Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2002, page 14

Bethlehem Bulletin

 

Hanging by a Scarlet Thread in the Holy Land

 

By Sr. Elaine Kelley

The in-flight entertainment on the Dec. 3 flight from London to Tel Aviv opened with a BBC report announcing that Israel had resumed bombing Bethlehem. According to the report Israel was retaliating for the Dec. 1 suicide bombings at the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall in West Jerusalem and a bus bombing in Haifa the following day.

I had been looking forward to my arrival in Beit Sahour, just down the hill from Bethlehem, where friends whom I had not seen for almost a year and a half were preparing a welcome back supper for me and my co-traveler from Oregon, Nancy Hedrick, a veteran Central American peace activist now working with the Northwest Coalition for Justice in Palestine. This would be her first visit to the Middle East and an opportunity to experience Palestine with a “townie.” Over the past decade I had lived in the Bethlehem area for a total of four years, so for me it was like coming home. During the five-hour flight, however, we worried about the news reports. Would the bombing stop soon? Would we be able to get through the checkpoint into the West Bank? Was it dangerous?

Dan Simmons, another Oregonian working in Palestine and the new director of World Vision in Jerusalem (see the December 2001 Washington Report, p. 66), picked us up at Ben-Gurion Airport. As he drove, he talked on his cell phone with a staff member in Gaza who was giving Dan the damage reports from the Israeli air attacks there. Two people had been killed somewhere in Bethlehem, they said, the electricity had been cut, and, yes, helicopter gunships continued their assault. Dan insisted that we stay at the World Vision guest house on the Mt. of Olives in East Jerusalem, near his office. There would be no getting into Bethlehem this night.

Nancy and I were on a mission. We had just 10 days to get everything done: see friends and visit the holy sites, photograph the destruction in Bethlehem, attend a meeting of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, visit the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron, attend a memorial service in Ramallah for peacemaker Audeh Rantisi, who died this past October, and introduce Nancy to Palestinian and Israeli peace groups and acquaint her with the political terrain so she could knowledgeably communicate the realities in Palestine and Israel to people back home. It was important for us to get into Bethlehem and Beit Sahour as soon as possible.

Ironically, we were experiencing exactly the opposite frustration of our friends, who cannot leave Bethlehem to go to Jerusalem. I called our hosts in Beit Sahour, who said they could still hear shelling somewhere in Bethlehem, and maybe in Beit Jala as well. They were disappointed that we could not join them for supper, and urged us to try to reach Beit Sahour very early in the morning, before the day’s problems began.

There is an ancient Hebrew superstition that if you wear a scarlet thread around your neck it will protect you from danger. The story was originally intended for pregnant women, with the added precondition that the thread must first be sanctified by wrapping it around Rachel’s Tomb, where the matriarch and eternal “loving mother” of the Hebrew scriptures was buried around 1560 bce. It’s said that the tradition continues even today. I wondered if it applied as well to Palestinians and to visitors.

The following morning I arose at 4:30 a.m. and, leaving Nancy and our luggage at the guest house, took a taxi to the intersection north of the Bethlehem checkpoint. To avoid the Israeli soldiers and their questions I got out of the taxi and walked through the Tantur Biblical Institute compound. I hadn’t come this far to be told that Bethlehem was a closed military zone. On the way I ran into some Bethlehem University students walking from Beit Safafa through Tantur’s hilly, rocky trails in order to circumvent the checkpoint and get to their classes, and a number of men walking in the opposite direction, toward Jerusalem, trying to get to their jobs. For me the detour was a mere annoyance and inconvenience, but for these Palestinians it was a daily affront to their basic human rights.

I had last seen Bethlehem in July 2000, when I lived and worked there during and following the development projects for the New Millennium. Christmas 2000 had been everything a millennium birthday should be, with world-renowned choirs in the Church of the Nativity, thousands of pilgrims enjoying the beautified neighborhoods, decorations, welcome banners, colorful garlands, stands of newly-planted trees, and happy merchants anticipating long-awaited sales. The historic pilgrimage of His Holiness Pope John Paul II in March 2000 saw the little town continuing its evolution from an underdeveloped Third World town to a 21st century holy land conveying new peace and new promise for the future.

I was shocked by the Bethlehem to which I returned in December 2001. The Paradise Hotel, a landmark at the entrance to downtown Bethlehem, looked like a remnant of civil-war Beirut: the building was almost completely destroyed, and still blackened by bombings sustained during Israel’s incursion in October and November last year. Right across from the hotel, at Rachel’s Tomb, groups of Israeli soldiers spend their days and nights forcing Palestinian traffic off the main road and away from the holy site, where only Jewish visitors and an occasional tourist or Christian pilgrim are allowed to enter.

Further down Manger Street, smaller buildings sat in ruins from recent shelling, broken glass still littering the street and sidewalks. These stone structures, which had housed private homes, apartments, clinics, produce markets or other small businesses, have been reduced to mounds of rubble. Burned-out cars pock-marked with bullet holes sit abandoned along the street. Gone—deliberately mowed down by Israeli tanks—are the seedling trees planted over a year ago along Manger Street’s new center meridian.

Nancy stayed in Jerusalem for two days with World Vision volunteers and toured the Old City. She then joined me in Beit Sahour, where she was inaugurated into life under occupation, with reassurances from our hosts that she would survive the experience. Although they considered her a political novice, they were unaware of her studied familiarity with Palestinian history and current affairs. The honored guest, Nancy was a new convert to the Palestinian cause and, as such, the recipient of all the details of injustice and oppression. One sensed that the Palestinians who provided them were relieved not to be reiterating them once again to each other.

With our hosts we traveled to the outskirts of Beit Sahour to visit a cooperative housing development called Iskan (in Arabic, a community living in peace). Managed by Palestinian Christian churches, Iskan stands high on the hillside across the valley from Shepherds’ Field and not far from the mountain called Abu Ghneim, where the huge new Jewish settlement of Har Homa has taken command of the skyline. My friends had been making monthly payments on one of the units at Iskan, hoping to move their large family of nine out of their cramped dwelling in the center of town. Now they were concerned about the frequent shootings emanating from Har Homa and from the new for-Jews-only by-pass road running immediately in front of their building. Standing on the fifth floor and looking out across Shepherds’ Field with binoculars we could clearly identify Palestinian buildings that had been damaged by rockets from the illegal Jewish settlement.

On another day we took a taxi to Ras Beit Jala (the highest point in Beit Jala), where most of the damage was inflicted on houses on the hillside exposed to the Gilo settlement to the northwest. Large villas have been demolished along one road where there is an uninterrupted view of the valley below and Tunnel Road, another by-pass road now closed to Palestinian traffic and patrolled by the IDF. Looming large on the other side of the valley was Gilo, one of the largest Jewish settlements, spreading across a hilltop as do the vast majority of settlements.

We canceled our visit to Hebron and the Christian Peacemaker Team living there when we heard that Israeli soldiers were preventing foreigners from entering the town. Those on solidarity visits should know that having an American passport does not grant automatic access and the unhindered right to pass through Israeli military checkpoints. This was a strict closure. Then we got the message that Patricia Rantisi had decided to postpone the memorial service in Ramallah for her husband, Audeh, because getting in and out of their town by taxi, bus or private car was difficult and the time spent waiting in long lines at the checkpoint unpredictable.

Nancy wanted to visit a refugee camp so we went to Dheisheh camp, south of Bethlehem. Established in 1948, it now houses about 20,000 “permanent” Palestinian refugees. We were also invited dinner guests at the Christian Brothers’ residence at Bethlehem University where I served as development officer from 1998 to 2000. The religious men told us their stories of the senseless destruction of campus buildings and equipment by Israeli fire. The university’s report of the Oct. 27 damages notes that the Brothers’ residence on campus was “hit by at least 110 bullets.” Historic Bethlehem Hall, the campus building closest to the Israeli tanks as they laid siege to Bethlehem, sustained structural damage. Four water tanks were destroyed, as were two solar heating panels. There were 13 broken windows and 15 bullet holes in the main entrance door. The Internet connection wire for the Science Building was severed in four places, and power lines cut. The new Millennium Hall building had 46 broken windows, and eight water tanks and two solar panels destroyed. In their damage report the Brothers observed that “as far as can be determined the tank grenades being used are 40mm low velocity fragmentation grenades designed to be lethal within a small radius.”

In spite of all the damage, the university has managed to hold classes most of the time.

Nancy and I decided to find the place where two Palestinian men had been killed the night we arrived. George and Mohaned from Beit Sahour served as our guides and interpreters. They knew exactly where to go. A large, four-story building on Bethlehem’s Saf Street bore banners in Arabic announcing the martyrdoms of Nedal Zedok of Bethlehem and his friend Rafat Bajali from Zatara. The building, visibly damaged by the shelling, was still occupied in the lower floors by the victims’ surviving families. It sat in the midst of a densely populated neighborhood where children played in the streets.

Gathered there for the traditional week of mourning that follows a death in the community were dozens of men and women. This was a large Muslim family. Sitting in a circle in one room some 20 veiled women silently shared their grief. The men were gathered in an adjacent room. I was introduced to Abdul Karim Zedok, Nedal’s father—“Abu Nedal”— whose advanced English-language skills made my job a little easier. He first led us on a tour to the top floor of the building, a dangerous climb into a bomb site strewn with huge stone slabs and gaping steel framework, broken glass, and the still-visible signs of blood. Abu Nedal pointed to the spot where his son had died, with a small shrine consisting of a photograph surrounded by flowers and a lone green fern placed on the very spot. He spoke of the horrors of that Monday night, the terrifying sounds from “the Apache” [helicopter] that drove seven families from the building into the street to find cover. He removed his keffiyeh to reveal a serious head wound which put him in hospital for two days.

Abu Nedal, a street vendor who sells work shoes and rents an apartment in the building along with others in the larger, extended family, explained that his son had gotten married just five months ago. Nedal had served on the Palestinian Authority security team as one of Yasser Arafat’s bodyguards. “When Israel demanded that Arafat act to reduce violence,” Arafat fired Nedal (who was suspected of terrorist activity), his father said. “But Israel killed him anyway.”

Asked how the Israelis could know Nedal would be on the top floor of that building at that very moment, Abu Nedal explained, “There are collaborators.”

Later, downstairs, he insisted on serving us tea, in spite of the Ramadan fast. Hospitality must go on. And he was eager to talk. “Only one Italian TV crew came to talk to us,” he declared. “You are the only other ones.”

We met Abu Nedal’s 14-year-old son Ezz [Ezzeldeen], who showed us his broken arm, compliments of a sound bomb at Rachel’s Tomb three months ago. Apparently sound bombs do more than just make loud, frightening noises. Last Sept. 18, for example, Dalia Habash, senior information officer at Birzeit University sustained a broken leg at the Surda checkpoint when an Israeli soldier released a sound bomb at close range, hitting her leg.

Every night we were in Beit Sahour we heard gunfire, and maybe bombs, or just jets overhead breaking the sound barrier. We weren’t sure. The likelihood of violence is so great it makes one perhaps a little too vigilant. One little girl in Beit Sahour traumatized by the sounds of war has not spoken a word since a night in November when Israel invaded the town with its full military might. Bethlehem’s ancient Church of the Nativity remained empty all through the Christmas season. No pilgrims’ prayers resounded in the ghostly quiet streets of the Old City.

We left the Holy Land with a sense of the enormity of the evil being inflicted on it. Although at times we were tempted to abandon hope, we realize that we are part of a resistance that is based on hope and, most especially, on the spirit of the people, expressed in their daily efforts to work and endure, that, insha’allah (God willing), justice will prevail. As Abu Nedal told us, “After all this, I still want peace.”

Sr. Elaine Kelley is the administrative officer of Friends of Sabeel-North America.

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