Security Forces Outnumber Visitors in Somber Bethlehem

Soldiers and police outnumbered pilgrims and tourists in strike-bound Bethlehem on Christmas Eve where all festivities were canceled because of the Arab uprising against Israeli occupation.

Rain and wind lashed the town’s unadorned and shuttered Manger Square as the Latin Patriarch arrived from Jerusalem to celebrate Mass in the traditional birthplace of Christ.

Soldiers with automatic rifles crouched on rooftops and others searched people entering the town square with metal detectors.

Private cars and taxis were barred. Israeli-organized shuttle buses for tourists from Jerusalem ran almost empty.

“This is depressing,” said Gabi Schutz, one of the few tourists to visit the Greek Orthodox Church of the Nativity, built in the 4th Century by the Emperor Constantine. “We knew security was a problem, but we were surprised by the numbers of military and police,” said Schutz, who is from Wurttemburg, Germany.

The army declined to say how many reinforcements had been deployed to prevent the stone-throwing and protests that have marked the 3-year-old Palestinian uprising, or intifada , against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The uprising’s underground leaders ordered all shops in the town closed to prevent what they called Israeli attempts to show TV viewers worldwide that all was normal.

Church leaders in the Holy Land, many of them Palestinians, canceled all but religious celebrations this Christmas.

The only decorations the few tourists saw were put up by the Israeli authorities on the road leading to Bethlehem, safely outside the occupied West Bank.

“This Christmas is for Bethlehem. We are not celebrating Christmas to appease or please the Israelis,” Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij said.

Freij, 70, said it was the gloomiest Christmas he had known. Almost every family in the town bears the scars of the uprising--a relative killed, wounded or jailed, a business ruined.

“Last year was miserable,” said Samia Ishar, one of only a handful of adult Bethlehem residents on the streets. “This year is very miserable, everybody is staying home.”

The intifada and the Persian Gulf crisis have scared away the tourists on whom nearly half the town’s 35,000 people depend for their livelihood. Tourist numbers have dropped from 100,000 a month to less than 10,000 a month since the uprising.

Freij, mayor for 19 years, blamed the U.S. government for advising Americans to stay away from the Holy Land.

The fall in tourists “is the fault of the intifada , and the fault of American greed in fighting for the oil in Kuwait,” he told reporters.

Many Palestinians feel sympathy for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who says he champions their cause.