While in Western countries Christmas has become a ritual of compulsive consumption — lights, shop windows, excess and collective anaesthesia — in Gaza there is no truce, no shelter, and no real promise of “peace.” There is mud in flooded streets, overwhelmed hospitals, diseases that would be treatable anywhere else but here become death sentences, and a people subjected to structural violence that has known neither seasons nor festivities for more than 78 years.

The devastation of Gaza is not a natural disaster: it is the direct result of a colonial logic sustained by the war industry and by the states that administer it. Israel does not act in a vacuum, but as the armed wing of an imperial order that requires disciplined territories, dehumanised populations and normalised suffering in order to continue accumulating power, wealth and geostrategic positions to uphold a cultural dominance in decay. Deaths, hunger and disease are not “collateral damage”: they are functional components of the machinery of the war-system.

Meanwhile, the Western world celebrates Christmas as an orgy of consumption, emptied of any ethical or empathetic meaning. The figure of Jesus is invoked among shopping malls and advertising campaigns, while deliberately forgetting that Jesus was a poor Palestinian, born under occupation, persecuted by power and executed for challenging the established order. If he were living in Gaza today, he would have no shelter, no drinking water, no medical care. He would likely be labelled a threat and eliminated amid the complicit silence of anaesthetised societies, just as Palestinians are today, more than 2,025 years later.

It is not only life that is commodified: the suffering of others is commodified as well, turned into background noise so that nothing interrupts the circulation of goods and capital. Gaza, this Christmas, is the shattered mirror the system refuses to look into. A brutal reminder that there can be no peace while the world remains divided between those who can afford excess and those condemned to organised misery.

Denouncing the situation in Gaza today is not a moral gesture: it is a human and political obligation. Because solidarity cannot be seasonal, and because no Christmas tree can conceal the fact that under this system — now once again propped up by the Trump administration — barbarism is not an exception: it is the norm.