This is a guest post by Tamara Abood, a UK-based psychotherapist to corporate and creative professionals, and a lawyer.

A good friend recently forwarded a GIF of a Christmas tree lighting up with a jolly “Merry Christmas!” message from her.

She caught me in a difficult moment. I had just been watching another video in the canon of videos evidencing Israel’s crimes against humanity.

I responded with “Beautiful but meaningless. Sorry for the downer, but Jewish extremists are currently slaughtering innocents in Palestine. Christmas is just performative nonsense right now”.

She pointedly didn’t reply. My guess is she didn’t much like the fact I had pricked the Christmassy bubble she was in.

I admit I struggle with this bubble. How do people manage to parse what is happening in Palestine? Why doesn’t it dominate their thoughts or shape their days in any way?

The bubble troubles me.

People with healthy emotional development are able to see the world as it is. They don’t create false narratives or avoid reality. Importantly, they have also learnt to integrate or tolerate conflicting thoughts and feelings, and accept this duality of existence.

The same cannot be said of the bubble people.

Those of us who post frequently on Gaza are used to having these avoidant types question the extent of our genocide-focus, as if our engagement with reality and not their denial of it is the problem.

And what is the reality?

The reality is that in the the cradle of Christianity the gravest sins imaginable are currently being committed against its Palestinian inhabitants. It is the most grotesque of ironies, and one that millions seem oblivious to.

The reality is that people the world over will sit down on the day of His birth and parse any thoughts they might have had about what is happening in His birthplace. For most, the day will be about gorging on food until they are sick, and unwrapping gift after gift of things they do not need but want want want.

The reality is that in His birthplace on His birth day, the bells of Bethlehem’s church will stay silent once again. In this Palestinian town south of Jerusalem in the Occupied West Bank, its people are in mourning for the brothers and sisters lost to the genocide. There is nothing to rejoice when all around them displaced Palestinians are trying to survive without shelter or warmth, starving under open skies that bring death and fresh agonies on a daily basis.

The reality is that in Gaza, according to a recent study, almost half of all Palestinian children are so traumatised by what is happening to them that they just want to die.

Imagine that. Children whose Christmas wish is not for a Barbie doll or an Xbox, but to be released from this hell on earth, to be delivered from evil.

My apologies if that agonising thought bursts your bubble.

Merry Christmas!