A season of sorrow in Bethlehem

Joshua HAMMER, Newsweek’s Middle East bureau chief, wrote of the Holy Land from a personal perspective in his previous work, “Chosen by God,” a breathtaking memoir of his younger brother’s embrace of Hasidic Judaism and how that conversion transformed the author’s relationship with his sibling.

In that narrative, Hammer -- raised in a secular Jewish family in New York -- wrote of visiting his brother in Israel before this transformation and of the potent ambivalence he felt toward his brother’s new religious fervor.

“A Season in Bethlehem” is as dissimilar a book from his first volume as one could imagine, yet it is equally focused on the often-divisive consequences of religious passion.

Here Hammer considers the region of Bethlehem and its war-torn status, not through the eyes of the memoirist but with the objectivity of the reporter.

Hammer does not attempt an all-encompassing examination of the “al-Aqsa intifada” he’s witnessed, beginning with Ariel Sharon’s incendiary visit in the fall of 2000 to the Temple Mount (or, as the Palestinians call it, Haram al-Sharif, Noble Sanctuary) and the endless procession of suicide bombings, terrorist attacks, funerals and Israeli reoccupation of Palestinian regions that has followed. Rather, he tells us, he’d like to “hold one piece of the mosaic under the light” to create what he calls “a biography of place.”

He succeeds, writing authoritatively, dispassionately and clearly about the savagery and pain he finds amid daily life in the West Bank and taking a piercing look at each of the sides involved and their place in the struggle, ultimately building to a climax he hadn’t anticipated. “I had pretty well settled on Bethlehem as a book subject,” he writes in the prologue, “when Israel invaded the town on April 2, 2002, and besieged the Church of the Nativity. The epic standoff at Jesus’ birthplace -- the army of the Jewish state surrounding two hundred Muslim militants who had forced their way into the second-holiest site in Christianity -- added a whole new dimension of color and drama to the story.”

That 39-day siege, he tells us, seemed to capture the essence of the Mideast struggle: “a seemingly intractable conflict fought between two stubborn and deeply distrustful enemies.”

The book is structured so readers will understand the history and characters involved when that standoff occurs, building slowly with an accretion of details and crucial background information until we reach the dramatic event.

Hammer visits and interviews Palestinians living in Aida and Deheishe, refugee camps in the Bethlehem region, interested in how the culture of violence manifests itself, particularly in children -- the next generation. He reports Palestinian boys as young as 5 hurling stones and sometimes firebombs at Israeli soldiers. Several have died this way, their deaths adding momentum to the cycle of anger and violence.

Hammer profiles Mohammed Al-Madani, then governor of Bethlehem, who tried to stop the Palestinian violence but ultimately was undermined by Yasser Arafat; Madani would remain in the Church of the Nativity until its resolution.

Hammer considers, as well, the militants involved in the siege, an Israeli reservist who is the son of a peace activist and is called to duty during the standoff, and Palestinian Christians living in Bethlehem who find themselves caught between the two warring factions, for whom “the game was about survival, about negotiating a path of least resistance between the Israelis on one side, Muslims on the other.”

Hammer visits the family of Ayat al-Akhras, a teenage girl who’d been engaged to be married the following year and was preparing to enter Bethlehem University when she blew herself up on a Friday afternoon in a crowded market. “Killing only begets more killing,” her father, filled with grief, tells Hammer at an impromptu gathering to honor his dead daughter. “We want our children to live together in peace.”

A few hours after that bombing, the Israelis stepped up their preparations to invade Bethlehem.

Thus the narrative pieces fall into place for the siege itself. Through firsthand accounts, Hammer artfully reconstructs the day-to-day tension as food supplies dwindle, negotiations stall and men risk their lives to sneak into gardens and gather leaves and grasses to eat.

The priests in charge of the church, angry at having to provide sanctuary to men with firearms in so holy a place, eventually come to understand the militants’ pain and anger, even as they disagree about ways of effecting change.

In all, Hammer shows us the complexities involved in the Mideast tensions, how the violence and retribution, the numbing brutality and bottomless hatred have made for a tragic tale in one of the most sacred places on Earth. In doing so, he maintains a knife-edge balance between impartial reporting and visible compassion. It is to his credit that, for all his journalistic rigor, Hammer cannot edit out the deep sense of hopelessness and sorrow this tale engenders.