Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem: Not a Christmas Story

1. Bethlehem
One morning at the end of February I spent 90 minutes hanging out in the office of Bethlehem mayor Victor Batarseh. Bethlehem in the West Bank, Palestine, that is. And yes, the mayor’s office overlooks Manger Square, looking south toward the Church of the Nativity; so there is a certain sense of history to the place.
During our conversation, Batarseh wanted to make sure he got on the record with his scalding criticisms of Israel’s recent war against Gaza. “This war was not against Hamas. It was against the Gaza Strips’ women and children and its whole infrastructure,” he said.

They were trying to destroy the whole society there… Just as Sharon did here in the West Bank in 2002, and we still haven’t totally rebuilt from that.
How can the western governments, time and time again, ask their people to pay for all these damages caused by Israel’s military actions?

Bethlehem’s city council has 15 members: eight are Christians and seven are Muslims, and of the Muslims, five are members of Hamas. Batarseh is a Christian, affiliated with one of the venerable leftist factions of the PLO: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP.
I’d been taken to Batarseh’s office by council member Zoughbi Zoughbi, a veteran peace activist and also, fwiw, a Christian. Visiting the office that morning were two of the Hamas council members and one of the Fateh members. Batarseh sat behind his desk, the council members and I sat in the easy chairs in front of the desk. Mainly we talked politics– in English and Arabic. There was a lot of camaraderie and good-natured teasing amongst the council members in the gathering, which assumed the feel, very familiar to me, of an Arabic style “majlis” get-together. Every so often a city official would come in to do some business, and there were some discussions of serious differences among the council members on the question of whether the number of peddlers’ cart licenses should be increased or not. (That one sounded like an issue of expanding the economic opportunities available to low-income people versus not scaring off valuable, revenue-bearing foreign tourists by having too many peddlers in the streets.)
Of course, given that the weather was very chilly that day the whole gathering was also lubricated by numerous rounds of hot drinks: yensoon (aniseed tea), mint tea, Arabic coffee, back to yensoon…
Armchair analysts in the west who believe that there are deep and possibly irreconcileable rifts between Fateh and Hamas would have done well to spend a morning with me in Batarseh’s office. “In Bethlehem, there are no problems between Fateh and Hamas because we know each other well,” Hamas councillor Saleh Shawkeh said. And the way the council members from the different Palestinian movements all interacted together seemed to bear out his words.
“Hamas has to join the PLO!” Zoughbi exclaimed at one point. Batarseh clarified that he thought that Hamas and Islamic Jihad should come in “under the PLO umbrella… and the PLO needs to be renewed and reformed so it can assure the representation of all Palestinians both inside the homeland and in the diaspora.”
Shawkeh said, “Yes, the PLO is a legitimate body but it’s not the only one in the field. So our idea is that the PLO needs to be fixed before we can come into it.” (That echoed exactly what I’d heard from two Hamas parliamentarians I’d interviewed a few days earlier, in Ramallah/Bireh.)
Batarseh jumped in with: “Hamas needs to change too… It shouldn’t reach for power by force, as it did in Gaza in 2007.”
Shawkeh: “Look, we did win power firstly by votes, but no-one let us even start to exercise our constitutional power after the election!”
Half an hour later a Fateh councillor (whose name I didn’t write down) also joined us. “There is no alternative but for both Hamas and Fateh to end the conflict between us,” he said, “for the sake of the Palestinian people.” Later on, though, he also chided the Hamas councillors, saying many Arab satellite news channels had been strongly biased toward Hamas– “and they never mentioned the suffering Hamas inflicted on the people in Gaza.”
When the conversation turned to broader political principles Batarseh betrayed his PFLP origins when he said,

We and Hamas both want peace based on justice… We preferred an outcome of one state for all the people in in it: the secular democratic state that used to be the PLO’s dream. A state based on religion or ethnicity is always going to have many problems.
Is there any space left for a Palestinian state any more, with all these Israeli settlements all around us and all these settler-only roads? If we’re going to have a Palestinian state we need it to be viable!

Later in the conversation he laid stress on the fact that, “All of us agree that the Oslo Agreement was a big mistake in which Arafat and the PLO gave away far too much.”
… All in all, it was a good– and very good-natured– political discussion.
Outside Batarseh’s office, the streets that snake around and up and down the steep hills on which Bethlehem sits were much quieter than usual. A commercial strike had been called by the PA that day, to protest against Israel’s newly announced plans to demolish 88 homes in the Silwan area of Jerusalem.
That strike was significant: It was the first nationwide public action called for jointly by both Fateh and Hamas. It was also an evocative reminder of the heady days of the First Intifada, 1987-93, during which the vast majority of the Palestinians’ protest actions had been nonviolent mass actions like commercial strikes, sit-ins, and marches. And yes, the commercial strike announced that day (Feb. 28) was remarkably widely observed– in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, in East Jerusalem, and in many other areas of the occupied West Bank.
The discussions inside the mayor’s chamber may have been friendly and warm, and the streets outside subdued and calm. But around the Bethlehem and its sister cities of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala stood The Wall, its forbidding 30-foot-high presence a constant and very “concrete” reminder of the encirclement of the Palestinian communities of the West Bank.
I cannot overstate how brutal and ugly the Wall is. It becomes a fence in many of the more rural parts of the West Bank. But here, as all around east Jerusalem, and in nearby Ramallah, it is definitely and inescapeably a Wall– one that’s about twice the height of the Berlin Wall, which was already shocking enough.
The Israeli Wall where it comes anywhere close to populated areas– and oftentimes, it will cut right through them– is punctuated by cylindrical concrete watch-towers that are even taller than the Wall. At the top of the towers are large, slanted-forward bullet-proof glass windows from which heavily armed Israelis look down on the Palestinians living below. There are also numerous free-standing watch-towers, also of 35-40 feet high. Sometimes their thick slanted glass windows looks directly into apartments on the upper stories of buildings.
The sheer size and extent of these Walls and towers– and the massive investment that has gone, and continues to go, into their ever-expanding construction– make a mockery of the idea that the Israeli government might be seeking peace with its neighbors any time soon.
Concentration camps were first invented by the British, during their wars against the Boers in South Africa in the early years of the 20th century. The experience of being “concentrated” into these closely guarded camps did not make the Boer civilian population that was herded into them into a warm, pliant, peace-loving people, to say the least. No reason to think that Israel’s ongoing attempts to quadrillage, “concentrate”, and control the Palestinians of the West Bank would be much different.
But at least the Anglo-Boer wars came to an end and after just a few years of concentration the Boers were allowed back to their farms.
In Bethlehem or Beit Jala, by contrast, if you look out across the Wall to the areas outside it, most of what you see are the gigantic new Jews-only settlements of Gilo and Har Homa eating up more and more land with every month that passes. Those settlers don’t look as though they are going anywhere anytime soon. So the Walls and fences that keep the indigenous Palestinians away from those expropriated portions of their native lands likely won’t be coming down anytime soon, either.
As Zoughbi and I looked out westward across a valley toward what is now the settlement of Gilo he said, “Those used to be the fields and grazing lands for the landowners of Beit Jala. Beit Jala’s people had such wonderful lands– they used to stretch from here right down to the coastal plain. They took all that land… ”
At the end of my visit to Bethlehem and Beit Jala, Zoughbi took me to a bus-stop in the center of Beit Jala where we were lucky (on a strike day) to find a mini-bus heading for Jerusalem. You can read a bit about that trip here.
I can’t tell you how sad and guilty I felt that I– a complete foreigner– was able to travel fairly easily from Bethlehem to Jerusalem while Zoughbi, like the vast majority of other residents of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour have been forbidden since 2000 from traveling to Jerusalem, their close relatives and business associates there, and the many holy places there for both Christians and Muslims. And they, like all the other Palestinians of the West Bank have absolutely zero prospect, as of now, that these roads will be reopened to them any time soon.
Downtown Bethlehem is about seven miles as the crow flies from the center of Jerusalem.
2. Nazareth.
Back in the 1980s I made a couple of visits to Nazareth, which is the largest city in northern Israel and the largest Arab city anywhere in Israel. Back in those days if you started off from the– in my view exceedingly ugly– Church of the Basilica you could immediately climb upward into the dense network of tiny stone-paved streets that laced up the hills up behind it forming the dense and busy Arabic-style suq (market) that lies at the heart of all ancient Middle Eastern cities.
Back then, the guidebooks said that if you go to the second haberdasher on the right side of a certain street in the suq, you could get the key to a nearby, half-underground structure that was absolutely reputed to be the very synagogue in which Jesus of Nazareth, aged 12, had delivered his first sermon. In 1989 my father, a devout Anglican and something of a sermonizer in his own right, was staying with us in Israel/Palestine for ten days, and we couldn’t resist the temptation to seek out the haberdasher in question, and get hold of the key… Before long, we were standing in that very synagogue room, imbibing many centuries’ worth of pure ambience from the roughcut, cobwebby walls around us. Gosh, I must still have the photos of that somewhere…
And then, we exited the synagogue, coming out directly into the hustle-bustle of the suq that was all around us.
When I was planning the return trip I made to Nazareth ten days ago, I asked Jonathan Cook, a very smart British writer who I think has now earned the title of “The Sage of Nazareth”, where would be a good place to stay. Jonathan suggested I try one of the two little guest houses that have recently opened up within the Old City. I was excited. I love the intricacies, history, and bustle of the Middle East’s “Old Cities”. When I was in Damascus back in January our delegation stayed in a place called the Talisman Hotel, which is one of a number of small boutique hotels that have opened up in recent years– along with an even greater number of very fancy restaurants– inside the traditional, courtyard-based homes and “palaces” of the Old City… Or, you could think of the often smaller “riyadh” guest-houses established in lovely old homes in Marrakesh… One of the principal attractions of such lodgings is the fact that they are located in, and help to sustain the economic fabric of, fully functioning ancient downtown areas.
Well, that is there. But Nazareth is in Israel, which apparently doesn’t place much value on fully functioning Arab-style (and Arab-peopled) downtown areas.
Back in 2000, the Pope decided he wanted to visit Nazareth for the millennium. So a few years before that the Israeli government decided to gussy the whole city center up. That, according to Jonathan, involved closing down the entire downtown area for three years so the facades of the buildings could be entirely cleaned and standardized. The Pope came, and I imagine he may have looked at the facades for some minutes (or not.) But most of the shopowners and the residents who once lived above and all round them never returned. Downtown Nazareth became a nearly deserted urban wasteland, inhabited only by a small number of very poor squatters and drug addicts.
Jonathan has described the process as the “de-development” of the Nazareth downtown. You can see a few of his photos of Life in Nazareth here.
And guess what. Here as in Jaffa and Acre and the “de-developed” historic centers of other Palestinian cities inside Israel, Jewish-Israeli entrepreneurs have just now moving in to try to gentrify, boutiquize, and rebrand the Old City.
That is after, of course, the Israeli government has already, over the years, taken numerous steps to expropriate and re-purpose– for Jews only– many of the lands around the city that for generations were owned by Palestinian landowners. One of the biggest of these land-grabs was the one that resulted in the building of an whole new Jewish town, called Nazareth Illit (“Upper Nazareth”) on the hills north of town.
Historian Geremy Forman has written that,

Like other Jewish settlements in the Galilee, an important aim of Upper Nazareth was to ensure Jewish state control and sovereignty in the region. According to IDF Planning Department Director Yuval Ne’eman, the new settlement would “emphasize and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole, and … demonstrate state sovereignty to the Arab population more than any other settlement operation.” More specifically, Upper Nazareth was meant to address the challenge perceived as emanating from the all-Arab city of Nazareth. It would do this not by achieving a Jewish majority within the city of Nazareth itself, but rather by quickly evolving from a neighborhood into a city and eventually overpowering Arab Nazareth numerically, economically, and politically. According to Northern Military Governor Colonel Mikhael Mikhael, the final aim of the settlement was to “swallow up” the Arab city through “growth of the Jewish population around a hard-core group” and “the transfer of the center of gravity of life from Nazareth to the Jewish neighborhood.” (G. Forman: Military Rule, Political Manipulation, and Jewish Settlement: Israeli Mechanisms for Controlling Nazareth in the 1950s, The Journal of Israeli History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2006), p.351, cited in Wikipedia.)

…Well, despite my disappointment about the sad fate of Nazareth’s Old City, I did have a good time during my short stay there. Jonathan and his wife, Sally Azzam, were extremely kind in showing me around. They showed me how to find some of the small number of functioning businesses inside the Old City. But we also wondered around many streets looking at some of the fine architectural details of beautiful old homes now falling into disrepair.
Both of them are really interesting people. Jonathan is an amazingly prolific and smart writer. He’s now published three books of his own, as well as contributing chapters to several edited volumes. (Details here.)
I managed to buy and read his latest book, Disappearing Palestine, before I got to Nazareth, and strongly recommend it. On his website he describes his perspective in these terms:

Geographically, I am the first foreign correspondent to be based in the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, in the Galilee. Most reporters covering the conflict live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’ – a catch-all that offers Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under international law.
Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.
From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism’s appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its settler colonial agenda.

Sally was equally interesting to talk to. She is probably somewhere in her early thirties, and she’s a native of Nazareth. She talked about how, growing up there and going to one of the city’s many nun-run schools, she never heard very much talk at all– either at home or from her teachers at school– about the Nakba (catastrophe) that struck the whole Arab community of Palestine in 1948. She said her grandmother, who had lived through the whole Nakba, “never wanted to talk about it at all”, and her mother never said much about it until recently, either.
It was only after Sally went to university, in Haifa, that she really started to hear the Nakba discussed openly. And it was then, too, that she started to explore and strengthen her identity as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. (Official Israeli policy has always been to try to downplay the “Palestinian-ness” of the country’s Palestinian-Arab citizens, describing them only as “Israeli Arabs”, or further sub-dividing them into even smaller categories like “”Christian Arabs”, or “Israeli Druze”, or “Israeli Beduins”, or whatever… Anything but the dreaded P-word that might cause them– gasp!– to identify more closely with those of their cousins and brothers who had left as refugees in 1948 or who, living just a few miles south of Nazareth, were living under the yoke of Israeli military occupation in the confines of the West Bank.)
Sally also talked a little about how, young and eager to be “modern”, she was eager when she went to university to have her first real opportunity to make friends with Jewish Israeli girls her age. But she said that most of her efforts to do so were rebuffed: “They really didn’t want anything to do with us.”
These days, one of the things Sally is doing is working with one of the many “co-existence and conflict resolution” projects that have been started by NGOs within the Palestinian-Israeli community. She’s been working with a group of Palestinian-Israeli girls in Nazareth on life-skills, nonviolent communication, and things like that.
She recalled one recent event when “her” group of Palestinian-Israeli girls were scheduled to meet up and do a joint activity with a group of Jewish-Israeli girls who had been taking part in a parallel program someplace else. “Our girls were pretty excited at the opportunity to get together as equals, for once, with these Jewish girls. But when we got there, none of the Jewish girls turned up. They just couldn’t be bothered. It was pretty hard to explain to the girls in my group that this event they had been looking forward to, and preparing for, for quite some time– to the Jewish girls, it was just nothing.”
for me, that story of Sally’s was an echo of something Jewish Israeli strategic analyst Yossi Alpher had told me just a few days earlier.
We were having lunch in a nice cafe in northern Tel Aviv, and at one point Alpher said,

You know, for the Arab states, they seem to act as if this ‘normalization of relations’ that they are holding out to Israel as part of the Arab Peace Initiative is a big deal. But it really isn’t. Most Israelis don’t give a toss these days about having good relations with the Arab world, becoming well integrated into the Middle East region, and all that. For an earlier generation of Israelis– maybe that mattered. But nowadays? No. The present generation of Israelis have largely turned their back on the Arab world. They’re much more focused on Europe.
Now, you have numerous Israelis who commute on a weekly basis between Tel Aviv and London or Amsterdam. Then you have the descendants of all those earlier generations of Israelis who came here from Poland or Romania or wherever in the 1930s: Now that most of those countries have gone into the EU, Israelis are reclaiming their citizenship rights there, and those EU passports, at a fast rate. Why would they want to be bothered with the Arabs?

Anyway, back to Nazareth: Guess who’s coming to the city again, (though in a new instantiation) this May?
The pope. H’mmm.
3. Tawfiq Zayyad
From 1973 until his untimely death in 1994, the Palestinian-Israeli Communist poet Tawfiq Zayyad was both Mayor of Nazareth and a member of Israel’s Knesset (parliament.)
Here, thanks to Wikipedia, are English-language translations of two of Zayyad’s best-known poems:

Here We Will Remain
In Lydda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
we shall remain
like a wall upon your chest,
and in your throat
like a shard of glass,
a cactus thorn,
and in your eyes
a sandstorm.
We shall remain
a wall upon your chest,
clean dishes in your restaurants,
serve drinks in your bars,
sweep the floors of your kitchens
to snatch a bite for our children
from your blue fangs.
Here we shall stay,
sing our songs,
take to the angry streets,
fill prisons with dignity.
In Lydda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
we shall remain,
guard the shade of the fig
and olive trees,
ferment rebellion in our children
as yeast in the dough.
* * *
All I Have
I never carried a rifle
On my shoulder
Or pulled a trigger.
All I have
Is a flute’s melody
A brush to paint my dreams,
A bottle of ink.
All I have
Is unshakeable faith
And an infinite love
For my people in pain.

Zayyad was killed in a car accident in July 994, as he drove back to Nazareth after a visit he made to Jericho to welcome Yasser Arafat on the occasion of Arafat’s post-Oslo return to the West Bank.
How tragic was that?
4. Jerusalem
I have written quite a lot about Jerusalem here already– about the Jewish-Israeli western part of the city, from which some 60,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed during the fighting of 1948, and have never since been allowed to return, and about the now Israeli-occupied eastern part of the city from which some 2,000 Jewish people were ethnically cleansed during the 1948…
The eastern half of the city includes the city’s historic and fascinating walled Old City, home of some of the holiest sites of the three monotheistic religions: The Kotel, or Wailing Wall, beloved as a place of intense lamentation by Jews; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is, truth be told, much fought over among a myriad of Christian churches; and the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif) of the Muslims, home to the highly venerated Al-Aqsa mosque and the gold-carapaced Dome of the Rock, a shrine on the spot from which the prophet is reputed to have sprung on his horse during his mystic Night Journey… The Haram al-Sharif is also reputedly on the site of the Jewish people’s destroyed Third Temple. (The Kotel that we can see is the wall facing a portion of its foundation. The lamentations there are over the destruction of the temple.)
Ah, as soon as I write about this sacred geography, and its intimacy, you can start to see the complexity and incendiary nature of the issues involved.
No wonder my friend Moshe Ma’oz says “The negotiators should start with the issue of Jerusalem, not end with it. With goodwill and mutual respect all round these issues can be resolved. And once you’ve solved Jerusalem everything else falls easily into place.”
However, the mutual respect part of this might require quite some effort to build. After Israel’s military occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967 it almost immediately set about trying to Judaize as much of the city as it could. First it seized back control over the historic Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Then it decided to make a big ceremonial plaza in front of the Kotel, for which purpose it demolished 135 Palestinian homes in the Mughariba Quarter near the Wall, along with two neighborhood mosques and the shrine of a Sufi saint. Then, almost immediately, it set about building thick swathes of Jewish settlements in such a way as to stifle the city’s remaining Palestinian residents and to cut them off from their cousins and compatriots in the rest of the West Bank.
For this purpose, too, the Israeli government unilaterally expanded the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem considerably beyond where they had previously been and then declared the unilateral Anschluss of the whole expanded city to the State of Israel. The Palestinians trapped inside the annexed city now number 220,000. The number of Israeli settlers quite illegally planted into the occupied east of the city number around 195,000. The boundaries of the city are ringed by the brutal concrete Wall.
And still the demolitions of Palestinian homes inside the city continues, as does the creeping forward of Israeli settlement projects right through the heart of historic Palestinian neighborhoods both within the Old City and outside it…