O Little Town of Bethlehem

All photos by Michael J. Keating

The pilgrims’ route from Jerusalem to Bethlehem is blocked at Rachel’s Tomb.

THE NEXT DAY, July 21, we visited Bethlehem, a town dying without its tourist industry. What should have been a 15 to 20 minute trip from Ramallah took us two hours.

Bethlehem belongs to Christians all over the world, Mayor Hanna Nasser, himself a Christian, told us in his office. “Muslims have a duty to visit their holy places,” he pointed out. Likewise, he insisted, “Christians should visit Jesus’ birthplace.”

Bethlehem is now a desolate place, its shops boarded, its streets strewn with trash. Its hotels are closed, as are all but a handful of restaurants. Manger Square, normally packed with tour buses jostling for parking spaces, was all but deserted when we arrived. Several trinket vendors, desperate for a sale, appeared from nowhere. Two nuns walked together, talking quietly, across the vast, empty plaza.

Bethlehem is a holy city dependent upon visitors for its economic viability. Since Israel’s siege of the Church of the Nativity, however, few tourists visit the holy sites, according to Bethlehem Mayor Hanna Nasser.


	Few Western Christians visit the holy city of Bethlehem.

The Palestinian Authority, with international help, invested large sums into the restoration of Bethlehem in anticipation of the celebrations surrounding the 2,000th birthday of Jesus. Those improvements were destroyed by the siege, or else crushed by the tanks rumbling in and out of the ancient city.

Next to Rachel’s Tomb, the traditional pilgrims’ route between Jerusalem and Bethlehem now is barricaded and impassable. “It’s a big shame to put the wall at the entrance to Bethlehem,” said Mayor Nasser.

The Israeli military seized Rachel’s Tomb for—what else?—”security reasons,” pushing concrete barriers in front of the site and wrapping it in razor wire. A netted cement watchtower rises above.

“You have 14 days to go to the Israeli High Court” to challenge the barrier, the mayor said he was told. So he did. After 14 months, however, there still is no verdict. Except for the one on the ground: no one walks the street outside Rachel’s Tomb. No camera-toting tourists prowl the holy site. The shops have withered and died. Jewish pilgrims are brought in from the other side of the wall.

Israeli settlements surround the city. In the last month, its mayor said, the Israeli military returned and reoccupied Bethlehem, declaring it a closed military zone. All citizens need military permission to leave the city.

Nasser said it was unbelievable that Christians in the United States backed Israel’s occupation of the Holy Land. When we asked Nasser to come and speak to American churches to describe the plight of Palestinians in Bethlehem, he shrugged. “An 18-year-old Israeli soldier sometimes tells me, the mayor of Bethlehem, that I cannot leave my town to attend a meeting even in Ramallah.”

As elections near, President Bush seems to have forgotten his vision for peace in the region, Nasser said. He is waiting for a new vision perhaps from another American president. The Old Testament had a lot of visions, he said, but this time he was hoping for a vision to become a reality.

—MJK, DCH

SIDEBAR

“We are in Trouble”


Bethlehem Mayor Hanna Nasser.

Most elected Palestinian officials have been in office for years—whether they want to be or not. Because of repeated delays in the Oslo process, elections scheduled for 1996 were never held, so mayors such as Bethlehem’s Hanna Nasser have been forced to remain in office because there is no one to succeed them.

One could say that they are forced to remain physically as well, because elected Palestinian officials cannot leave their cities without permission of the Israeli military. Even when he receives permission, Mayor Nasser said he thinks twice about traveling to Ramallah, because “once you are there, you are trapped.”

Their jobs certainly cannot be described as sinecures. As a result of Israel’s draconian occupation, with its closures, checkpoints—126 on the main road to Bethlehem alone—and now the wall, “almost everything has collapsed,” Mayor Nasser told us. “We are in trouble.”

Unemployment is up to 50 or 55 percent, he said, and per capita income, which three years ago was $2,700, has plummeted to less than $400. Unemployed Bethlehemites, of course, cannot pay taxes. Nevertheless, Mayor Nasser explained, the municipal government is “obliged to keep the city in good shape.”

With an annual budget of $3 million, the city these days is in constant deficit, according to the mayor, unable to pay all its employees for the past two months.

Social services also are affected by Israel’s strangulation of the town about which Western Christians sing every Christmas. (Indeed, the mayor said, it was a miracle that the Church of the Nativity, where Jesus was born, survived Israel’s 2002 siege. Israeli troops frequently threw flares into the air, Nasser recalled. Had one of them landed on the church roof, it would have gone up in flames.)

Today, Bethlehem’s one hospital is poorly equipped. It has no intensive care unit for heart attack victims, for example, and Israel’s insistance that ambulances use the back-to-back system at checkpoints has cost the lives of some patients who could not be moved from one ambulance to another. Other ambulances, of course, simply were turned back. The denial of passage to hospitals has meant that many pregnant women have been forced to give birth at checkpoints. Not all mothers and babies survived.

Because of Israeli policies, the education level of Bethlehem University teachers also has deteriorated, Mayor Nasser said. Fewer hold master’s and Ph.D. degrees, and about 30 have earned only a B.A. “This is very bad for the system,” said the concerned mayor.

The university is now isolated along with the city. It cannot employ teachers with degrees who live outside Bethlehem, and the percentage of its students who live outside the city has dropped from 35 to 5 percent.

Mayor Nasser was proud of Bethlehem’s reputation as a model of Christian-Muslim coexistence. In the last few years, however, 4,000 Christians and 8,000 to 9,000 Muslims have left the city.

This is due in large part to the settlements which surround it to the north and south, the mayor said, leaving no room to grow—in fact, endangering physical growth—grabbing land and water, and killing movement. Many have lost land that now lies on the other side of Israel’s wall. Just as in 1948, the mayor pointed out, Israel claims it is “absentee” land, that it has been abandoned by its owners—who in fact are prevented from reaching it.


	The forested Jabal Abu Ghneim (above) was confiscated to construct the Jews-only settlement of Har Homa (below).

Israel is trespassing on the master plan of Bethlehem, its mayor told us, “confiscating entire neighborhoods. They say it is temporary until December 2005,” he noted, “but everything temporary becomes permanent.”

That confiscation is perhaps best symbolized by Jabal Abu Ghneim, a hilltop on the outskirts of Bethlehem. In 1963—four years before Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip—the municipality planted trees on Jabal Abu Ghneim, making it a soothing, verdant sight enjoyed from the windows of many residents.

Today virtually all the trees are gone. The hilltop now is covered by a brown and dusty Israeli settlement.—JM