Kairos Palestine, the initiative that sprang up out of the inspirational Kairos Palestine Document of 2009, has issued its annual "Christmas Alert.”

The introduction to the Alert offers an invitation for Christians and people everywhere to get involved in five specific ways:

With this Christmas Alert, we are asking you to turn the tide by getting involved through the

following activities:

1. Please distribute and study background materials and theological reflections in your own churches each Sunday of Advent to inform and educate your sisters and brothers about the situation of your Palestinian brethren living under Israeli occupation.
2. Please share the alert with congregations and dioceses across your country.
3. Please send letters of solidarity and support for justice in Palestine/Israel to the Israeli embassies in your own country.
4. Please come and see. We will fulfill our role in sharing the truth of our reality with you, receiving you as pilgrims coming to pray, carrying a message of peace, love and reconciliation. You will get to know the facts and the people of this land, Palestinians and Israelis alike.
5. Please inform your Palestinian brethren about the way you have been involved with the Christmas Alert by writing us.

With your help and solidarity, we can finally live in peace with justice: the peace that all people aspire to, the peace that was announced in Bethlehem.

So the Christmas Alert asks us to "help turn the tide.” It is such an apt invitation for a season that remembers a radical and life-giving change in the course of history, the birth of Christ. Kairos Palestine asks us to imagine ways to be Christ-like in our responses to injustice and injury. The alert offers four reflections for the Sundays of Advent. Each has a particular focus on an aspect of the Occupation and the lives of Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The first reflects on the strategy of imprisonment that is used to create chaos in the society and suppress resistance; and the second offers perspective on displacement of persons and refugees who are cast out from their homes. For the Third Sunday in Advent, the crisis of family separations is examined; and finally, a reflection on 2014 as the UN Year of Solidarity with Palestinians.

We commend this document to you for study and reflection.