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Bethlehem Encircled

By Henry Norr, November 12, 2007

It is unconscionable that Bethlehem should be allowed to die slowly from strangulation.

—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 2005

Bethlehem at Christmas time – by now it's an old chestnut for Middle East reporters. Every December, you can find feature stories about the city of Jesus' birth in mainstream media outlets across the Western world – publications that have, in most cases, reported nothing about the place since the previous holiday season.

The formula is predictable: in recent years there's typically something about Christmas decorations paid for by the Hamas-dominated municipal administration; the obligatory quote from a Manger Square souvenir seller or restaurant owner about the decline of tourism since the second intifada began; some statistics about Christian Palestinians abandoning the city; perhaps a brief reference to the 25-foot-high Israeli Wall that looms over the northern edge of town. Reporters with a taste for irony may mention some of the signs that decorate the Wall: the huge, multicolored "Peace Be With You," in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, that the Israeli government has put up on its side, or the defiant graffiti—"Warsaw Ghetto 1943," "Apartheid," and "To exist is to resist," for example—that crowd the Palestinian side.

Even the best of the mainstream reportage, however, generally misses the fundamental dynamics that underlie Bethlehem's current travails: the city, symbol of faith and hope to millions, is falling victim to a process of systematic strangulation. The Wall has already cut it off from Jerusalem, a city with which it has been bound economically, culturally, and spiritually for more than two millennia. Now, as construction of the Wall—and several sub-walls—extends to the west and south of the city, Bethlehem is also being blocked from the rural villages that have traditionally supplied most of its food. Beyond the walls, a new generation of illegal Israeli settlements will cement the division of the West Bank into small, encircled fragments that recall the bantustans of apartheid South Africa—or, closer to home, the reservations to which the United States confined its indigenous population.

While political leaders on all sides are again babbling on about the never-ending "peace process" and a renewed "freeze on settlement activity," the reality on the ground is that the agony of Bethlehem, far from slowing down, is advancing at an accelerating pace.

Rachel's Tomb

Visually, the city's problems are most apparent at its north end, closest to Jerusalem. There, construction of the Wall is virtually complete, and what was just a large but ramshackle checkpoint when I first passed through it in 2002 has been transformed into a huge and Orwellian "terminal," where travelers lucky enough to have the right passport or permit shuffle through an array of high-tech inspection stations, directed by the amplified voices of unseen guards.

Just south of the terminal, Israeli forces last year completed an extension of the main wall—this one even more imposing, with cement segments 30 and 36 feet high, four watch towers, and an enormous iron gate—that encloses Rachel's Tomb, supposed burial site of the Old Testament matriarch, where Muslims as well as Jews once prayed; effectively, the site has been annexed to Jewish Jerusalem, even though it's on the Palestinian side of the main Wall, and ultra-Orthodox Jews have already set up new mini-settlement and yeshiva within the tomb compound.

The once-thriving commercial district in this neighborhood has been reduced to a virtual wasteland. According to a United Nations report issued in December 2004, 72 of the 80 small businesses in the area, including all 11 restaurants, 20 of 22 vehicle maintenance shops, and 12 of 13 factories or workshops, had shut down or moved since 2002. (Most of the shops still open in 2004 have undoubtedly closed since then.)

The Wall at Rachel's Tomb

Elsewhere in the city, the economic picture is almost as dire. For generations, tourists and pilgrims have been Bethlehem's primary source of income. In the 1990s, when peace seemed to be on the way, local entrepreneurs and foreign investors poured millions of dollars into construction of new hotels, restaurants, and other facilities. Now most of them, if not shut down altogether, are grossly underutilized. From a high of 90,000 visitors a month in early 2000, tourism in the city has dropped to an estimated average of 1,500 a month this year. Tens of thousands used to descend on the city for Christmas; last December the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism reported a total of 3,500. And while most of the visitors used to stay in Bethlehem, spending their money in its hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops, the majority now come only on day trips, traveling in huge Israeli tour buses that whisk them back to the Israeli side of the Wall before nightfall.

The net effect: unemployment among Bethlehem's 45,000 residents (including some 15,000 in the city's three refugee camps) has soared to 60 to 65 percent, according to the Mayor, Dr. Victor Batarseh. (A U.S. citizen who used to practice thoracic surgery in Sacramento, CA, the 73-year-old Batarseh has long been aligned with the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; he won the mayor's seat in 2005, when he ran in alliance with Hamas and Islamic Jihad against the corruption of the previous Fatah-dominated municipal administration.) And with unemployment, of course, come poverty and despair, which in turn have produced new problems of crime and drugs.

More walls, more settlements

The problems described above are by now apparent to any open-minded visitor to Bethlehem. What's not so obvious—and hardly ever reported in the Western press—is that Israel in recent years has embarked on a stepped-up campaign to ring the city with more walls, new and expanded settlements, and Jewish-only "by-pass road”—all built on confiscated Palestinian land.

* Northeast of the city, for example, Israel is rapidly expanding the settlement of Har Homa, the concrete monstrosity that occupies the once pine-covered hill Palestinians called Jabal Abu Ghneim, and planning two new adjacent settlements; all together, the built-up area in the complex is slated to grow by 350 percent. One consequence: Israel recently issued military orders for the demolition of parts of an affordable-housing development built by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate on a nearby hill east of Beit Sahour.

* Northwest of Bethlehem, near the existing settlements of Gilo and Har Gilo, a new settlement called Giv'at Yael is slated to house 55,000 Jews on Palestinian agricultural lands. The project is part of a plan to establish an unbroken arc of settlements from the Gush Etzion bloc to the west and south of Bethlehem all the way to Jerusalem.

* In the same area, a new wall now under construction will completely surround and isolate the Palestinian village of al-Walaja; the only way out will be through a single Israeli-controlled crossing point.

* West and southwest of Bethlehem, another segment of the Wall will surround a huge chunk of the Bethlehem Governorate (district). This project is intended to encompass Kfar Etzion, the oldest Israeli settlement, and the 11 other settlements that make up the Gush Etzion bloc, with a total population of 80,000 settlers. But eight Palestinian villages, representing almost a third of the district's currently accessible agricultural land, will also fall within the Etzion walls, leaving 20,000 residents completely cut off and probably unable to deliver their produce to Bethlehem's markets. (More than three quarters of the governorate's total agricultural land, lying to the east of Bethlehem city, has been inaccessible to Palestinians since Israel declared it a "closed military area" shortly after conquering it in the 1967 war.)

* Southwest of Bethlehem, near the border of the Hebron district, the Israelis have begun construction of the Wall plus a major new terminal on land confiscated from the Palestinian village of Umm Salamuna. It's believed to be part of a long-term plan to build a new "ring road" around Bethlehem's southeastern flanks, thus completing the encirclement of the city.

As has been true elsewhere in the West Bank in recent years, the villagers of the Bethlehem Governorate are mounting a determined campaign of nonviolent resistance to the new Israeli offensive. Inspired by the example of Bil'in, the village northeast of Jerusalem that staged weekly marches to protest the theft of its lands, attracted wide publicity within Israel and around the world, and eventually prevailed on the Israeli High Court to order adjustments to the route of the Wall, residents of al-Walajah, Artas, Umm Salamuna, and other villages around Bethlehem have in recent months adopted similar tactics.

As in Bil'in, Israeli and international activists, including the ISM, have joined the demonstrations and helped the villagers get word of their struggle out to the world. Also as in Bil'in, the Israeli Occupation Forces have responded with the usual tools of their trade: tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets.

The villagers, of course, are well aware that they can't by themselves stop the Wall or oust the settlers; that will require major changes in the international political climate, in particular in U.S. policy. But as usual they are standing fast, waiting for the world to take note and take action to stop the injustices Israel continues to perpetrate.

Henry Norr has visited Bethlehem four times since 2002. In 2005 he spent two months there, volunteering with the International Middle East Media Center."

YouTube video of the Annexation Wall in Bethlehem, 2007