Sojourn In Palestine (Welcome To Palestine!) by Alfred N.Muggins : Part 4

Featuring the Three Wise Men!
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Part 4

17/11/24
   Balthasar, the wise African, looked again to the skies and saw that the star they followed had moved again, “The star is moving!” he cried to his colleagues. The three wise men looked up to the skies, and all agreed the Star had moved westwards.  
    “It is as if the Star led us to this town of Bethlehem to inform us of the past we have somehow missed,” suggested Caspar, “when we apparently came to Bethlehem more than two thousand years ago and found the Christ child here.” He was born in a mere stable, shared with animals, a humble birth and most definitely not a Palace! But the star is on the move again, leading us further west.”
    “We must follow, said Melchior, before we lose the way. Our fate has brought us here so far, and has helped us upon our way so far. I was set free from the soldiers of Israel. It is time to follow.”
    They readied their camels and continued the journey to the west, following yonder Star. They travelled through streets filled with worried ordinary people of Palestine, unemployed as war and increasing raids into Palestinian towns and refugee camps made their lives poorer, harder and more fearful. The Israeli governors had been allowing foreign Jewish settlers to come to Palestine to take over the hill tops, creating settlements to once again wrest the land from the Arab villagers, diverting the water supplies to the favoured and chosen newcomers for many years in a creeping takeover and resettlement, which had hardly been prevented by foreign diplomats or by the local populace despite the best efforts of many. In recent times the ineffectually opposed ‘illegal’ resettlement by Jewish people had become much larger and more determined, driven by hardliners who cared nothing for the people who had lived on these lands for many years and were gradually being denied them.

    And then they came to fields belonging to kibbutzes nearly destroyed in the Hamas invasion attack of October 2023. They had been restored and their people returned, who survived. And then they came to the site of a massacre by those Hamas forces, where young Jewish revelers were chased and massacred even in their cars as they tried to escape, and many captured and taken back into Gaza as hostages. (Although some legends tell that it was Israeli helicopters and missiles which killed many of the reveller/hostages in their cars in attempts to prevent Israelis from being taken alive as hostages!?)
    Eventually they came to another wall and a tall fence, with even taller towers overlooking the ghetto beyond. There were breaches in the fence. Israel’s soldiers came towards them. They were entering the forbidden zone, the ghetto.
 
23/3/26
   Ravaged by months of 'warfare' since those attacks, in which the normal defence Israelis would have expected had seemed inexplicably slow to materialise, the Israeli government had decided to once and for all root out all the 'terrorists' from the Arab territory of Gaza, and to punish the people who wished to protect their own lands and people and had hoped to take back their old homes in 'modern Israel'. Hamas were apparently a movement of resistance and defence, an emergency defence, but they hid and defended a wide network of tunnels under the Strip of Gaza. If the Israeli occuppying soldiers had hoped to reoccupy and control the whole of Gaza, the 'operation' did not seem to have gone so smoothly as they kept returning to fight in those tunnels, and in the process they had demolished with bombs and missiles most of the buildings and apartments of the people. The people, periodically forced to move from one part of the territory to another for 'safety', which did not always prove to be safe.
4/6/24
  Eventually they passed magically into the forbidden territories of the Gaza Strip, a small enough and overcrowded refugee camp. There is a war on at the moment, which seems to be destroying everything in this enclave which had been supposed to be a safe haven for Palestinians, so many of whom had been made refugees in the past conflicts which had created and strengthened New Israel. Unfortunately it had become filled with a very large number of anti humanitarian horrors, and their own presence was surely not allowed by the foreign Israeli authority which has reentered this erstwhile reservation for Palestinians.
   The Three Wise men have been warned in no uncertain terms not to set foot here. Even journalists, medics and foreign travelers are not safe here! Indeed it is well understood by now that no one is safe here. They are entering the Palestinian ghetto, starved of supplies and assistance, while the soldiers of Israel search out and destroy all suspected of membership or association with the Palestinian resistance fighters of Hamas. 

   Perhaps they hear that the returning baby Jesus is to be born again, not in Bethlehem, as it has become a controlled place, but in a refugee area (camp!) in Gaza. They are guided again by the star out of Bethlehen to the border with the Gaza Strip, and could see the bright Star lingering over the dusty and smouldering ruins of a camp frequently targeted by the Israeli missiles and drones But surely the son of God cannot return to human form in a Palestinian enclave? Jesus was Jewish, he would not be here?
  Jesus speaks to Jews and gentiles alike. The wise men go to a stable where God directs them, under the missiles crashing down, but when they reach it the light is extinguished. An Israeli missile has targeted the place they were travelling to and they are in time only to see the smoking ruins of a dwelling.
    "Was there a babe here, dressed in swaddling clothes?" they address a weeping mother.
    "Indeed there was, he was my child." The mother was distraught, like so many here she was paying the price for both Palestinian resistance, and for Zionist fervor and revenge. Indeed her own bloodline, and that of her son and husband went back to the family of the original Christ, and beyond that to the House of David, the celebrated first King of Israel and Judah, but she and her ancestors had been known as Arabs in recent centuries. But the European Jews had returned in strength and seemed not to have recognized some of their brethren of common ancestral heritage. 
   "I know my child has gone, he was here when the missile struck!" That part of the building was now rubble. "But where is my husband Joseph?"
   A neighbor appeared, "Joseph is dead! There is his body." He too had been caught in the blast.
   "Can we ask lady, what is your name?"
   Her tear strained face turned again to answer the wise man’s questions. "I am Mary." 
     Melchior turned to his wise comrades and declared, "It seems the chosen one, our Prince, has tried to return in humanity’s hour of need. He has become yet another sacrifice, or martyr, at the hands of what passes for justice in this occupied land!"

10/6/24
    And so the three wise men, who had come so far, from afar, discussed the significance of the accidental death (according to the Israeli military!) of he who had been intended to be the ‘chosen one’, Christ the savior, who had been born of Mary and the Holy Spirit, in an apartment in war torn Gaza. “Perhaps God will send another son soon to save all these people and the whole wide world?” suggested Balthasar optimistically.
    “More likely,” conjectured Caspar of India, the people of modern (future?) day Earth have once again missed their chance at having a savior come to them. Here in desperate war torn Gaza his chances would not have been great while the militaristic power of Israel refuses to allow this region and these people to prosper and survive. The chances of survival or flourishing for any young person right now is very small. We gathered from the Priest in Bethlehem that the one who arrived in our time, and is reputed to have been visited by us more than two thousand years ago, was arrested by the Sanhedrin, and sorely criticized by the Pharisee faction of the occupied Jewish nation and brought before the Roman occupier for justice. Their representative Governor washed his hands of the messiah (saviour) and allowed the Jewish authorities to impose their own cruel and deadly justice upon him. Thus they got rid of a ‘thorn in their side’ at that time, (with the governing Romans placing the famous crown of thorns upon the head of the ‘King of the Jews’ at the time of his crucifixion!) little knowing that his messages would resonate through the years and give rise to a long history in which the orthodox Jews would be persecuted and made refugees so many times through history by people who were supposed to be followers of Christ, known as Christians. Many of Jewish ancestry have now returned to take over and resettle these lands, but they have once again managed to destroy the next son of God, or the same one so briefly returned! This time he was unable to even begin his teaching or leading.”

END

NB : Caspar(Gaspar – a King of India - frankincense), Melchior (King of Persia - gold), and Balthasar (often depicted as a black man (from Ethiopia?)- myrrh)- brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.