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Note #7483 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Hanging tough
02415
October 24, 2002

Hanging tough

Israeli roads and settlements are choking the life out of Bethlehem

by Alexa Smith

BETHLEHEM - Jad Isaac adjusts his computerized maps by simply tapping the
keyboard with his index finger.
	Tap: A plethora of pink squares show all the Israeli checkpoints and
roadblocks around the perimeter of Bethlehem and beyond. Tap: A
black-and-yellow line shows bypass roads, those only for Israelis, who use
them to reach the 27 settlements on hilltops around the 605-square-kilometer
area called the Bethlehem District.
	Tap: Deep patches of blue show how the settlements sprawl to the
north, south and west of the town. Gilo to the north creeping ever closer to
Beit Jala, a town that borders Bethlehem so closely you can cross from one to
the other and never even know it. Gilo, Har Gilo and Giv'at Hamatos, all
crowd the hillsides to the north, soon to be protected by  a "fence" or a
"wall" the Israeli government intends to build to mark the invisible line
that divides Israel from the West Bank.
     In Bethlehem, the trench and the dirt road are already being cut by
bulldozers, visible at the periphery of Har Homa. While specific details for
construction in Bethlehem were unable to be obtained from either the Prime
Minister's Office or the Israeli Internal Security Ministry at press time,
one human rights organization says that, in some areas, the security barrier
will include a trench, a dirt path that will be a "killing zone," an electric
warning fence and a two-lane road for Israeli patrols. In other areas,
portions of the barrier are also concrete.
	Regardless, upon its completion, Bethlehem will sit stranded on the
other side, separating its residents from Jerusalem, their primary workplace
and one of the most sacred cities to three religions.
	Even to the untrained eye, it doesn't take long to see that the
"little town of Bethlehem" will stay little - if it survives at all.
	It is almost boxed-in, almost completely surrounded by settlements,
bypass roads, military roads and the path of the soon-to-be-built wall - a
little town enclosed inside a ring. That leaves precious little land for
natural population growth - for families to build houses - or for future
economic development.
	What's that signify to Isaac? 
If the barriers stay put, he says, it will kill the town.
	"The Israelis are suffocating Bethlehem  trapping us in Bethlehem in
our own ghettos," he says. "They're taking as much land as they can for
Israel, leaving no open space. ... That means Palestinians will be dependent
on Israel for work, dependent on their generosity."
Even if a Palestinian state is created, Isaac says, it won't be economically
viable if it is hemmed in on every side by an Israeli military that imposes
curfews to imprison the residents for days - or just occupies it, as it has
five times in the last year.
	Severing the city's tie to Jerusalem, he says, will be the kiss of
death for the town of Jesus' birth, because it depends so heavily on
Jerusalem for employment - or did, before virtually everyone in Bethlehem
became unemployed two years ago when the border to Israel was closed to most
Palestinians shortly after the Intifada erupted.
"What's left, then?" he asks. "Bethlehem will be an isolated backwater, with
no chance for economic development  and people will just leave."
	As he spoke, the Israeli army was setting up roadblocks just outside
Isaac's window at the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), near the
Bethlehem checkpoint closest to Jerusalem. A gaggle of neighbors stood in the
street outside, stunned by the swiftness with which Israeli bulldozers
guarded by armed soldiers plowed through their neighborhood, closing off five
streets in two hours, among them the main route to the Caritas Hospital for
Children - with no explanation.
 One man wondered out loud how he would get his car past the gravel barricade
to his home.
	The swath cut by the bulldozers on Oct. 15 ran adjacent to Rachel's
tomb, the burial place of the Hebrew matriarch who died giving birth to
Benjamin, the youngest of Jacob's 12 sons. Isaac says it is no secret that
the tomb is slated for annexation into Jerusalem.
According to Isaac, the Israelis intend to annex, demolish or clear out more
than a dozen residential buildings housing Palestinian families to
incorporate the tomb inside the Jerusalem city limits. If the buildings stay
put and the people remain, B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human
Rights in the Occupied Territories, says that at least 35 Bethlehem residing
along the town's northern edge are at risk for remaining on the other side of
the wall in the newly zoned south Jerusalem, cut off from the West Bank.  
Hagai Elias, a spokesperson for the Jerusalem Municipality, said that the
houses of the 35 Palestinians will not be destroyed, but "they will live on
the Israeli side of the fence," since the area surrounding the tomb itself is
already under previously negotiated Israeli-control.
Another preoccupation is that the Israelis are planning to raze a 120-unit
housing project operated by the Greek Orthodox Church just outside
Bethlehem's city limits in Beit Sahour. The towers sit at the foot of the
hillside crowned by Har Homa. The Israeli courts have rejected a legal
appeal.
	That isn't unusual.
Just ask Ghasson Andoni, executive director of The Palestinian Center for
Rapprochement Between People in Beit Sahour. He has long opposed Israeli
expansion on the West Bank, especially in the Bethlehem District. He's lost a
lot of battles.
	The center tried, but failed, to stop the construction of Har Homa on
one of the few green hills left in the area. It tried, but failed, to stop
the bypass road between Bethlehem and Hebron. He's still trying to prevent
the demolition of the housing project, but he's not betting on the odds. He
also is trying to start a new housing project for Palestinians to the east of
Bethlehem, but hasn't yet received an Israeli go-ahead.
	It is hard to mobilize people for whom daily living is a challenge
now, says Andoni, sitting behind his desk, big circles underneath his eyes.
	"In a way, people have not yet comprehended what is happening," he
says. "People have adapted to the idea of life being so ... caged. The
situation during the last two years has been horrible enough. People aren't
looking for long-term issues; everybody is trying to live their lives."
	It's been a tough couple of years in Bethlehem.
Since the outbreak of the second Intifada two years ago, 80 percent of the
population has been out of work. Tourism, 60 percent of Bethlehem's
livelihood, has dried up. And troops have closed the border to Israel,
keeping residents from going to Jerusalem to find work. The food that makes
its way into the city is too expensive to buy in big amounts and it arrives
on an unpredictable schedule. Families get by without meat, or have it only
once a week.
 Desperate vendors virtually assault the occasional tourist in Manger Square,
pleading that their children need food. It's a buyer's market in Bethlehem.
	Sitting in the square, keeping an eye out for a customer, one idle
guide reckoned that most Bethlehem residents are aware of the big problems
but are obsessed by the little ones: How to get back into the city if the
army lets them out to see a doctor or visit a relative; how to feed their
kids; how to get an essential prescription drug.
"Bethlehem itself is going to be isolated, separated from all the West Bank,"
he says. "We're going to be in a circle here, with a complete border."
	In his office near Manger Square, Bethlehem Mayor Hanna Nassar admits
that he's also disheartened. Life is so hard, he says, that 1,200 residents
of Bethlehem have given up and left in the past 24 months, relocating to
Latin America, North America or Canada.
	Yes, he nods, there really is going to be a wall. "I myself never did
believe in walls," he mutters.
The Rev. Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran pastor, has been addressing the pastoral
implications of being "boxed in."
"We feel very helpless," he says.
	The encroachment on the West Bank, he points out, doesn't make for
exciting news footage, even though it actually accelerated in the wake of the
Israeli-Palestinian agreement in Oslo, something the 1993 and 1995 accords
did not expressly prohibit, one of the fundamental flaws in the agreement,
according to its critics. Oslo did, however, preserve the "integrity and
status" of the West Bank and Gaza during the interim period, a fact
Palestinians stress regularly because they interpret it to mean no more
geographic change until the final negotiations. 
	The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an "occupying power" from
deporting or transferring its own civilian population into the territory it
occupies, an international law that anti-expansionists have tried to apply to
the territories with no success.
	"Except for a small window to the east, we'll really be in a ghetto,"
says Raheb, a slim, bespectacled man who was raised just down the street from
the Church of the Nativity. "No expansion is possible, which means our
children will not have ground to build homes on. Bethlehem will be
overcrowded, and people will emigrate more. It is difficult to absorb what is
happening."
	As of this week, a new checkpoint has been erected at the eastern
opening, according to ARIJ.
	A spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry for Internal Security told
the Presbyterian News Service that the question of the town's life is a moot
one. "The town's dead already. Tourism is on life-support," he said, adding
that Christians are "streaming out" because of increased militarization
there, while declining comment on the impact of both territorial and economic
strangulation.
	Across town at ARIJ - near the Israeli checkpoint - Isaac keeps
tapping his computer keys, the bulldozers working noisily just outside his
window. He isn't convinced that the eastern border of Bethlehem will remain
open, or that the settlements and bypass roads in the works now will be the
end of the encroachment. 
	Sipping an espresso, he says it probably won't be long before another
bypass road seals shut the fourth side of the box Bethlehem is in, which
appears as a swatch of white on the map, just along the southern perimeter of
the town.
"How do we oppose it?" he asks. "We've had marches, press conferences. But it
seems the interest of the world is (elsewhere). There's been a slow
blood-letting going on here 
"Still, even now, nobody wants to believe us."

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