Mr. Macron, in this Christmas season so painful to Palestinians of all faiths, you have sent us, Christians of Palestine, a message of solidarity and support. In a communiqué from the Elysée published on December 24 – on the dark night during which yet another massacre took place in Gaza, in the Maghazi refugee camp, which cost more than 70 people their lives – you expressed your concern and support for us in speaking to the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.

In this press release, you referred to us as "Christians of the Holy Land." Repeatedly, as if you were afraid that people would misunderstand you. This is a strange abuse of language, a vagueness that has left me perplexed. We are – and this is how we choose to define ourselves, but it is also our historical reality – Palestinian Christians, who participate in that which constitutes the Palestinian nation.

A religion whose founding myths were born here

Mr. Macron, what do you think you're accomplishing by choosing to name us wrongly? Why have you chosen, at this time of year, to separate us from our nation? This abuse of language, Mr. Macron, is appalling. It makes our culture and traditions disappear, with a sweep of the hand and a carelessness that dismays us on this mournful Christmas.

We practice a religion whose founding myths were born here, in Bethlehem, in Palestine: not in Rome, not in Constantinople, not in Moscow, and even less in Paris or in Washington. Some people don't hesitate to call us "living stones of the Church." We are not the practitioners of a foreign religion in a land that is abstractly holy.

We are the practitioners of a religion whose primordial story is that of a Jew living under the yoke of an occupation; and which is centered around his luminous birth, and then his death at the hands of an empire and its executors.

An abuse of language that makes us foreigners to our land

We practice this religion under occupation and in a system of apartheid that conditions our access to our holy places, the survival of our culture, and our lives.

This abuse of language makes us foreigners to our land and our country. It's just one way among many used by the great powers – on all sides – and by Israel, to reconfigure Palestine into a purportedly religious question.

This approach is convenient, because it posits a form of essential irreconcilability between Jews and Muslims; it obscures the material realities of the occupation, of the colonization, of the apartheid, and makes the issue of political justice disappear behind the religious fog of a supposedly fratricidal and age-old opposition.

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