[ARCHIVE] Christmas—and Christians—in Palestine w/ Dr. Mitri Raheb
Makdisi Street
Bayt al Makdisi
4.9 • 643 Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2025
⏱️ 74 minutes
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Summary
The brothers welcome Dr. Mitri Raheb to the show to talk about the role and visibility of Christians in Palestine's ecumenical culture, so-called Christian Zionism, and how the Bible can be read either as a text authorizing empire and genocide (as with Netanyahu citing the extirpation of the Amalek) or as a text calling for liberation, equality, justice and resistance to empire.
Date of recording: December 22, 2023.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You live in the US, and Christmas is about the reindeer and the white Christmas and the jingle bells and so on. |
| 0:11.2 | Nothing of that has to do with the real Christmas story. |
| 0:14.7 | I mean, this is a commercialized society. |
| 0:18.0 | It's a consumer society. |
| 0:19.9 | And it's an entertainment society. Most of the American Christmas |
| 0:24.5 | songs, they had nothing to do with Jesus. I mean, think of jingle bells or think of, it talks |
| 0:31.0 | about something totally. And they were not written by Christians, actually. It's very interesting. |
| 0:37.2 | It's an entertainment. While if we take the Christmas |
| 0:40.4 | story and we read it in today's context, you think this story is written just now in Gaza. |
| 0:51.4 | Welcome to a new episode of the Mahdi-C Street podcast. |
| 0:55.0 | My name is Usama, Maktisi, and I'm joined as always by my brother's Sadi. |
| 1:00.0 | Sari is good to see you again. |
| 1:02.0 | Hello, everyone. |
| 1:03.0 | And my brother Karim in Beirut, Karim, it's great to see you again. |
| 1:07.0 | Karim, you're on mute. |
| 1:09.0 | Hi, everybody. Yes, hi, everybody. We're delighted to have with us one of the most distinguished Palestinian liberation |
| 1:16.9 | theologians of our time, Dr. Mithri Rahab, as our guest today on Mahdisi Treat podcast. |
| 1:24.3 | Dr. Mitri is the founder and president of Daal al-Kal Kalima University in Beitlahem in Bethlehem. |
| 1:30.3 | He holds a doctorate in theology from Phillips University at Marburg in Germany. |
| 1:35.3 | He is, more importantly, the author and editor of around 50 books, including the most recent book, Decolonizing Palestine, The Land, the People, the Bible, |
| 1:46.4 | which was published by Orbis Books this year. And I highly, highly recommend our listeners and viewers to |
| 1:53.5 | get this book. He is a founding member and board member of the National Library of Palestine, |
... |
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