For several years now, I have been unable to lightheartedly sing Christmas carols containing the word "Bethlehem". That is because in 1996 I made my first visit to the town, making the acquaintance of people who know what it is to be tortured, to be insecure, and even, in one case, to have lost a friend to suicide because the occupying power's intelligence services had put a beautiful young woman in an untenable situation.
My visit to Bethlehem, then, did not give me the religious warm fuzzies. Rather, it opened my eyes to what it means to live under military occupation.
I have been back several times in the last ten years, most recently in the past week. I am back in the States now and am dedicating this post to the people of Bethlehem, both Muslims and Christians, who are too little understood -- and too easily condemned -- by many Americans. A recent survey examining American perceptions of Bethlehem illustrates just how in the dark many Americans are about issues in this part of the world. (To view this survey, go to www.openbethlehem.org.)
Palestinians waiting in line at the wall in the pre-dawn hours, with an Israeli tower looking down upon them
One of the most recent challenges to Bethlehem is Israel's Separation Wall, seen above. Built not on the Green Line (the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and the West Bank) but rather inside Palestinian territory, the wall has cut off most Bethlehemites from their friends, families, and religious shrines in places like Jerusalem.
A very few residents of Bethlehem are granted permits to work in Israel, or to visit relatives or go to the doctor in Jerusalem. They begin lining up at the wall as early as 2:30 a.m. By 5:00a.m., when the military opens the gate in the wall to check IDs of those with permission to pass through, up to 1,000 people may be in line. For some of these men and women, the five-mile commute to Jerusalem can on some days take more than five hours.
The same line, an hour or so after sunrise
Bethlehem is in the foreground, while the illegal Israeli settlement of Gilo, built on land occupied in the 1967 war, is in the background. Note how the wall is built right up against Bethlehem, preventing its expansion, while allowing the Israeli settlement plenty of room to expand in the future. The open area between the two communities -- those are Palestinian olive trees in the middle -- belongs mostly to Christians in the Bethlehem area, who now have difficulty accessing their land and, in all likelihood, will soon be forbidden from accessing it completely.
This is what you see as you enter Bethlehem from Israel. The "Peace Be With You" sign strikes most people as terribly ironic, almost sickly ironic, in that the Wall is not at all about peace but about instituting a form of apartheid. If the makers of the wall wanted true peace -- in Hebrew, shalom refers not simply to the absence of violence but to justice, to "right relationships" -- they would have built it on the internationally recognized boundary rather than deep inside another's territory.
The "Peace Be With You" sign is designed for the benefit of foreign tourists who may shuttle briefly into Bethlehem and then back out again. Those who actually live in Bethlehem, however, would rather have seen the money spent on the hidden side of the wall, where they line up each morning with no roof over their heads. Imagine: a wall that cost two billion dollars, yet no thought at all given to the value of a simple shelter for the people who are forced to wait up against the wall for hours, sometimes in bone-chilling winter rain.
On December 8, a twelve-year-old boy, while playing on his balcony, was shot in the back from this bullet proof watch tower (to read the story as reported in The Middle East Times, click here). Released from the hospital a week later, some 50 Israeli soldiers raided his house at 3:00 in the morning on his first night back home. I visited the family the following day and the father, when asked why the soldiers ransacked the house, replied, "They want to show us their power." Ostensibly, the soldiers had come to "search for weapons" -- any evidence that might justify their shooting of the son. But the family, which intends to press charges against the military for the shooting, is convinced the soldiers came to show that, so long as they intend to press charges, the military will do what it can to make their life hell. If the charges are dropped, the family believes, the military will desist from making these unnecessary nighttime raids. If not, the family can expect such a "raid" on any night.
Stories like this are but one of the reasons I feel conflicting emotions when I hear a song like "Silent Night." Too often the nights are not silent. Too often there is weeping, breaking glass, the bootsteps of soldiers charging up a family's stairwell.
But despite this, many people in Bethlehem still celebrate Christmas. People like this young Orthodox girl...
and this shop keeper...
and this barber...
and the mayor's office, which is responsible for the decorations in Manger Square...
and 67-year-old Bishara Awad (below), president of Bethlehem Bible College...
Dr. Awad's younger brother, Mubarak Awad, was deported from Palestine in the late 1980s, accused by an Israeli court of contributing to the start of the intifada. Israel's murky legal system (when it comes to Palestinians) never said what Awad's crime was. The presiding judge claimed to have a secret file that nobody -- even Awad's lawyer -- could see. On the basis of this, he was shackled and put on a TWA flight for deportation. (Once in international airspace, the sympathetic TWA captain came to Awad's seat in economy class and told him a seat was waiting for him in business class).
While this secret file was never made public, Awad's actions before his deportation were very pubic: directing a center for non-violence in Jerusalem; publishing a book called (something like) "121 Ways to Struggle Non-Violently", which became popular with many Palestinians; stoking the imagination of his people to do sit-ins, etc. Some people on Gather have said there will be peace in Israel/Palestine as soon as Palestine gives birth to a Gandhi figure. Mubarak Awad illustrates that Palestine already has produced such a figure, and that such a figure is not treated kindly by the occupying power.
Today Mubarak Awad is a professor at American University in Washington DC, still promoting non-violence as a means to combat injustice and oppression.
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To learn more about Bethlehem and its people, check out www.openbethlehem.org or www.holylandtrust.org. The latter organization is directed by the son of Bishara Awad. If you wish to visit, there are fine organizations that will facilitate your stay, enabling you to stay either with local families (who make some of the best food on the planet) or, if you wish, in a hotel.
To read a short piece in which Palestinian Americans compare their memories of Bethlehem before to Bethlehem today, click on Christmas in Bethlehem: Then and Now.
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Comments: 36
They also saw Israeli settlements being built on the choosiest part of Bethlehem. My sister in law was indignant in relating this story to me. However my retort is that the Israelis have little incentive to "play nice" since they do not have a partner in the peace process. Everyone did agree that Arafat failed his people. He could have negotiated w/ Barak and Clinton and established a two party state w/ part of Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. However, Arafat was not a leader and caved into his extremist backers in the Arab world.
My only point is there is plenty of blame to go around for the dismal state of Bethlehem.
Yet to my mind this only underscores the need to love one another.
It just makes me so sad. Man's inhumanity to man, and all that....
Great photos, as always, and excellent commentary.
I wish they were more stories like yours out there...but they never reach the media.
Watching the Holocaust again and again, month after month,year after year,
who can ever imagine whats happening today in Palestine? Very few..just few.
Who can see the pictures of innocent 12, 14 year old kids die on daily basis?
Very few...just few. The rest are very quick to judge and call them Terrorists.
Little children with Rocks on their hands Terrorizing a peaceful Tank driving down
the road? Are these the Terrorists they are after?
When Yasser Arafat made his demands, at first Isreal balked. Then eventually, they relented and gave him all his concessions. His response? He turned them down. Keeping the violence alive and creating a false struggle for which he intended to use to get the world on his side because of one thing the Isrealis did not give Arafat. That was the end of Isreal's existence. That was Arafats goal. To accept anything else is defeat. To actually concede to live side by side with the Jews is defeat and can not be tolerated. Isreal has conceded Palestine's right to exist. Yet, incredibly, this isn't enough. So they continued to send suicide bombers into Isreal. Isreal attempted a military response. One that specifically targetted the instigators and leaders of the intifada and the UN and US response was to tell Isreal to excercise restraint. Instead of an all-out assault on Palestine which would have lead to countless civilian casualties, they attempted to use surgical precision attacks on the leaders and instigators and yet the world body condemns Isreal. These surgical strikes did cause some civilian casualties but far less than the alternative. So now Isreal is faced with another dilemna. Actually, not another dilemna, the same one, just with more complications. So they decided to build the wall. Of course, the UN and US and the EU all balked and bitched. The wall goes up and terrorism within Isreali borders goes down. So now the wall is effective, doing the job in which it was designed. Yet, now you have people condemning the wall and cursing the wall and making images of suffering Muslims on account of the wall. Where are the pictures of the suffering Jews and Christians from the bomb strapped bastards that line up in droves for the opportunity to be martyred. A status that is not supported by the Qu'ran. At least not the one I read. As a matter of fact, the Qu'ran I read states that if a person kills innocent women and children and non-combatants, then he would be condemned to hell. So maybe this whole terrorist thing isn't so bad. The victims are usually believers so they are in heaven and the terrorists are condemned, according to their revered Qu'ran, to eternal hell without benefit of judgement day.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!
thank you for this great article I think
you are very brave to write it and take
the plame for saying the truth,well done.
-- this article is intentionally one-sided, but not in the sense of white-washing one people and demonizing another. It is one-sided in that it seeks to give a glimpse into life in one particular community, Bethlehem. It does not seek to look at other communities.
-- In the U.S. we understand the insecurity that comes with the fear of terrorism; we have less understanding of the insecurity that comes with occupation. This article looks at the latter form of insecurity.
-- You will find some people even in a Palestinian town like Bethlehem who do not oppose Israel's right to build a wall. What every Palestinian does oppose -- and many other people too, including myself -- is where this wall is built. The route of the wall demonstrates that security is only one reason the wall has been built; land-grabbing is another. By so often swinging the wall deep into the West Bank, swallowing up large swaths of prime Palestinian land, Israel has opened itself up to justified criticism. (Again, refer to the picture and caption above in which the illegal Israeli settlemement of Gilo is shown)
-- To say that if Palestinians stopped terrorism Israel would readily consent to peace is, I think, naive. The last portion of my article illustrates how Israel can be intolerant even of peaceful activists who oppose Israel's policies.
-- In summary, this article is about a Palestinian town that suffers under occupation, including an occupation that tragically misroutes a wall. Unfortunately, I know that while many readers do care about innocent people in places like Bethlehem, some will have difficulty because all they can see is "terrorism."
How awful are the conditions in the little town of Bethlehem!
This is a great piece, and you respond very patiently to the writers who believe that anything Israel does can be excused by citing the Arab terrorism.
The recent report on the amount of illegally-occupied land on the West Bank cries out for a decent response from Israel. The United States once required a least a pretense of restraint in creating new settlements, but this has been abandoned by the neo-cons now in charge of US policy.
The more I see of the world makes me wish we could just get along. Some people are just not accepting of others beliefs.