Stalled Hopes and Dreams in Bethlehem

Hassan abu Khleileh gestured sadly at the boxes of Christmas tree ornaments and brightly packaged children’s toys in his empty shop.

“It used to be that two weeks before Christmas we started selling like crazy. We couldn’t sit down, the store was so busy,” Abu Khleileh said. “Now, you see--nothing.” He shrugged his shoulders in resignation.

“Maybe it is better just to go home and sleep through it,” he said. “There’s no happiness at all this Christmas.”

Tonight, the traditional midnight Mass is to be held at the Church of the Nativity, but the town where it all began 2,000 years ago is having a hard time finding its Christmas spirit.

This was supposed to be the Christmas when Israel’s army had pulled out of Palestinian towns and villages and the Palestinian Authority had taken responsibility for running daily life in the West Bank. But negotiations have bogged down between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization on redeployment and on holding Palestinian elections in the territories.

Redeployment and elections now seem likely to be delayed for several more months. The Israeli government says it cannot redeploy because the Palestinian Authority cannot ensure the security of about 120,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority accuses the Israelis of violating the Sept. 13, 1993, accord that the two sides signed on the South Lawn of the White House.

The testy exchanges--coupled with a winter that blew in early and with unusual ferocity, dumping freezing rain and sleet on Jerusalem and the surrounding areas--have put both Israelis and Palestinians in a sour mood.

Still, the Palestinians are going through the motions. A few hundred yards from Abu Khleileh’s lonely shop recently, there were unmistakable signs that Christmas was coming. Israeli soldiers were hammering together the bleachers where foreign choirs will stand when they perform tonight. The municipality had strung lights across the small square, and even the Israeli police, whose building sits behind a high fence on Manger Square, had decorated a large cedar tree outside their police station with lights.

The Palestinian Authority is also making its presence felt this year.

Last year, Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij had to defy the Israeli army to hoist a single Palestinian flag in front of City Hall, which fronts on the square. This year, the strings of lights are accompanied by strings of tiny Palestinian flags crisscrossing the air above the square. Shops that sell olive-wood Nativity scenes also sell Palestinian flags and portraits of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

And a few blocks away from Manger Square, the local office of Fatah--the Palestinian guerrilla group that for decades was outlawed in the territories--has decorated the balcony of its second-floor office with a Christmas tree and a Santa clutching a Palestinian flag. It has also strung up rows of Palestinian flags and portraits of Arafat.

But Bethlehem’s decorations are meager. They would look shameful juxtaposed beside the decorations of the smallest American or European town.

And except for the soldiers and a few loitering locals on a recent day, Manger Square was almost empty. Many shops in the ancient town--which once attracted huge crowds of Israelis from neighboring Jerusalem who shopped and dined in local restaurants--are now shuttered. Seven years of intifada, the violent Palestinian uprising against Israeli military rule in the occupied territories, drove the customers away and the owners out of business.

“The streets used to be crowded, not only with foreigners but with Jews,” Abu Khleileh said. “Now, not only the Jews don’t come, even the foreigners are afraid to come.”

Abu Khleileh remembers a time when Christmas was celebrated not only by Bethlehem’s Christians--who for years have been in a minority--but also by many of its Muslims. Families and friends got together for big dinners, bought lots of presents, gathered in Manger Square on Christmas Eve to hear the choirs and decorated artificial Christmas trees, or trees chopped down surreptitiously from Israeli forests.

But the last such Christmas that Abu Khleileh can recall was the Christmas of 1987--”before the intifada moved here from Gaza,” he said. The intifada erupted in Gaza’s refugee camps in December, 1987.

For years before the signing of the Israeli-PLO peace accord, public celebrations of any kind were frowned upon by intifada activists. Arabic newspapers in Jerusalem took to printing Christmas stories headlined “Santa Claus Wept.”

Last year, after the accord was signed, the mood lightened somewhat, although it was marred in Bethlehem by the scuffle over the flag. But in the last year, Palestinians have seen the Palestinian Authority get off to a rocky start in Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho and have watched with growing frustration as negotiations on expanding self-rule throughout the West Bank stalled.

And most importantly for many Palestinians, their economic situation has not improved.

The Israelis maintain roadblocks on the entrances to Jerusalem--the commercial, social and political hub of West Bank life, and a corner of the triangle of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jerusalem where most of the West Bank’s 50,000 Christians are concentrated.

Only West Bank Palestinians with special permits are allowed to enter Jerusalem--home to 390,000 Jews, 150,000 Muslims and 10,000 Christians. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967.

By cutting Jerusalem off from the West Bank, the Israelis are preventing thousands of West Bank residents from working in Israel, the only source of livelihood for many families. And they are preventing Palestinians from shopping in Jerusalem, or visiting the city that holds sites holy to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Speaking to reporters this week, Latin Patriarch Michel Sabah called on Israel to lift restrictions on Palestinian Christians visiting Jerusalem.

Sabah, the first Palestinian to head the Roman Catholic Church here, also called on the United Nations to guarantee free access to Jerusalem.

“Peace should encompass the opening of Jerusalem, which is still closed to Christians, Muslims, to all inhabitants of the occupied territories,” Sabah told the Associated Press. “Jerusalem is the heart of civil and religious life . . . and therefore it should not be closed for any reason.”

Maj. Elise Shazar, spokeswoman for the civilian government that the Israeli army runs in the West Bank, said that Israel has granted thousands of temporary permits for worshipers to visit Jerusalem.

But obtaining a permit requires hours-long waits in endless lines outside the civil administration offices of the West Bank, an ordeal many Palestinians prefer to avoid.

So Christmas this year will again be celebrated mainly indoors, in quiet gatherings of families of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It will be a low-key affair, constrained by economic hardship and political uncertainty.

“There is really no atmosphere of holiday this year. You really don’t feel that there is peace,” said Ahmed Hamal, a shop owner in Ramallah who sells high-quality clothes for babies and children.

For five days last week, the army ordered Hamal and 19 other shop owners in downtown Ramallah to close their stores after the shop owners failed to aid an Israeli soldier who had driven his car into Ramallah and was attacked and injured by youths.

The closure, Hamal said, ensured that he and the other punished merchants would salvage nothing from a Christmas season that already was looking grim.

Hamal pointed to his shelves stuffed with gaily printed outfits for young children. There were no customers in sight. Sales this year, he said, were abysmal.

“As long as the army is still in the streets, people won’t feel like celebrating,” he said. “What will make the difference is when people will feel that they are free to move, that they are free to go places and to do things without being bothered.”