Oh little town of Bethlehem how still we see thee lie.
Bethlehem is no longer a little town, but it is certainly “still”.
Shops are shuttered. Many of the Palestinian population have left, unable to survive the virtual drying up of tourism since the second intifada (or Palestinian uprising) began in 2000.
The fourth century Church of the Nativity was almost empty when I went there this week.
Before 2000 it was invariably packed with long queues to get in.
In Jerusalem, just 20 minutes away, it is different. Tourism and pilgrimages – along with their foreign money – are returning now the worst of the intifada appears to be over.
Adnan Al-Korna, sitting in his deserted shop in Bethlehem asks, “Why?”
No doubt the families of the victims of the London transport bombings are asking the same question.
I landed at Heathrow on the day of the bombs on my way to Amman, Jordan, and then across the River Jordan into the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Friends and relatives in Australia said I was mad going to the Middle East for a holiday. The official Australian Government travel warning says the same thing.
“Australians in . . . the West Bank should leave,” it says.
No such advice for London. Yet George Bush’s war on terror has made the whole world – not just the Middle East — less safe. We should be more even-handed in our scare campaigns.
So why is Bethlehem deserted? Because it is beyond the Wall and because of a scare campaign.
Bethlehem is in a non-Jewish areas of the West Bank – the 2000 sq km (subs: grateful if you could check this and change if you get a more accurate figure) area abutting the River Jordan that Israel has occupied contrary to UN resolutions since 1967.
The Israeli Government has been constructing an eight-metre high wall and several hundred kilometres of four-metre high fencing to incorporate it settlements and expansion areas that wants in the West Bank and the whole of Greater Jerusalem. The rest – barely viable – will be handed to the Palestinians if ever there is a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Wall is made of sheer-faced reinforced concrete – more austere than a prison wall and dwarfing the Berlin Wall.
I cannot imagine a US President going to Palestine and saying in Arabic: “I am a Palestinian” in the way Kennedy empathised with the plight of Berliners isolated by a ruthless communist regime.
At the Bethlehem checkpoint it is daubed with slogans: “American money. Israeli apartheid” and “Warsaw ghetto” – a poignant, if inaccurate, reference to the Nazi compounding behind a wall and later murder of thousands of Jews in Warsaw. There is no murder, but there is a campaign of eviction.
Israeli authorities can prevent passage through the wall of anyone at any time. They can delay passage and humiliate Palestinians wanting to cross to visit their relatives, farms and business links on the other side.
Iyat, an under-employed tourist guide, tells of regular difficulties. Sometimes he is not allowed through and his tourists have to be picked up by someone on the other side.
The Wall makes tourism to Bethlehem more difficult. Tourists are discouraged by Israel tour operators and others who say – like the Australian Government — that Bethlehem is unsafe. It is just a safe as London. It is easy to engender fear.
Adnan says it is part of a broad Israeli aim to make life so difficult that Palestinians leave – part of the relentless replacement of the Arab population with Jewish population. In 1948 and 1967 it was done by force. Now it is being done by purchase, town planning and the Wall.
In East Jerusalem you can see the occasional recently bought Jewish dwelling with guard posts and barbed wire around the rooftop entrance.
Iyat said, “They offer large prices and passports to another country. Slowly they are taking the Arab part of the city.”
He is resigned to it and expects the Dome of the Rock – built as a mosque in the seventh century in the place where Moslems believe Mohammed ascended into heaven – to be demolished and replaced by a synagogue.
In town planning, Israel has reserved green areas, denying Palestinians the right to build. A myriad of other obstructions prevent Palestinians building yet allow Jews to build. Town planning is used to ensure Jews get water and electricity and Arabs have a harder time getting it. Jewish areas get better garbage services, parking enforcement, road and pavement maintenance and so on.
The Wall separates Palestinians from their agricultural land, businesses, friends and relations.
Adnan says, “Dignity is the most important thing for us. We don’t want to beg. We want to work.”
The resentment is not only felt within Israel and the West Bank. In Jordan, which houses millions of people who fled Palestine in 1948 and 1967, I met a woman who told of how her parents went back to Palestine in the period between intifadas and saw a Jewish family occupying the home they had fled.
Of course, on the Palestinian side, Yasser Arafat was their worst enemy. For years he held out against a peace settlement and refused to end terrorist violence because a peace settlement with a Palestinian state would have seen him lose his position as fighter for that very Palestinian state. Yet each time over nearly 40 years that he refused settlement he ensured only that the next offer would be for even less land for the Palestinians.
Nonetheless, the Wall, the humiliation, the dispossession of land without compensation, the economic dislocation and the apartheid can only add to the seething resentment that leads to a violent response. People do not resort to violence without cause. Without a just settlement and an end to humiliation, attacks on dignity and dispossession, there can be no security – either for Israelis, Palestinians or Londoners on the underground.
As this week’s suicide bomb – the first for four months — that killed three in northern Israel shows, bunkering down with fences, walls, guns and intimidation will not stop violence and will not provide security.
There is no point in having a war against terrorism without a war against the causes of terrorism.