What Christmas carols still tell us about Israel

Walk into any church this Christmas and you may hear something that has echoed for centuries. Not just the melodies. Not just the familiar cadences of belief. But a name.Israel.

It appears in some of the oldest carols in the Christian tradition. Not with hesitation or caveat. Not as a political statement or act of defiance. Simply as geography. As the setting. As the place where it all happened.

“Ransom captive Israel.”

“Born is the King of Israel.”

“Christ is born in Bethlehem.”

“Sing through all Jerusalem.”

These are not modern lyrics. They were written long before Twitter mobs, protest slogans and armchair revolutionaries. They predate the creation of modern Israel by centuries. And yet, back then, nobody seemed confused about where the story took place.

Israel was not a political flashpoint. It was the backdrop of the Gospels. It was history.

Now compare that to what we hear today.

In recent years, certain corners of the West have taken to rewriting even this. Palestine, conspicuously absent from the Christian liturgical tradition, is now being inserted into modern protest songs and activist rewrites of carols. Not because history has changed, but because the politics have.

You will not find a single traditional Christmas hymn that mentions Palestine. Not one. Its inclusion today is not a restoration of forgotten truth. It is a revisionist flourish imposed by those more interested in ideology than accuracy.

That fact alone should stop us. Because when a culture begins editing its hymns to suit modern politics, it is not preserving memory. It is erasing it.

The difference between tradition and propaganda is precisely this: tradition tells you what happened. Propaganda tells you what you are supposed to think about it.

And in that distinction lies the story of our time.

It has become fashionable in some quarters to speak of “decolonising” everything, from literature to religion to Christmas itself. We are told that certain words must be removed, certain names replaced, and certain histories revised. All in the name of inclusion. All in the name of progress.

But cultural confidence does not require the rewriting of sacred texts. Weakness does.

The truth is that Israel, both ancient and modern, is central to the Christian story. That is not a political position. It is a historical one. Jesus was not born in a vacuum. He was born in Bethlehem. He walked through Jerusalem. He lived and died in a place the carols name without embarrassment.

This is not to say the modern conflict in the region is unworthy of scrutiny. It is to say that rewriting 800-year-old hymns is not scrutiny. It is erasure.

And once a culture begins deleting its own memory, it is not long before it forgets who it is altogether.

Christmas carols did not invent Israel. They remembered it.

Perhaps this year, we should listen more closely to what they still dare to say.