28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001
Issue No.514
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001 Issue No.514 |
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Killing Christmas
The winter rains swept into Bethlehem just as the traditional Christmas Eve procession of Jerusalem's Latin Patriarch entered Manger Square. It continued to bucket down the rest of the day, washing away all but a handful of pilgrims who slouched against the wall of the Basilica of the Nativity in readiness for Midnight Mass.
A tree decorated with pictures of martyrs of the Al-Aqsa Intifada poignantly demonstrates the solemn mood that replaced Christmas cheer in Bethlehem this year
(photo: AFP)
The rain did not kill Christmas in Bethlehem this year, for it was dead already.
"We had been preparing for this Christmas for two-and-a-half years, as the highlight of the millennium celebrations," commented Bethlehem's mayor, Hanna Nasser. "But in the light of what is happening, we've been obliged to change our plans."
"What is happening" of course is the three-month old Palestinian Intifada and the Israeli army's response to it. The suppression has been especially tough in Bethlehem and its sister Christian villages of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour.
Following the revolt's outbreak in late September, Israel's Tourism Ministry "advised" all pilgrims not to visit the town of Christ's birth due to "the deteriorating security situation". In November, the Israeli army slapped an "internal blockade" on Bethlehem, severing the town not only from Jerusalem but also from its West Bank hinterland. The blockade remains in place, as evidenced by the car after car turned away on Christmas Eve by Israeli soldiers at the main checkpoint into the town.
"Ammon Lipkin Shahak [Israel's Tourism Minister] promised us three weeks ago the closure would be lifted for Christmas," said Nasser. "It hasn't been. So Christians from Jerusalem and [the West Bank town of] Ramallah cannot see their families in Bethlehem".
The siege has been catastrophic for Bethlehem's fledgling, tourism-dependent economy. Freshly minted hotels and restaurants, hurriedly thrown up in anticipation of thousands of millennium visitors, stand empty and dark. New yellow taxis scud past boarded-up souvenir shops and along streets decorated only by Palestinian Authority policemen and the drenched posters of one or other of the 22 Palestinians killed in Bethlehem since the uprising began.
"In 75 days Bethlehem lost $15 million in expected revenues," says Nasser. Others put the unemployment and under-employment rates in Bethlehem at anywhere between 50 and 70 per cent.
Work and income are not all the 140,000 Palestinians who live in Bethlehem district have lost. In reprisal for shooting attacks on Jewish settlements and Israeli military bases in or near the town, the army has bombarded all those who fight it or who have the temerity to host those who carry out such attacks. Tanks and helicopter gun-ships have destroyed some 40 homes in Beit Jala, displaced dozens of Palestinian families in Beit Sahour, and hit churches, mosques, hotels and refugee camps in Bethlehem.
The upshot is a people dislocated, traumatised and hopeless.
"We hover," comments Zoughbi Zoughbi, head of Bethlehem's Conflict Resolution Centre, "between community and chaos".
Chaos is presaged in the random armed attacks by Palestinian fighters on settlements from civilian areas like Beit Jala, and the enormous Israeli retaliations they elicit -- despite explicit instructions from Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement that it should refrain from doing this. It is also in the fear that the war between Israel and Palestine may degenerate into sectarian strife between Bethlehem's Palestinian Muslims and Christians or, more precisely, that Israel may exploit the latter as a weapon in the former.
In early December, a Christian cemetery was desecrated in Beit Jala. The PA picked up from the village 15 Palestinians for the outrage. Was this the work of collaborators, or of radical Islamists who believe that the "holy war for Al-Aqsa" must now extend to Christians as well as Jews?
"I'm reserving judgement until the investigation is complete," says Zoughbi. "But the attack on the cemetery happened on a night when Israel was bombing Beit Jala. Who would do such a thing on such a night? I mean, whose interest does it serve?"
It certainly does not serve the Palestinian national movement, which on every Sunday since the Intifada erupted has called for unity demonstrations between Palestinian Christians and Muslims. Nor does it serve Arafat, who broke his three-month exile from the West Bank to attend Midnight Mass in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve in deference to his Christian flock but also, admits Nasser, "to maintain the solidarity of all the people of Bethlehem."
It was for this reason, too, that the Bethlehem municipality reversed an earlier decision to cancel all religious festivities this Christmas.
"You can't cancel Christmas in Bethlehem. Christmas is what gives Bethlehem its identity," says Nasser.
So this year, as previously, Bethlehem's people will find succour in their churches and mosques, families and faiths, even as they are bound by the oppression of their nation. And this also is part of the identity of a town and a community where, as Pope John Paul II reminded them last March, "the Crib lies always in the shadow of the Cross."
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