Nakba, passed on their memories, pain, and trauma to me. Israel is paving the road for another Nakba. By targeting civilian locations, hospitals, including the ones run by churches, and even libraries, to show us exactly what they tried to show us in the 1940s—that there is no safe space for us. And the only way out is to leave.