A child of Bethlehem
From The Economist print edition
December 19, 2006

No end of history
LIKE children the world over, five-year-old Ramiz has a weakness for flickering
screens. He spends hours watching Walt Disney cartoons, helpfully dubbed into
Arabic. But Ramiz also enjoys bedtime stories from his grandmother about the
events that are supposed to have taken place in the stony fields around his house at
least 3,000 years ago.

His granny, a bustling Palestinian Christian housewife, is a talented narrator. She
tells him about smooth-skinned Jacob and his hairy twin Esau—and of the cunning
ruse by which Jacob tricked their blind father Isaac into mistaking one son for
another, and so secured a paternal blessing. As the hazy light, refracting off pale
stone houses and potholed roads, gradually fades, this snippet of local lore sounds as
though it happened yesterday.

Nor, of course, is that the only Bible story associated with the olive groves and
scrubby pastures near Ramiz's home in Beit Sahour, one of three townships which
form the conurbation of Bethlehem. With a fine garden of orange trees and scented
jasmine, his home adjoins the traditional site of the Shepherds' Field: where angels
are said to have filled the sky and informed an astonished group of pastoralists that
an infant destined to save mankind was lying up the road in a hay-trough. Hard to
believe for a boy growing up in an electronic age? Ask Ramiz: the stars over the
Judean desert are so bright they could portend almost anything, however
miraculous.

Like every youngster who grows up in Bethlehem, Ramiz is learning to deal with life
as a series of negotiations. To begin with, there are several different sets of Christian
symbols. If he is lucky, a grinning Santa in a red cloak with white trimmings will visit
his school this Christmas and dole out presents—personifying a modern, Teutonic
idea of an early Christian bishop called Nicholas, revered in Bethlehem for centuries
before anyone sang “Jingle Bells”. From his family, Ramiz will hear an older version
of the Bible story. Like the majority of Christians in Bethlehem, his parents are Greek
Orthodox. But many other Christian confessions exist in the town, and the faithful
rub along alright, even if the clergy squabble.

Then there are the relationships with the family's Muslim neighbours. In Beit Sahour,
dealings between Christians and Muslims have usually been amicable. But now that
Palestinian politics are dominated by the Islamists of Hamas, the business of daily
life has become more complicated. So far, the Christians of Bethlehem insist, Hamas
has treated them decently—turning back, for example, from proposals to make
Sunday, the Christian holiday, into a working day. But the Christians would not be
human if they did not regard Hamas rather warily. When the Islamist movement first
emerged around 1987, people in Beit Sahour saw it (not absurdly) as part of an
Israeli ploy to undermine relations between Muslims and Christians.

Lastly, dominating the calculations of every grown-up in Bethlehem, there are the
Israeli authorities, which have held ultimate sway in the city ever since the West
Bank was occupied after the 1967 war.

Since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in autumn 2000, the civilian
residents of Christianity's home town have lived through some terrifying moments.
First there were nightly battles between Palestinian fighters who requisitioned
buildings in Beit Jala—the mainly Christian hill-town which forms Bethlehem's
western wing—and the Israeli army. Then there were incursions by Israeli forces,
complete with armour, who said they had to stem the threat to civilians from fighters
based in Bethlehem.

These incursions culminated in the siege of the Church of the Nativity in spring 2002,
a 40-day stand-off between Israeli snipers and armed militants sheltering in the
ancient building. Nothing quite like that has happened since. But in one particularly
tragic incident in spring 2003, for which an apology was made, Israeli forces
mistakenly opened fire on a car and killed a ten-year-old girl called Christine.
Compared with those fearful days, life in Bethlehem is now relatively peaceful, but
every so often there is an armed clash when an arrest by Israeli forces, discreetly
but perpetually present in the town, leads to protests. Meanwhile, the local economy
is in deep crisis as traditional sources of revenue—work in Jerusalem, and tourism—
have dried up; it is now very hard for most Bethlehemites to obtain Israeli permits to
leave their town. For outsiders, entering the town is not quite so difficult, but it can
involve long waits and searches.

In an Israeli-Palestinian conflict where both sides are ever more entrenched,
Bethlehem stands in the front line, just a few miles from the glitter and prosperity of
Jerusalem but enclosed in a separate universe. An eight-metre (24-foot) high barrier
is gradually encircling the smaller town, obscuring the views of Jerusalem which its
high elevation once afforded.

The combined effect of the wall, land confiscations, checkpoints and expanding
Israeli settlements, linked by settler-only roads, causes every Bethlehemite to make
the same complaint: we are being strangled. Rachel's Tomb—the site which used to
mark the entrance to Bethlehem for travellers coming south from Jerusalem—has
been sealed and surrounded by razor wire.

Not surprisingly, almost everything that is written about this place notes the contrast
between the town's sentimental associations—for the millions of people who mark
Christmas with cribs, trees and stars—and the tough, unsentimental realities of daily
life in a modern Palestinian community of 60,000. (About 35,000 live in Bethlehem
proper, which has a Muslim majority, and the adjoining, mainly Christian settlements
of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour account for about 12,000 each. A further 15,000,
virtually all Muslim, live in UN refugee camps.)

The Israelis have no time for sentimentality about Bethlehem either. They say the
wall is necessary to keep out suicide-bombers; indeed, they argue that half the
terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians in 2004 originated in Bethlehem. More
specifically, they cite a need to shield the new Jewish settlements of Gilo and Har
Homa, partially built on old Bethlehem land. Bethlehemites retort that the wall's
main aim is not to provide security but to entrench the new “facts on the ground”
established by the gradual appropriation of their vineyards and orchards. “Beit Jala
has lost half its land, central Bethlehem has lost a quarter, and Beit Sahour a third,”
grumbles one resident—a fair summary of recent changes in the city's boundaries.

Given that the inflow of tourists has slowed to a trickle, and most only stay for a few
hours, the city's shops are in the doldrums and unemployment is well over 50%.
Indeed, one of the mysteries about contemporary Bethlehem is not why many
people are discontented, but how the place survives at all.

One answer is that conservative family bonds, both Christian and Muslim, keep
society intact—but there are signs of a community on the verge of breaking down.
“Fathers come to us in desperation, saying they cannot feed their families, and we
have to provide discreet help,” says Bishara Awad, the president of Bethlehem Bible
College, an institution whose Palestinian staff train tour guides and pastors.

Cut off without a penny

The finances of Bethlehem town hall, as explained by the deputy mayor, George
Sa'adeh, are in a pathetic state. Its expenditure in normal times would be a modest
12m Israeli shekels ($2.8m) per year, divided about equally between pay for 180
employees and services such as rubbish collection. But “you can't collect taxes from
unemployed people”, so council-tax arrears amount to around 10m shekels. With the
Palestinian government unable to help, the town is sliding deep into debt.

Along with the Christian mayor, Victor Batarseh, Mr Sa'adeh benefits from an old
Ottoman arrangement whereby local power is shared by Christians and Muslims.
Eight places on the city council, including the two top jobs, are reserved for
Christians; the remaining seven seats are held by Muslims. The current occupants
include five representatives of Hamas and one from Islamic Jihad, an even more
militant group whose posters adorn the streets. Despite the religious differences, the
town council presents a united front. Last summer, when two American congressmen
put forward a resolution accusing Muslim Palestinians of persecuting Christian ones,
councilors of both faiths told them to mind their own business.

About 15 years ago a British social anthropologist, Glenn Bowman, observed how Bethlehem's Christians and Muslims bonded through common veneration for certain holy places—such as the monastery of the Prophet Elijah, a Greek Orthodox institution north of Bethlehem. Back in the 1990s, both Christians and Muslims went there to picnic on the annual feast of Elijah. But now the site lies outside the town's new limits, so very few people can go.

This is all very puzzling for a five-year-old like Ramiz. Luckily there are neighbours and family friends who can answer his questions. One such neighbour is a professor of
comparative literature, Qustandi Shomali, whose first name—a variant of Constantine—recalls the Byzantine emperor who built Bethlehem's first church 1,700 years ago. For many generations the Shomali family has interpreted this landscape to visitors while nurturing its own sophisticated understanding of sacred geography and history.

As Mr Shomali knows well, Bethlehem has always been connected with homelessness
and forced migration, and with the paradoxical ways in which wealth and poverty,
power and impotence can be intertwined. All these associations existed long before
the King of Israel was born amid the lowing cattle—and even before a much earlier
monarch, called David, emerged from this modest settlement.

It was in Bethlehem, after all, that a poor widow called Ruth pined for her distant
homeland, even as she settled down with a rich local farmer called Boaz. (Their
descendants included David, as well as Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus.) And the
traditional location of Boaz's fields corresponds precisely with the land that the
Shomali family has always farmed.

Land of our fathers

As Mr Shomali recalls, his forebears literally provided images of Ruth and Boaz for
Western pilgrims. His great-great-grandfather posed as Boaz, and a female forebear
as Ruth, for the benefit of a 19th-century German photographer, and the resulting
picture was widely reproduced.

A few years earlier, in 1850, the Franciscans had acquired title to some of his
family's land but allowed the Shomalis to keep farming it. More recently, the Catholic
religious order built a church to commemorate the vision of the shepherds.

But Mr Shomali insists that his family had no need of pious Western visitors to teach
them the significance of their lands. Well before a new wave of Western pilgrims
turned up in the 19th century, his forebears maintained the tradition that Jacob had
settled in Beit Sahour after burying his wife Rachel. They also cherished the notion
that lambs for the Jewish Passover were reared in their fields. “It is very natural for
our family to be living here, more natural than it is for, say, Christians to live in
Australia,” the professor sighs.

If only things in the Middle East were moving forward, people like Mr Shomali—members of the extrovert, multilingual intelligentsia of Bethlehem—might be forging partnerships, professional and social, with their Israeli equivalents. Back in the1990s, when the peace process still looked promising, that was beginning to happen.

But for the immediate future at least, most of those Israeli-Palestinian relationships
have been frozen. Israeli citizens are not allowed to visit Bethlehem without special
permits, and only a handful of Bethlehemites can now visit Jerusalem or anywhere in
Israel. Any help that Bethlehem gets from the outside world tends to come from
places far beyond Israel, such as European NGOs, churches and city councils. Nordic
NGOs, for example, help to fund the broadcasting studio where Ramiz's father Ala is
a production manager.

On days when there is no school, Ramiz likes to go to work with his dad. As they
chug their way up the steep hill in a car caked with dust, they are—if you believe the
local tradition—following precisely the mile-long journey which those awe-struck
shepherds made: “Let us go now even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is
come to pass.”

Sometimes Ala and Ramiz follow the shepherds' route all the way to the Church of
the Nativity, a place of endless fascination. It is, in fact, a complex of churches: a
big, echoing Greek Orthodox basilica—one of the oldest places of continuous
Christian worship—full of faded frescoes and glinting silver, and adjoining it a
Catholic church with varnished pews where a Westerner would be more at home.

In the crypt of the Greek church, pilgrims kneel before a pointed silver star, inlaid in
marble, which is said to mark the location of the birth of Jesus Christ: not in a stable,
according to Greek tradition, but in a cave where animals were also kept. As scholars
have pointed out, the idea of a child being born to a poor family in one of
Bethlehem's many caves because there was no room elsewhere is quite plausible.

Among the labyrinth of sacred grottoes below the Church of the Nativity, one has an
especially solemn feel: it is dedicated to the Holy Innocents, the babies said to have
been slain by King Herod in his desperate attempt to eliminate a potential rival.
Whatever the holy sites of Bethlehem symbolise, it is not a world free of pain.
Indeed, if the sacred places of Bethlehem and the community that guards them have
remained intact for many centuries, that reflects resilience in the face of frequent
adversity—as well as good fortune.

The Persians who sacked Jerusalem in the early seventh century are said to have left
the Nativity church alone because a mosaic showed the Magi—the wise men who
brought gifts to the baby Jesus—in Persian attire. The Muslims left the church intact
because of their own faith's respect for Jesus and his mother. Muslims and Christian
women alike still flock to the Milk Grotto, where Mary is said to have breast-fed Jesus
as the family was fleeing. As in so many shrines in the Ottoman world, women of
both faiths leave scribbled supplications for a successful conception.

The extraordinary thing is not that perhaps 3,000 Bethlehemites have emigrated
since the intifada started but that so many stubbornly stay, with no visible means of
support. “We are becoming a little town of Bethlehem,” grumbles Jad Isaac, a
science professor with a Bethlehemite's gift for mixing Western and local metaphors.
The wall has deprived his family of access to land it had held since 1563. “Every day
you see evidence of emigration—houses for rent, businesses for rent—but I will resist
emigration. If I am taken away from Bethlehem, I am like a fish out of water,
because this landscape is deep inside me.”

Mr Sa'adeh, the deputy mayor, who is also headmaster of a school which Ramiz will
soon attend, agrees that his community has a duty to hold on as guardians of the
“capital of the Christian world”. For reporters visiting Bethlehem, Mr Sa'adeh is a
favourite interviewee, and not just because of his job as a teacher and councillor. A
retiring, bespectacled figure, he is the father of Christine, the ten-year-old who was
killed in 2003. As a Christian, people ask, can he forgive his daughter's killers? “Yes,
we do forgive, but we can't forget,” he says quietly, in a school office where
Christine's photo adorns the wall. “My hope is that no more children from either side
of this conflict will die.”

As the teacher speaks, his future pupil Ramiz is horsing about in the playground. For
him, the schools, churches and holy fields of Beit Sahour are still a place of wonder.
But when he grows older, this child of Bethlehem will have lots of wise people on
hand to explain the mysteries of his birthplace.

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