早稲田国際教養AO Supplement The Pain of Those Who Remember by Chris Hedges - revised -

 

Read the following excerpt from the foreword, The Pain of Those Who Remember, written by a former war-correspondent Chris Hedges, from “Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide” by Atef Abu Saif, and answer the following question. The first edition of this book was published in December, 2023.

 

The story of Christmas is the story of a poor woman, nine months pregnant, and her husband forced to leave their home in Nazareth in northern Galilee. The occupying Roman power has demanded they register for the census 90 miles away in Bethlehem. When they arrive, there are no rooms. She gives birth in a stable. King Herod – who learned from the Magi of the birth of the messiah – orders his soldiers to hunt down every child two years old and under in Bethlehem and the vicinity and murder them. An angel warns Joeseph in a dream to flee. The couple and infant escape under the cover of darkness and make the 40-ile journey to Egypt.

  I was in a refugee camp in the early 1980s for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. The peasant framers and their families, living in filth and mud, their villages and homes burned or abandoned, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper to celebrate the Massacre of the Innocents.

  ‘Why is this such and important day?’ I asked.

  ‘It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,’ a farmer answered.

  The Christmas story was not written for the oppressors. It was written for the oppressed. We are called to protect the innocents. We are called to defy the occupying power. Atef, Refaat and those like them, who speak to us at the risk of death, echo this Biblical injunction. They speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world ― the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileges, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel lobby groups ― who are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza. The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete.

  Evil has not changed down the millennia.

  Neither has goodness.

 

Question: The writer says, “The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete”. Also, on December 25, 2023, Pope Francis said that children dying in Gaza are the “little Jesuses of today”. What exactly are they talking about?

 

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Ideas and expressions:

Both analogies refer to refugee children in Gaza being killed continuously in the Israeli genocide, which is the last phase of the 76-year-old ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that Israel has been methodically committing, ignoring the two-state solution and keeping invasion into the Palestinian territories and periodically killing Palestinian children as they call it, “lawn-mowing”, to reduce the Palestinian population.

 

Even before the Hamas attack on the Israeli civilians on October 7, IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) had insulted, arrested, attacked, and killed innocent Palestinians, including women, children, and elderlies, on a daily basis. They help Israeli citizens usurp houses and land of Palestinians backed by the Israeli government. They also pour cement into wells and break water facilities in Palestinian territories. After Hamas was elected in Gaza, Israel built walls around Gaza and controlled food and materials that go in and out of this small strip of land, keeping 2.5 million Gazans even poorer than before.

 

Right after October 7, Israel shut down all the necessities that were to Gaza and started indiscriminate attacks on Gaza, calling the people “human animals”. Since then, Israel has flattened all the buildings in Gaza, displacing 100% of Gazans and killed over 40,000 civilians, including 16,000 children, by bombs, bullets, and torture. IDF have bulldozed people alive with garbage, whose arms ziplocked, and burned those in tents alive. They target writers and doctors. They have destroyed all the universities in Gaza. Their latest powerful weapons tear the victims apart into small pieces, which are collected in plastic bags. In a recent bombing of a school used as a refugee camp during morning prayer, people had to put unidentified pieces of victims together in bags and share them by weight to the families of victims, going 70 kg for an adult and 25-35 kg for a child. IDF also use internationally-prohibited white phosphorus bombs, which melt flesh and bones, producing corpses of children the contents of whose skulls are lost. If those who died of hunger or disease due to lack of nutrition and sanitation caused by the Israeli control, over 160,000 Gazans have been killed in this genocide. IDF also arrest more innocent Palestinians, including children, in the West Bank than before. They keep thousands of them in prison in horrendous conditions, torturing and raping them.

 

When they started the attack on Gaza, they ordered the people to evacuate to the southern area in Gaza and attacked them on the way and in the area. There is no place to flee in Gaza now. Like baby Jesus, children in Gaza are homeless, sleeping in camps or on the ground, or on the concrete of ruins, fearing their oppressor’s attack at night, when bombing becomes more frequent than the day time, thinking this can be the last night of their short lives. Jesus, or rebels under Roman occupation who collectively became a legend as Jesus Christ, was a Jew, and Jews and Palestinians are of the same race, Semites. Jesus had wooly hair and dark skin, as the Bible describes him. In other words, Jesus could have looked like anyone in Gaza and vice versa. Ironically, now those who claim themselves as his descendants are relentlessly killing people who could be identical to Jesus.