Palestinians Fear Being on Wrong Side of the Fence

The story of the biblical matriarch Rachel is one of the loveliest in the Old Testament, but in the Palestinian enclave surrounding the spot where tradition holds she is buried, an ugly quarrel is brewing. Israel this week served notice that it intends to seize large chunks of the neighborhood surrounding Rachel’s Tomb -- a fortress-like shrine on the edge of Bethlehem where Jewish worshipers arrive in armored buses and enter to pray under the watchful eyes of Israeli soldiers -- to build a heavily fortified security barrier between Israel and the West Bank.

Scores of Palestinian families and businesses, facing life in what they call a “ghetto” that will be cut off from the rest of Bethlehem by fences and checkpoints, are fearful and distraught.

“We’re going to be locked in, only able to come and go with permits,” said Fuad Hazeineh, a 62-year-old jeweler whose home is inside the zone that is to be sealed off from the rest of Bethlehem, but whose business lies on the other side of the line. “How long can we live like this?” he said. “It’s only a matter of time until we will be forced to leave our homes.”

Israel says this stretch of fence, along with the rest of the security barrier that is beginning to take shape along the meandering boundary of the West Bank, is a necessary safeguard against suicide bombings and other attacks.

“There’s no other choice here,” said Raanan Gissin, a senior aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

But in Bethlehem, Palestinian officials call the planned placement of the wall a de facto annexation of an area rich in tradition, history, religious significance -- and potential tourist revenue.

The neighborhood, once home to the town’s leading families, still bears traces of its former elegance, despite years of economic privation and the scars of dozens of gun battles that have raged in the environs of the tomb during the last 2 1/2 years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

“So, I will need special permission to come and visit my sisters in our family home,” said Bethlehem Mayor Hanna Nasser, whose ancestral mansion holds a place of pride on Yasser Arafat Street, the main thoroughfare at the entrance of town that will be bisected by the barrier. “It’s not only my personal problem -- it’s a tragedy for our entire city.”

Bethlehem officials are still researching legal avenues for blocking the construction of the 25-foot-high fence but don’t expect to have success. Orders such as this one -- the seizure of land for Israeli military purposes -- are rarely overturned by Israeli courts.

“Bethlehem will be totally strangulated,” said Jad Isaac, director of the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, a think tank that lies near the wall’s path.

Along the planned route of the Bethlehem barrier lie restaurants, a gas station, souvenir shops and an olive-wood workshop. There are also a rambling grape arbor, an auto parts garage and a metalworks factory, as well as a network of terraced stone walls that look as old as the biblical hills that cradle the town.

About 700 people live inside the affected area, town officials say.

The tomb and its environs, which include a mosque and a graveyard, have religious significance for Muslims and Christians, as well as Jews. Israel retained control of the compound after a 1995 withdrawal from Bethlehem that left the rest of the town under the administration of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.

In the 1990s, Israel constructed a high retaining wall that blocks the tomb from view. A white-domed Mameluke-era sanctuary marks the burial spot of Rachel, so desired by Jacob that the Book of Genesis describes him as doing 14 years of hard labor in order to win permission from her reluctant father to marry her. Tradition says she died on the road to Bethlehem after giving birth to a son.

Throughout the current intifada, the presence of Israeli troops at the tomb and the proximity of a poor and angry Palestinian refugee camp, Aida, have proved an incendiary mixture.

Over the months, the area has been the scene of sporadic but sometimes heavy fighting between soldiers and Palestinian gunmen.

Bethlehem has been under intermittent military curfews, and its other principal religious site -- the Church of the Nativity, the traditional birthplace of Jesus -- was the scene of a monthlong armed standoff last year.

The town has been devastated economically by the fighting. The affected area contains several fairly large businesses that had managed to hang on until now, but their owners fear they cannot survive the isolation that the wall will impose.

“This area will die, and our livelihoods with it,” said Jamil Hosh, who has run the olive-wood souvenir workshop for the last 24 years. He employs 12 workers, all of whom live on the other side of the planned barrier.

Particularly painful for the town fathers is the thought that the fence will accelerate the flight of Palestinian Christians, once a majority in this town of 30,000 people but now estimated to number about one-third of its residents. The affected enclave is largely Christian.

“No one will be told outright that they have to leave, but the whole area will become a ghost town,” predicted Isaac, the think-tank director.

“On a map alone, you can’t see the effect it will have on the lives of people here.”